'Zero Dark Thirty's' compound challenges

First-time feature production designer Jeremy Hindle admits to some dicey feelings while taking director Kathryn Bigelow on an initial walk-through of "Zero Dark Thirty's" key set. But they weren't rookie jitters.

"I remember telling her, 'You're going to feel insanely creepy. You're going to feel like he lived here,'" Hindle says.

The verisimilitude Bigelow demanded for all aspects of the film was particularly important to the re-creation of the compound in which Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs last year. "We walked through, and the detail … it felt like someone had lived there; six years of never leaving," Hindle says. "We knew what his bed looked like from photographs. We knew he had an AK-47 hanging over it. We knew he was a pack rat. The hallway was just jammed full of every newspaper he could get his hands on."

Using primarily open-source intelligence from news reports and the like, and enhanced by Oscar-winning writer-producer and military journalist Mark Boal's research, the production constructed a full-scale, fully operational replica of Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

"You can scale quite a lot off photographs," Hindle says. "We had a company called Frame Store in London model it in 3-D for us. Once you have the photographs and video, it's all a big math equation. It was a couple weeks of math, really.

"We built it for real out of stone and steel. We flew real Black Hawks in; there was a Black Hawk 50 feet over that set with Kathryn and every actor inside it. So the compound was 21/2 times over-engineered," he says, noting the set had to withstand the crash of one of the helicopters [hanging by a crane]. "There were 9-foot caissons underground, steel, cinder blocks; it was a bunker. It would be hard to blow that place up."

Hindle made the jump to feature film work from commercials — on which he had worked with such directors as Spike Jonze, Nicolas Winding Refn and Alejandro González I?árritu — in part due to the recommendation of "Zero Dark's" cinematographer, Greig Fraser.

"Kathryn hates wild walls [which can be removed for ease of filming]. Because [our] walls don't move, some cinematographers would have had a heart attack. Greig's not like that. We've worked together before; I've boxed him into places before. He loves that kind of style. He knows it creates a certain energy. It's difficult to shoot in when it's 120 degrees, but I said, 'I'm not going to make it easy for you to shoot; I'm going to make it great so you can shoot it.'

"You're cramming everyone in the room; it makes it so real. It's not a way that anyone else [but Bigelow] would make this film. [Normally,] you'd just say, 'Let's go to a stage … break it down, each floor.' But it's real. It was engineered, architecturally drawn up, and we built the thing in 10 weeks."

Scouting and construction of meticulously authentic locations on several continents and the design and assembly of approximations of stealth Black Hawk helicopters happened very quickly.

"I got hired the 25th of November, and we started shooting Feb. 28. It was mind-blowingly fast," Hindle says. "Every one of those military bases [seen in the film] didn't exist. We built all those. The Islamabad embassy, that's an engineering school in India. That was after scouting in Jordan for months."

But Hindle had concerns beyond making his timeline. Safety became an issue as the replica of Bin Laden's compound was built and shot in Jordan.

"It was haunting, for sure," Hindle says. "There were bomb-sniffing dogs checking the set before you walked on. There was a lot of security. We were 30 miles from Syria and three miles from Israel. For the first half of [building] the structure, nobody knew what it was. And then the helicopters came in, hanging from cranes … it was like, 'Huh. We're about a mile from the Dead Sea.'"

Like the hundreds of windows that make up its shiny facade, Carleton University’s new River Building is the result of many smaller victories, says university president Roseann Runte.

Opened this fall, the $55-million building is symbolic of how committed the federal and provincial governments, as well as individual donors, are to funding higher education, she says.

The reliance on sustainable construction practices — the building has a bio-wall and green roof — and its location near the Rideau River signify Carleton’s connection to the community and its concern for the natural environment.

But Runte says its greatest symbol is inside the building, in the form of a giant sculpture carved from the wood of an oak tree that stood in Old Ottawa South for more than 200 years.

The impressive sculpture, called Sailing Through Time, shows a tree upside down, its branches pointing toward the ground and its roots in the sky.

“To me, that is a symbol of what happens at university — that people learn new ways of thinking, new ways of opening their eyes to the world,” Runte said in selecting the River Building’s opening as the single most important achievement at Carleton in 2012.

With baccalaureates largely seen now as only the first step toward entering the workforce, Runte says, Carleton must make getting such a degree as enriching as possible.

A few years ago, the school started giving students a co-curricular record upon graduation, which is essentially a transcript of all the volunteer work, internships and international work they did outside of class during their time at Carleton.

Co-op placements are also a big deal, Runte says, adding they’re not just for science and engineering students any more. All arts departments at Carleton offer co-ops now.

In terms of reforming the post-secondary sector as a whole, Runte said stable government funding and a greater adoption of technology on campuses provincewide are key.

It might soon become commonplace to have some courses taught on campus and others offered strictly online, for example. “I think that will become the norm,” she said. “There will be a greater mixture of how that is done, and that will bring greater collaboration among institutions.”

Collaboration is something else she’d also like to see more of.

Runte used the example of a unique joint program it offers in conjunction with Algonquin College called the Bachelor of Information Technology. Students attend both schools concurrently, getting both the theory and the practical, and graduate in four years with both a degree and a diploma.

That means entering the workforce two years earlier and saving thousands of dollars on tuition.

Runte said the two schools are currently looking at other programs to do this with, and added that other Ontario campuses appear interested in doing the same.

Although calm has been restored now, this year’s Quebec student protests and ongoing concerns about rising tuitions have put the issue of access and affordability front and centre.

Runte says the current model requires a balance to be struck between what proportion government and individuals each contribute, though there is not currently a formula to set these amounts.