Who is it should die? People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater.
They want clothed sodas, pop popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booths.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring. It's another dry in windy day in Paradise.
Based on all drivers.
There's a situation developing at Ponderosa Elementary.
There are twenty three kids who are stranded. Is there anybody in the area that picking them up? Is there anybody that can go and pick these kids up?
Nine six, three days?
I can get.
It's just another rough fire, nothing new. Hi, Hi, I'm Mary Kevin. Kids.
This is our bus driver, Kevin. I don't think you understand there and seen our situation here?
Why we calmly? One single line? Do you know all of us are gonna be there? It's gonna take ten minutes.
There have any safety protocols on this bus yep?
You got that?
Great?
Yeah, that'll make all the difference.
At approximately six thirty am this morning, a fire entered the town of Paradise.
Where do you need to get to?
My son's up.
There with his grandma. It's too late.
I'm too late.
As a father, it's not too late, Kevin, can you hear me?
N three?
Jerry.
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, it is the return of Brandon K. McLoughlin. He is a special effects coordinator and he worked on the new film The Lost Bus. The film stars Matthew McConaughey, America Ferira, and my friend Ashley Atkinson, who gives a fantastic performance in this one. I think it's playing on Apple TV currently. Had a great time talking about mister McLoughlin. Hope that
you have a great time listening to it. Enjoy the interview.
Obviously, I want to talk to you about The Lost Bus, but I'm so curious, how did you even get into special effects in the first one family.
For the most part, my uncle was in it, and I got hired on Twister as a PA. I worked that whole show, and I worked two other shows, just grinding and scraping at the carpet and concrete, and had an opportunity to join the Union. Joined the Union and it just took off from there. I fell in love with it. I've always been a mechanical mind, and I remember distinctly. Remember my mom tells me this all the time.
She goes, yeah, I remember when you were were six years old and I bought you a little remote control car. Two hours after I gave it to you, it was all a partner bedroom, and you looked at me and said, don't worry, Mom, don't worry I'm just figuring out how it works, and I'll put it back together again.
And I did. I put it back together again and I played with it.
So I've always been I've always been that way, never been really good at school, always had something better to do in my mind, and it was always being outside and being physical building things. So it was a perfect fit once I got in and I just blossomed in there. And you mainly learn everything on the job, because there's no you can't go to a school.
We have to know to do our job. Well.
You have to be an electrician, you have to be you have to know hydraulics, you have to know water, you have to know elements, you have to know engines. You have to know everything for the most part, and a good amount, not just dabble.
Well, especially you've got people's lives on the line. A lot of times.
I've done a lot of things that will never do again. You know, it was commonplace thirty years ago. It was what we used to do, and nowadays it's either cgi or that they don't they don't want to risk it, or there's not enough people left in the industry that know how to do things like that. So when you
do make the suggestion, there's usually you can do. That's that because you're more and more I'm dealing with people that have less experience in the industry as I do, and they're younger, and they've come up in theual effects world, not the physical effects, and I have to sit there and remind them, go, I've been in the business before there is visual effects, so yes, we can do anything.
Yeah.
We talked a few years ago when you had worked on The Killers of the Flower Moon, and I seem to remember you're much more in the practical effects realm. And the thing that I always appreciate about effects, no matter whether they're practical or digital, is they're practically invisible. You're not there to draw attention to yourself. You're just
there to add to the story. You must have had so many challenges with things like and I love that you have so many out west things, even there will be blood, like such a naturalistic film about the oil pumping and all those kind of things that must have been just arduous to work on that set.
That For some reason, I don't know why I've fallen in this category, because if you look at my resume, there's a lot that falls in line where it's practical effect. But we're not using practical effects to tell the story. We're using practical effects to amplify the story, to add to it. And I think it's the hardest part of effects is doing your job to where it's as realistic as it possibly can be and have people watch it and don't think about it, Oh that was an effect
or oh anything like that. Just be that's part of the story. That's I'm there to help tell the story.
And I like that. I like that part because that means I'm doing my job well.
