Mad Men’s special effects foreman hasn’t seen the infamous 4K remaster
Everyone had a good laugh at HBO Max this week when the new 4K Mad Men The remaster debuted with a number of glaring errors that should have been caught before the show was uploaded to the streamer’s servers. Episodes were posted online with incorrect titles and, in one case, members of the show’s production team could still be seen who should not have been visible on camera. The errors are said to be the result of Lionsgate Television — Mad Menthe original production company – sending the wrong set of exported files.
It’s crazy to think that no one at HBO noticed that the remastered episode of “Red in the Face” still included a clear shot of Mad Men Shannon Thompson, special effects foreman. When I recently spoke with Thompson – whose past credits include The mask, From dusk to dawn, American History, Dune: part oneand the new Matlock reboot – he told me he hadn’t had time to check out the HBO remaster. But he still remembers the filming of this episode of Mad Men clearly, and sees it as a solid example of how much invisible special effects work goes into making mundane television seem real.
How did you get into special effects?
I always knew I liked doing creative, mechanical things like pyrotechnics and stuff like that, so I started working in props, and sometimes there’s some crossover with that and special effects. I ended up meeting these two effects guys and hit it off with them immediately. They drew me in and I’ve been doing this for 33 years now.
Looking at your IMDb, you’ve worked on so many big sci-fi and fantasy projects, what kind of special effects work have you done Mad Men?
For a show like Mad Menthat’s a lot of atmospheric effects. Any time there’s something like snow, steam, or rain—anything that moves in front of the camera, but isn’t moved by an actor—those are special effects. Basically all the elevator doors you see in this series are fake, and I think the majority of my work in this series was on elevator doors. I literally hide in walls, wait for a signal and discover the trick to making these mundane things. seem banal.
What goes into creating juicy projectile vomit that looks believable and not too ridiculous?
[laughing] Honestly, you spend a lot of time studying and researching reality. I had to watch a lot of videos of people vomiting, but then there was the testing process of how to achieve this effect, in a practical way. We have this thing called a pressure pot that we fill with whatever liquid they want the vomit to look like in the final shot. You study how this liquid normally comes out of the pipe. But sometimes you have to manipulate the opening of the tube to make it look like the liquid is actually coming out of someone’s mouth.
If you only have a straight tube it will look like it came out of a tube, so you need to change it and consider what is normally in a person’s mouth, such as teeth and uvula which give a believable form of vomiting. And then the director will tell you what consistency he wants, and you’ll have to ask things like, “Well, what were they eating? Why are they sick? Is it because they’re drunk or because they have a virus?”
For “Red in the Face,” do you remember what kind of conversations you had about the consistency of vomit?
For this, they actually wanted Roger Sterling to eat oysters, and [producer] Matt Weiner said “it has to be clam chowder.” So…I ended up using clam chowder and figured out how to make it vomit everywhere.
What do you think might have gone wrong in the remastering process that led you to stay with the plan that everyone has seen now?
I guess I just don’t know what the future holds, you know? Every time we produced an effect, we had to be as close as possible while still being just out of frame.
When you initially shot this film, did you think you would just get cut?
Yeah. Back then we always tried to hide it as much as possible, but nowadays we tend to just say “we’ll clear it in the mail.” But this time, apparently, they didn’t erase us.
