Production design is always an exercise in worldbuilding. Everything we see on screen was put there by the art team for a very specific reason to tell us something. Colors, textures, shapes, styles; grounded or heightened realism. They’re all an invisible (or not-so-invisible) part of visual storytelling. But rarely is that exercise as much about hidden cameras as it is for “Company Retreat,” the second season of “Jury Duty.”
The hybrid series drops a real person into a scripted scenario — in this case, real temp Anthony Norman into the cringe and the chaos of a fictional hot sauce company’s annual retreat. To sell the curated reality to both Anthony and the audience, production designer Joe Warson had to design spaces with many fake walls. “My primary job is trying to lay out the land for all the cameras,” Warson told IndieWire.
And there are a lot of cameras: 48 in Season 2, up from the 29 that covered “Jury Duty.” But the scale of the production design challenge was in building spaces that would appear seamless but allow the crew to always track Norman and adjust the frame in order to spotlight the show’s unknowing hero — over almost 300,000 square feet.
“The biggest lift was taking away rooms to put in a lot of false walls and using the same trim. We used the same doors that [Oak Canyon] had. There were all these mirrors with these frames that are kind of weird, wooden ones. So we bought those exact same ones, put up a mirror, put up a false wall. You’re littering the space with sameness, so no one ever really keys in on it, like, ‘Why is that one mirror right there?’” Warson said. “Everything runs like that.”
Warson had to do a lot of early scouting to not only equip the existing retreat space with camera options but to build the communal architecture needed for group scenes. “The yurt was a huge endeavor. It was just a couple of posts in the ground [when we got there]. I didn’t think we were going to be staying there. It’s going to be cold. It’s outside. But sure enough, they used it,” Warson said. “That was a really difficult hide job because there’s no place to land a false wall. So there’s like a planked-like display, an Oak Canyon Ranch logo that’s kind of dimensional that we built. There’s black-tinted glass behind it, and they would shoot between the slats.”
Shooting between and among things was the order of the day on “Company Retreat,” and Warson credits DP Chris Darnell and his camera team with embracing a look that gets the job done, however it needs to be done.
“[They] didn’t need to have an 18-by-24 window for every pan and tilt. If you have a DP and a director who will embrace a ‘If you give me this, I can work with this,’ you’re going to have a lot more luck in terms of hiding stuff. We had these maintenance carts that were totally ramshackle brown carts for golf carts, and the camera guys would park it where they needed to, open up some doors we made, and shoot from inside. There’s black-tinted glass with some shells to busy it up. And the camera assistant would literally sweep and rake to make it look like they were doing something,” Warson said. “That’s how much care was going on to try to not get made.”
It’s a lot of care that had to happen on a very quick turnaround, too. “[Executive producer Nicholas Hatton] was like, ‘Joe, do you think you could turn this around in a couple weeks?’ We thought so, but we are always diving into these things headfirst. Was I confident about it? Absolutely not. There’s fear. But some of that fear you embrace, and that’s what drives you. We are actually going to do this. And we are going to dress this whole dad-gum place out with hides, too!”
“Company Retreat” is now streaming on Prime Video.
