This episode really highlights what an incredible family we’ve built over seven years. The truth is, I think we all welcomed the distraction from what’s going on in the real world. The whole thing was a very virtual experience, but I was really impressed at how quickly and seamlessly the team pulled together to get their specific job done. Editors, the sound team, and our composer were in Los Angeles. We had animators working in London and Atlanta. They recorded their dialogue into their phones, through an app, and uploaded those lines to our post team in L.A. The cast all recorded their lines remotely on microphones that were sent to them wherever they were quarantining. TVLINE | As you were putting this finale together remotely, did you hit any big production roadblocks? Anything that you simply couldn’t make work or had to cut because you were working from home? Big, sweeping, wide shots.” Most of the changes we made to the script were adjustments to open up the visual palette of the show and make things bigger and more fun. But when we realized we were animating things - that we hadn’t shot that scene yet - we thought, “Why not move this scene to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.? Let’s see the Capitol Building in the background. Originally, this was to be filmed on our stages in Red’s secret apartment. That’s the kind of thing we would never have been able to do where we shoot in New York City.Īnother example, we had a scene between Red and Liz where he gives her the case of the week. We jump outside the car to see the vehicle careening through the streets, cars whizzing past, horns blaring. However, with animation - and working with Proof - we realized we had an opportunity to open that scene up. In live action, that would have been shot with green screen and we’d be lucky if we ever popped outside of the car. For example, there’s a scene with three characters in the back of a car, racing through the city. We made some slight adjustments to the script, mostly trying to expand concepts that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to execute on our tight production schedule.
TVLINE | Did you have to make any tweaks to the script in order to accommodate the animated scenes? Less dialogue, longer pauses, anything like that?
So when we started kicking around ideas for how to complete the season, we looked back at the comic books written by Nicole Phillips, and an animated approach felt very organic.
The show has a slightly alternative graphic novel feel to it that’s baked into what we do week to week. A rogues’ gallery of criminals each week. We’ve got a criminal anti-hero at the center of the show. We’ve always talked about The Blacklist being a bit of a comic book. TVLINE | How did you land on graphic novel-style animation for this episode? Was that driven by the show’s existing comics, or did it seem easiest from a technical perspective as opposed to other animation styles?
His doc prescribed new meds for the hand tremors, but he also urged Red to be more honest with Liz about his medical concerns.īelow, series creator Jon Bokenkamp shares how the half-animated finale came to be, while teasing how that final scene sets up the previously announced eighth season. Meanwhile, Red’s ongoing health issues - cerebral edema, Red’s doctor told Liz - took a turn for the worse, prompting him to collapse mid-conversation. That includes you, and that includes Reddington.” In a move that initially seemed to take Liz herself by surprise, she chose Katarina by the end of the hour, though, she had completely accepted this new alliance, even revealing to her comatose grandfather ( the late Brian Dennehy, in his final appearance) that “anyone who is in way is in my way. During the episode, Liz was forced to officially pick a side between Reddington and Katarina Rostova, after the task force’s latest case put her smack-dab in the middle of those two.