How closely do you work with a director like a Paul Greengrass? How close do you work with him when it comes to helping him tell his story?
Oh, hand in hand. I had a meeting with Paul, And mainly when you do films like this, where my job is a huge part of the job talking about lost bus, where it's a huge part of the storytelling aspect because if there was no fire, there wouldn't be the lost But so you mainly want to sit down and have a discussion and get the feel of what he's looking for to tell the audience. Because every director's different,
they want to show something differently. Some directors might just want that in the background, just so it's in the corner of the frame so we can tell that there's something there. And with Paul it was right off the bat. It's fires a character in the story. It's the driving character. I don't want it to feel Another big one is that he said that he didn't want an audience member to sit there and go.
Oh, that's just visual effects.
One of the big things that we ended up doing the first meeting I had with Charlie and Paul Charlie the visual effects coordinator or supervisor. I said to him, I said, as long as we have practical fire in every scene, whether it's the full scene that's what the scene is calling for the element, or it's just half
of it. If you keep practical fire and everything, then visual effects has to build to it or it has to use it right, because what I was fearful of is going from a visual effects fire to a practical fire, to a visual effects fire to a practical fire. And you see that a lot, and you can tell they're not the same. There's definite differences between the two of them. And they both agreed. They both we actually was the school is what we were talking about.
Paul brought it up. He's like, how do we do this?
When I said, we do the window boxes, and I do fire everywhere that I possibly can, and then Charlie builds on top of it. And that's exactly what happened. That's what we did because I'm also limited to how much fire I can do practically. You can't stand in a forest fire, real fire and act. It's just too much. Eats is just too intense. He had to pick and choose what we could do what we couldn't do, but it was really good.
Paul is.
Very charismatic. He's a filmmaker at heart. It is difficult working with him because it's hard to get all the proper information out, But once you work with him and you do a show with him, yeah, this is good to show him. But I know he's going to want to see this or have backup plans. So going into it that way, then it's not that big of a job.
If you'd never worked with him and he walks on a set and you're supposed to do Norse and you've spent a month prepping due North, he turns around, he goes, I want to go do South.
It's just that's just how he is.
He likes getting on a set and feeling the set and seeing how the scene in his mind would play out, and using the set properly.
So it was fun.
I knew about that kind of stuff, but a lot of crews didn't, and it was always, oh my god, I'm like it was a good interaction with Paul. He was really appreciative. He was really appreciative of everything we gave him.
Hey, because this wasn't your first time working with him. You did what News of the World?
Yeah, I did News of the World with him.
Yeah, that was the first one I did with him, And that's where I stumbled through it.
And learned Paul.
I don't know if you remember that movie very well, but there's a big wagon Flip. We spent about a month setting it up at this location and had it all rigged and set up, and we had I had second, you know, go out there with a whole full camera.
Crew to shoot a test.
And we did it and it worked great, and it was a whole cable pole and it was a bigger deal, and we showed him it was all that was great. That's great, And two days before we were going to go shoot it, he completely changed the location and that was the turning point for me. It was like, oh, okay, so we got it done. But it was one of those things where it was like you really you tweaked it and you got it to work really good, and it went down a specific way and the wheels came on.
It was it worked great. And then he of course he throws that at you, and it's like, okay, think on your feet, it's beIN you move.
I can see a wagon flip being a major ordeal. But just the amount of fire that you have in lost bus, you must have had so much need to prep things and just know where that fire is going to be, how big it's got to be. How do you even figure that out?
I guess the easiest way to talk about this is Paul doesn't textcout. He usually shows up about two or three weeks before we start filming, so it's mainly executive producers, first AD department heads. We sit down and we figure out, okay,
what would work the best. We have the outside of the box drawn, but the inside of the box isn't really detailed, and we don't know exactly where we're going to go, so we end up having to lock in a direction, pick the locations, talk about how we're going to end up.
Shooting specific scenes.
