Re-creating 1970s NY for The Deuce

From graffiti-ridden subway trains to the infamous stretch of 42nd Street, which was populated with the movie theaters that were central to the burgeoning porn industry. Visual effects transformed present day shooting locations into grimy settings appropriate to the era. The most involved transformations from season two were the 42nd Street environment and the New York City subway.

42^ND STREET

The series takes its title from an old slang name for Manhattan’s West 42^nd Street. Unsurprisingly, the famed street plays a key role in this 1970s drama.  42nd street has changed drastically since the 1970s, however, with its current incarnation much more sanitized and tourist-friendly than it had been at the time of the story. For all scenes in the Times Square and 42^nd street area, production used a shooting location in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few miles away from the section of 42^nd St which it was meant to play.

“We had a lot of discussions with the art department before adapting the two-block location in Washington Heights to the single showpiece stretch of 42^nd Street, bordered by Times Square at one end and the Port Authority construction site at the other,” says John Bair, Phosphene’s VFX Supervisor for the project. “Due to location constraints,” he continues, “the art department was only allowed to build one partial marquee and hang lightboxes to represent a few of the others.  In post, VFX extended the partial marquee and created ten unique, fully CG marquees; each one individually typeset with period accurate film titles.”

“Technically speaking, recreating the illuminated marquees required careful balancing of multiple light temperatures and extreme exposures to maintain as much detail in the environment as possible while still representing bright punches of light from the marquees in a photographically accurate manner,” says Bair. “Such fine tuned details may seem insignificant, but paying special mind to them helps future proof the shots against higher definition technology that will be involved in future viewing experiences.”

In addition to adding marquees, VFX replaced non-production buildings and signage at the location with period-accurate architecture, even extending buildings across an intersection in order to simulate the longer blocks of 42^nd St.

The location’s roads required considerable cleanup as well. Modern traffic markings, such as bike lanes, school signs & yellow turning islands covered the practical roads and required considerable road cleanup, ultimately resulting in full replacement of the ground plane, and rebuilding car shadows and headlight patterns.

THE SUBWAY

The subway scene from episode 206 was filmed on the 2nd Avenue line, on period-accurate R32 subway cars provided by the New York City Transit Authority. When asked why production did not simply procure trains already ridden with graffiti, Phosphene’s VFX Producer Steven Weigle explains, “The city has a long-standing policy against film/TV productions applying graffiti to their cars in an effort to portray the city in a clean, tourist-friendly light. Even if this were not the case, prepping and removing practical graffiti from the cars and station would have required a much longer turnaround time, additional location fees, etc.”

“We worked with the show-side VFX supervisor Jim Rider and the show’s art department to strategize how the graffiti designs and layout would be executed,” continues Weigle. “On the day of the shoot, the show performed a LIDAR scan of the subway station and cars, which we used to build low-poly geometry of all of the surfaces that we would be applying graffiti to.”

“By ‘unwrapping’ our subway car geometry, we were able to represent the surfaces of the cars as a 2D Photoshop template that art department was able to use to lay out graphics, knowing that we would be able to then project their 2D graphics onto the 3D subway cars without distorting their designs.

In addition to compositing graffiti onto the train’s walls, Phosphene took care to represent the accumulation of the markings over time.

“In order to give VFX the flexibility to dial this look in, Art Department provided multiple layers of “clean” graphics.VFX then added wear and degradation that varied by layer.”

Phosphene is no stranger to New York graffiti, as Weigle points out. “Prior to The Deuce, we’ve worked on subway graffiti shots for A Most Violent Year, The Get Down, and If Beale Street Could Talk, covering a period of time where street art evolved rapidly. So, creatively, the work we’ve done runs the gamut from the sparse black-lined scrawls of the 1960s through the bold, stylized tags of the 1980s. On a technical level, having done this type of work in the past we had already a solid foundation of techniques, and we knew where the pitfalls were likely to be. This let us focus most of our energy on the creative work of integrating the graffiti into the environment and adding a layer of grunge and grime to the subway station and cars, while still maintaining a tight delivery schedule.”