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The ARC Network and The CAD Zone on CBS "The Guardian"

The ARC Network and The CAD Zone helped CBS achieve a closer sense of "realism" in this coming Tuesday's episode of the Guardian by providing an accident scene exhibit used by the actor portraying an accident reconstructionist.

The episode title is "The Intersection" where Lulu's recovery from a car accident is jeopardized when they find swelling on her brain. Meanwhile, Burton makes a last-ditch attempt to keep his hometown factory from going under, which would leave hundreds unemployed.

On Tuesday, January 8, The ARC Network received a phone call from the property master of the TV court-drama show, The Guardian. He was reviewing the script and needed some help when he discovered the plot called for an accident scene diagram to be used by the safety engineer testifying as an accident reconstructionist. Since he had no idea what this was, he turned to the Internet for help. All of his searches led him directly to a familiar site to us all; the ARC Network. After contacting us and understanding what his needs and requests were, I assured him we could help, after all, that is what we do - network for the industry of accident reconstruction. Since this project was extremely time sensitive, filming was to take place in 2 days and they needed the court exhibit to be completed and shipped by then, I contacted The CAD Zone for assistance. They were located close enough to Los Angeles to make all this happen.

Segue to The CAD Zone..... Derik White

The filmmakers wanted a realistic diagram, one that would be typical of diagrams presented in a court case by a crash reconstructionist. Due to time constraints and the lack of a plotter, Scott and the ARC Network thought it would be best to get The CAD Zone involved. Our contact for the project was Matt Cavaliero. Matt needed a simple, easy to read, 2D diagram of a crash scene involving a Chevy Suburban and Volkswagen Passat. Matt didn't have any pictures of the vehicles involved in the scene, but he did have photos of the intersection and surrounding landscape.

The accident was to take place on a rural four-way intersection, although the actual intersection used in the filming was a three-way intersection! Matt said that little problem would be remedied in the editing department. No measurements were taken at the scene, there were no sketches, and no photos of a crash to reference, but they wanted us to come up with a finished drawing the next day which could be used for filming on the day after that. Even though there was not much data to work from, we knew we could create a realistic, professional diagram in The Crash Zone.

The intersection was first created with The Crash Zone's unique Easy Intersection feature using a double yellow divider line. The rural intersection had no signage or stop bars. Since this was appearing on TV, so everyone thought fills would look nicer. So, the intersection was filled with with gray. Next we used the Symbol Manager toolbox to select and place pre-drawn symbols for a Suburban and a Passat. These were also filled with the colors of the actual vehicles, black for the Suburban and green for the Passat. The vehicles were placed to show three positions - the point before collision, the point of impact, and the final resting position.

Since there was no real data from the collision and the drawing was intended to be a simple and attractive prop we opted not to show any crush damage or dimensions. Simple text labels were placed in the diagram and a dense line of trees and shrubs were placed all around the intersection to reproduce the greenery that was filmed at the actual scene. Scott Baker provided invaluable assistance with reviewing the diagram for technical details. We didn't want some accident reconstructionist to watch the show and laugh at the drawing as being unrealistic!

Matt wanted a large size printout on a foam core backing they could set on an easel in the mock courtroom. We didn't have time to plot the diagram and send it to him so we created a jpg image of the drawing and sent that off. The jpg had to be high resolution so it could be made larger without getting "blocky." We set our screen resolution to 1600 x 1200 and used The Crash Zone's Export feature to create the .jpg image. That resolution is just too high for normal use since the buttons become so small. I'm getting old and need thicker glasses. However, it does allow you to create a higher resolution image which can be made larger, so Matt had no problem blowing up the image for the shoot on Thursday.

Some of the pre-production filming shots

This was a fun project for us. It was great working with Scott and Matt. This episode of The Guardian aires on CBS, Tuesday, February 25 at 9:00. Next we have to get the "CSI" show on CBS to use a Crime Zone diagram in one of their episodes. Gil Grissom, the main character in CSI, is actually modeled off Dan Holstein - a real live investigator with the Las Vegas Metro Police Department and a long-time user of The CAD Zone's Crime Zone software.

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