Then I can place the products that we built starting off first conversations that we had. I came up with we were going to have to at least have six to seven full burn sets, is what I was calling them, where it's fire everywhere, and in the state of New Mexico, which is the only state in the Union, you have to have a state appointed pro pane person certify everything that you're doing. Like in any other state, you can
run stuff out and make it all happen. And in this size of a film, of course, I had to have somebody there, and I'd worked with them multiple times, but that was difficult because I knew I was going to what I was going to get into with Paul, where you could only I could only move so much. Built forty trees three foot diameter and sixteen feet tall.
We built like sixty bushes. We had a bunch of cars, we had a bunch of partial buildings, and so we spent a lot of time in the production office with a big layout of the back lot that we had, and we came up with, Okay, the bus can make this turn to Paul really wanted to stay close to what happened in reality, so we had to lay out with the small little box that we had. We had to lay out the whole travel of the bus picking the kids up, going to Paradise Elementary, and then trying
to get out. So we had to lay all that out. The bus had to turn left here, they had to turn right here. It had to have fire on this side, had to have fire on that side. So there was a lot of conversations. And once we started laying everything out and had ideas of where we could place stuff, I would go out and temporarily put things, not plumb them, but put stuff, and then we'd go walk the set, you know, with the group without Paul, and go, yeah,
that'll work, that'll can you move that tree? Because we're going to make the turn there. So once we locked all that in, then I had a crew guys going hard plumb everything to the propane tanks. It was a three three and a half month prep for me and a crew of thirty five guys thirty eight.
At one point, what are you building those bushes and trees and cars out of? Because it's it can't be flammable.
Right, Yeah, it's all steel. The trees we built, I had a bunch of sixty sixteen gauge I think it was sixteen gauge sheet metal rolled at a tank manufacturer in Albuquerque, and they sent us sections. We welded the sections together and then on the outside of that we welded on electrical conduit metal electrical conduit and then put chicken wire around that, and then we used I had a done this before, so we had an idea of what to do, and then we used a fire place
mortar so it resists heat. For the most part, is a concrete base, but it's formulated to withstand a lot of heat. And I found online. I found a pine tree silicone stamps. So we would do a little section and then stamp it and then do a little section and stamp it and you could literally be standing a foot away from it and not know it was a fake tree. And we only built and it was the
thing that some people had a problem with. But if you look at pictures from Paradise, they're all ponderosa pines and the branches don't start until sixteen seventeen feet up in the air. It's just massive trunk and then you start getting into the top of the tree. So all we built was trunk. I had a couple little nubs on some of the trees just to make look but we were never going to be looking up. We were
never going to be looking super high. And we already knew that those big, massive wide shots that are in the movie that practically you can't do that with fire. That was always going to be visual effects. There were fires in there that were ours, but we knew that those big, massive white shots were going to be visual effects. There's just physically you can't do that and keep it under control.
I imagine that's got to be the watch word, is control and just making sure you can turn it on, turn it off, that nothing's going to catch on fire that's not supposed to. I mean, safety has to be such a major concern on a.
Set like that, Yeah, it was. There was always.
I required a lot of rehearsals, especially when we had a lot of people running around when they got stuck on one of the roads. I forget the name of the road. It was the big main road and there was a bunch of people running around. We rehearsed that for hours before we shot that. Just moving vehicles, fire, It's just throw all the elements at them as you can, a bunch of smoke, all that kind of stuff. So it was. It was always well rehearsed. We had a
great stunt team. Everybody was really on point and we knew everybody knew what was going on. Where we were shooting was in the center of Santa Fe. And I'm not kidding you. It was in the center of the city. I had houses, schools, I had businesses. Everything was around us.
It was a logistical nightmare to try to get the city to say yes, you know, I was a huge battle right at the beginning, me smoozing them and having trying to build the confidence that was needed for the city planners and the city council and the fire department
and the police department. But I had worked there a couple of times, and I knew the chiefs, and I knew quite a few people, and it was it was more along the lines of just telling them what the plan was and what what my thoughts were and how I was going to move forward with it.
And everybody was pretty cool. They were pretty decent. It was only the.
Police department was a little bit hard to get through just because of the amount of smoke that we were going to have. It was live traffic all the way around us. It was live traffic. And my biggest concern was is that we were going to have white outs and we were shooting this at night.
