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Visualizing the Enigmatic Mind of A Genius
Onscreen graphics help the audience understand a savant’s thinking.
By Karen Idelson
When “The Good Doctor’s” Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore) searches his mind for solutions to the most perplexing medical cases, onscreen graphics let the audience travel with him as he scans his memories of anatomy texts and visualizes the body’s inner workings.
These graphics — which range from drawings in the style of an old-fashioned anatomy book to sleek animations with a modern feel — help make “The Good Doctor” a visual standout.
The distinct visual style originated with executive producer Seth Gordon, who has a background in visual effects.
“For the pilot, I roughed all these graphics up in After Effects, and that’s basically what went into the show,” Gordon says. “It served the dual purpose of getting inside Shaun’s mind so you could see how he thought about things.”
After the show’s other producers saw that first pass of the visuals, they realized how powerful a device they could be. The graphics were able to compress Shaun’s medical education and his deductive reasoning of the character into a quick visual.
“It turned into a signature part of the show,” says Gordon. “A whole infrastructure was created to create those graphics and it went well beyond what I could do in After Effects quickly. Now we’re sketching it out, doing storyboards, adding 3D elements. We used to just leave room in the frame for the graphics but now we’re trying to shoot expressively to support the graphic story, like using tilt shift lenses, to get you really inside the character’s mind.”
“It served the dual purpose of getting inside Shaun’s mind so you could see how he thought about things.”
Seth Gordon
Executive Producer
Effects makeup team brings extreme realism to injuries and surgeries
From delicate fetal surgeries to desperate operations on maimed accident victims, “The Good Doctor’s” makeup and prosthetic effects push the limits of what can be shown on TV.
“We research with doctors and then make things as realistic as possible,” says Lori Sandnes, makeup effects/artist coordinator for MastersFX, which does the special effects makeup and prosthetics for the show.
For the separation of conjoined twins, for example, they consulted with a doctor who had done the procedure. But sometimes their research simply starts with a laptop.
Jon Berezan, makeup effects artist A for the show, explains: “It really is amazing what you can find on YouTube.”
Doctors often post videos as reference and education for other physicians and surgeons on the video-sharing service, and “The Good Doctor” reaps their rewards.
“The Good Doctor” uses prosthetics instead of CG much of the time.
“Things like hand-operated balloons look more like real organs because they’re a little more organic,” says Berezan.
Sandnes and Berezan consult with the writers and producers throughout production and use many conventional makeup and painting techniques to get the look they need.
Says Sandnes: “For something like a heart surgery, we would have the actor come in and we’d attach prosthetics, a beating heart, beating lungs, and make everything as accurate as possible. We give [the producers] everything as realistic as we can make it.”
But that level of realism sometimes goes farther than network TV show censors can allow.
“There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it to the show,” says Sandnes. “For episode 3 we made these anatomically correct severed legs for an accident.” Perhaps too anatomically correct. “They never made it to the final cut,” she says.
— Karen Idelson