Electric Entertainment: Inside Job
Watch the new TNT heist series “Leverage” and you’ll get a thoroughly modern take on a tried and true TV plot: the inside job.
The insider is Nate Ford (Oscar winner Timothy Hutton), a former corporate insurance investigator who turns against that world when his former employer allows his son to die by denying an insurance claim. Ford uses his inside knowledge and the calculated misdirection of a world-class team of high-tech thieves, hackers, and grifters, who join him to scam in the name of justice those who misuse wealth and power.
Go behind the scenes of “Leverage,” and you’ll get an equally forward look at an inside job. Taking a page from his own script, “Leverage” Executive Producer and consummate industry insider Dean Devlin has created the show’s first 13 episodes entirely within the walls of Electric Entertainment, his full-service production shop, using a completely self-contained digital post workflow anchored by Final Cut Studio.
"We do the entire show in Final Cut Studio," says Devlin, who also runs Electric Entertainment. "We shoot on the Red One camera, bring it back on hard drives, and put it in our Xsan. Then every department here pulls off those servers whether it's for digital effects, sound effects, sound mixing, picture editing, color correction, everything. And it never leaves our building. This is all able to happen because of Final Cut Studio."
Upscale Episodic
Although Devlin has done big feature films like “Independence Day” and “Godzilla,” he says that "Leverage" is the first weekly TV series he’s made on such a large scale, with ambitious on-location shooting and complex special effects figuring into every show. And he credits Final Cut Studio with delivering the necessary post-production leverage to create such a highly produced show on a cable budget.
“This series is about a group of high tech thieves who become modern day Robin Hoods,” says Devlin, a veteran actor, writer, and producer who made his directorial debut helming the “Leverage” pilot. “So there are a lot of digital effects, a lot of action, a lot of plot twists, and five main characters. It’s a very ambitious show for cable; it’s much more like something typically done for network television. So we have to get a lot done for a little.”
Devlin kicked off his more-for-less strategy by devising an end-to-end Final Cut workflow for the show’s pilot episode: “My goal on the pilot was to stay entirely within Final Cut Studio and really see how far we could take it. We color corrected in Color, we edited in Final Cut Pro, we mixed in Soundtrack Pro. We delivered the show without ever going to an outside post house.”
And he says that the extreme inside moves had immediate and conspicuous results: “The workflow really exceeded all of our expectations. We were trying to do a show that costs about twice as much as we had the money for, and the Final Cut post workflow allowed us to take every dollar we saved and put it back up on the screen."
Green Light
When the show was green-lighted by TNT, Devlin was determined to carry over into the full series production the benefits they’d realized in making the pilot. "Not having to shuttle our material between an editing house, a laboratory, a sound editing/mixing house, and a digital effects house, that alone saves us time and money,” he says. “And doing it all in house gives us great security, because we’re so nervous about things leaking out on the Internet or on floating DVDs.”
But Devlin says that the ultimate advantage delivered by the in-house workflow was not temporal or financial, but creative “For the entire time I’ve been in this business it’s been impossible to alter the sequence of the post workflow. But by having all of our post capabilities in house and always accessible, especially with some of Final Cut’s auto-conforming tools, we found that at any stage we could just walk to another room and color correct a rough cut of a scene, or even the dailies. If we wanted to hear how a scene would sound, we’d just mix it. We were able to break the old pattern, and it was a really liberating experience creatively”
Gallery
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Dean Devlin directing on the “Leverage” set. Photo credit: Electric Entertainment.
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On location digital acquisition with the Red One Camera. Photo credit: Electric Entertainment.
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Devlin preps actress Beth Riesgraf for an action scene. Photo credit: Electric Entertainment.
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Timothy Hutton, as lead Nathan Ford, with the “Leverage” cast. Photo credit: Electric Entertainment.
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Technology is a featured player in “Leverage.” Photo credit: Electric Entertainment.
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Hutton dressed for a scam. Photo credit: Electric Entertainment.