That was my biggest concern.
That we would end up getting to a point where the wind was moving just right and the main thoroughfare in Santa Fe bordered one side of our property, and I was worried about putting so much smoke in then we'd have accidents. So the on specific days that we were doing that amount of smoke, we had police officers, We had big construction signs, lit construction signs saying hey,
filming in the area, there's no fire. And that was another thing, having the citizens freak out that something's burning that didn't know what was going on, so we did. Before we started shooting, we did a lot of social media, Hey this is going on, please be aware. You don't need to call nine one one. And the first night we started shooting, they had something like eight hundred and fifty calls.
To nine one one.
I was standing next to the fire chief on set. I required the fire department there, even though it was completely under control and there was nothing that was going to burn and everything. I just personally want to have somebody who's got a radio to the closest fire, you know, calling nine one one, then has got to go to them.
Then it just turns into a nightmare.
And we were sitting there talking one night and he goes yeah, or the first night and he goes, yeah, the phones are ringing off the hook, and everybody knew. It wasn't like we were trying to sneak something by it just do people don't pay attention to their phones or whatever, and they didn't see this warning and everything else, or the big construction signs, so they'd be called, oh my god, the college is on fire. No, it's okay, we're filming.
He talked about how fire is one of the main characters of the movie, and obviously right there in the I got the bus. Were you in charge of any of the vehicle stuff as well?
I wasn't in charge of the vehicles, But what does fall in my lap is the safety of the children. So we spent time in sealing the buses up to where they were not hermetically sealed. We filled gaps and closed vents and stuff like that, and then I came up with an idea before we started shooting was to purchase the air purifiers. So I got two big air purifiers and we put them all the way at the back of the bus, so I was always circulating the air inside the bus and any kind of particulate that
was going to be in there. But I wasn't emitting anything into the air that was going to be harmful. It's just children. You don't want to expose them to. Even if you've got the okay and all the research and the products that you're using, do you try to do as much as you possibly can to protect that. Because I knew we were going to run into problems with parents and SAG and everything else working with children. That's one of the things you don't do in film.
You don't work with animals, and you don't work with children. It's a problem problem because you can't get around it.
Well, especially you're shooting at night, and I know there's all kinds of rules about like kids working at late hours and all that stuff as well. That must have been difficult too, it was.
And then we pitched the idea of building a little gimbal for the bus, so we had a stage, and we turned one of the stages into a volume stage so that we could shoot during the day and use the majority of their hours in the school bus.
And have that element.
And then I was able to rock it and roll it and like it was going down a bunch of rough road and everything else. We ended up spending I think it was like two weeks two and a half weeks like that in element stage. And I had hid firebars that would move.
And be able to throw the light in the bus.
And because the interior of the bus was like an awe slightly off white, but it was it was a gloss so it would pick up as you see the movie. You can see it in the movie. You can pick up the flame flickering and dancing in the bus and everything else. So we did that on stage, and I also had concern the bus. I had a backup planet if there was going to be an issue with anybody saying, oh my god, it's too close to the fire, so
on and so forth. That we had a magnet system that we could put on the bus and hang welding blanket, black welding blanket that would have completely blocked all the heat.
But we never ended up using it.
Nobody ever said anything like that, but it's that's part of my job, is trying to solve problems before they're problems.
Right.
The majority of this is you don't walk into a film like this and go, Okay, I'm.
Gonna do fire everywhere.
No, you start off by making sure everybody's comfortable with you, then laying out all the safety and how you would protect just in case something happened, and then you figure out how are you going to do the fire, and.
I know you're talking about the kids and everything, and then I'm sure you have to deal with the actors and having them too close to the fire. I'm hoping, and I'm sure that there were a lot of stunted people that were doubling our main actors. But how close is like McConaughey and America Ferrer were getting close to that.
America Ferrer was pretty close a couple times.
It was we would light it up and then we'd walk her in and she would go to where she's comfortable. So it was never Okay, stand here and then the fire is gonna light And there was never any of that. Yeah, there was never any of that. It was always we would bring it up and then they would get to a point where they were comfortable, and then Paul would set the shot and then we'd reset every thing and they.
