The Special FX of “Burn Notice” and a Look Ahead

I am not a technically minded person at all and when I watch a television show that has a fair amount of special effects, my first thought is often, “Wow, how did they do that!” But try to explain the technicalities of the scene to me and my eyes glaze over, and all I hear is, “Flar, flar, flar flar.” I recently sat in on a conference call with Burn Notice creator Matt Nix and Special Effects Coordinator, Kevin Harris, and I was determined to learn something from them that I could understand. Coming up with questions for them was not easy, this time. I mean, easy enough to ask a bunch of questions of Matt, but what was I going to do about Kevin? “Um, Mr. Harris, could you please explain to me, er, um, everything?!” Doesn’t really fly well, does it?

Fortunately, this was a conference call, and there were plenty of others on the line to cover for me. People who asked intelligent questions, or at least, they fooled me. I thought they were intelligent. And, I did learn some things! For instance, Matt told me that money is not always the obstacle when filming a scene requiring special effects.

“I mean really we’ve got such a great team of effects and stunt people that I can’t think of a time that they have come to me and said, “This stunt is too expensive. We cannot do this stunt.” Literally they will say to me, “You are not pushing hard enough. Come up with something that you really think we can’t do so that we can show you that we can do it.” Right? And so it’s just not – budget is not really the issue.

And really a good example is when Kevin (Harris) talks about doing intricate gags, that being a lot more difficult than doing big things. Like we do all the big things. We do the same things that they would do in a big movie, we’ll do them in more or less the same way, it’s just that we don’t have as many cameras on the stunt, we don’t shoot the green screen shot of the lead as the car is flipping, so that you see that it’s him in the car. You know, there are certain things that we don’t have time to do. So it’s kind of the details that end up falling out of stuff because we don’t have time to do it.”

Matt and Kevin each had their favorite scenes that were filmed.

Matt: “The funny thing is actually like my dream stunt sequence was the raining, flaming cars car chase sequence at the end of season two, which I wrote fully expecting them to come back and say, “We can’t do it.” And Artie, our stunt coordinator, and Kevin talked to me and the basically had pitches for making it bigger. And of course I said, “Yes, make it bigger.” So honestly, like I’m still trying to push for something that we can’t get, and we just keep writing it and they just keep doing it. So because of that it’s kind of a difficult question to answer.”

Kevin: “I’m more partial to water-type work, boat work, doing a lot of different types of effects on water and with the boats and stuff; it’s a lot more challenging. I will say that after doing a couple of seasons of SeaQuest and a Hulk Hogan series called Thunder in Paradise, the thing that really needs to be done when you want to do real deep action is you almost have to run simultaneously. We have a second unit and a first unit. And on both of those shows there, pretty much your first year they did all of your walk and talk scenes when your second unit was backing it up with all the action sequences. And in that case there is my difference as far as time versus money. There it’s both; you’re going to get double the time, although you’re going to spend double the money.”

I also wanted to know, from Matt, who we can expect to see guest starring this season.

“Well, we have – let’s see. We just got Debi Mazar; she’s going to be guesting for us in the – I just happen to be excited about that one. She’s guesting in the eighth episode.

Moon Bloodgood is our Burn Notice sort of arc character for the first bit of the season, and Ben Shenkman for the second bit. We’ve got Brian Van Holt in the first episode. Hope McElhany in the second episode does a great job. Third episode is the return of Brennen, played by Jay Karnes from The Shield. The fourth episode we have a fantastic performance by Nick Turturro.

I think this episode – oh, actually this is a fun one. In the fifth episode the actor Michael Weston stars as a schizophrenic client. So we have Michael Weston meets Michael Westen. He plays a character named Spencer. It’s not confusing, but it was fun for us. And he does a great job. We didn’t cast him because of his name, but it was a fun accident.

In the sixth episode – let’s see. We have some great actors, but I’m not thinking of anybody that would jump out as…. Seventh episode we have Jay Harrington, who did a great job. And then that’s basically as far as we’ve cast. So there should be another – there’s going to be another big Burn Notice character in the second half of the season, and we’ve got a fun list that we’re pulling together for that, but we haven’t nailed down who that’s going to be yet.”

I’ve already viewed the first three episodes of the new season, and let me tell you, it’s going to be a fun ride!

Burn Notice returns for its third season and in a new time slot, Thursday night at 8 p.m., CT, on USA. You can read the transcript from this interview HERE.