Go, Okay, here we go.
But you'd be surprised Matthew was doing a lot of it.
It seems like he would do that.
He's a good old boy. He's a good old boy. We had some good conversations. I think acting is something he fell into, but if he didn't, he would be an efects guy or a stunt guy. He drove the bus a lot. There was very few times we built pods for the bus so that we could remote drive it, and we used them, but we didn't use them nearly as much as we thought we were going to be using them. So it was he was just gung ho.
He said, no, I got this. There was a couple of times where the stunt coordinator came out to me. He goes, no, Matthew's going to drive through that, and I'm like, if you're cool with it, I'm cool with it, but let's have something backup standing by okay, just in case. So there's a running joke between the two of us. But no, it came out great, man, and it really did. The one that I'm talking about right there is the
phone pole. He's driving through the scene and the telephone poles are breaking and falling, and Matthew drove that that was not a stunt driver. When I found that out, I had to end up put I put safeties in so I could stop that pole just in case he's not on his mark or something like that, because I wasn't planning on it.
I was planning on a stunt driver and going.
Okay, the pole drops here, don't be here, and you can trust that if you know the driver, if you've worked with him before, so on and so forth. Then I had worked with this stunt team multiple times. But when he said yeah, Matthew's going to drive him, like okay, So I had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to stop a eight hundred pound pole following it twenty five miles an hour.
Sounds like so much of your job as just forming relationships with other people.
You do jobs like this, and you're responsible for people's lives, you know. And I don't think there's enough guys in my position that think that way. I think they spend more time thinking that it's a job and it's not. People come up to me and we're talking about a gag, and sometimes I step back and I go, they're gonna run at fifty miles an hour head into a dumpster and they're trusting me to pull the dumpster out of the way. When you think about it that way, make
sure it's right. You build much more of a relationship than you would with just having a conversation with somebody in a supermarket, you know what I mean.
So it's yeah, you know what I'm saying. And it's the same with my guys.
It's the same with my guys because I put them in situations or I'm in situations, and I'm trusting them, even lighting fires, even lighting the pilots on fires. You better trust the guy that's on the bottle, because if you're standing right there and you're lighting it, it could completely engulf you in flames. So it does take a little bit higher of a stance than just shaking somebody's hand. You know people you know pretty well. So, but that's why you hire the people you hire. That's one of
the big things. Not everybody can do what we do, and it takes experience, and it takes the proper mindset. It takes that kind of a relationship that you can trust somebody to do it and say, hey, you're going to go prep this car to explode, and know that you're saying something to somebody who understands who's done it before, and everything's going to be safe because it could be a piece of glass that hits the director, it could be a car door that came off and hit an actor, and that's it.
That's the end of it, you know what I mean.
So it's there is a lot there that I wish we could portray a lot more in the industry, but cost money.
Well, what are you working on now, my tan, how's that going for you?
The business is pretty slow right now. I'm sure you're aware of it. There's a big shift going on. So no, I haven't. I haven't worked since January. I did a commercial, but I'm trying trying to find something to do. But it's just it's dead. It's really it's a sad state of affairs, a real sad state of affairs. I've lost a lot of friends out of the industry. That's the worst I've ever seen it. In thirty two years.
Casting your mind back twenty years ago, were you just working all the time?
In thirty two years, I've never had more than two months off at any given time. It was always job after job after job after job after job. There was times where when I was working with Steve Kremen, we worked for four years straight in a row. We literally I would finish a job, he would leave a month early to go start prepping another job, and we would just constantly do that. I've been really fortunate to work on the projects that I have been that I have worked on. I look at my resume and I step
back and I go, damn, good films on there. And I've been one of the fortunate ones. And where I haven't had this grounge around, There's always been phone calls people are calling and everything else, and it's very new to me to be in this position. And it's just there's just no work. The producers and the up ms and the directors that I know that everybody's in Europe or they're not working. I can't go to Europe.
So well, Miss McLaughlin, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate this absolutely, Mark, thank you.
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