100 Fun Facts about Bones

http://www.fox.com/bones/100thepisode/

This was created around the time the 100th episode was to be aired I think.

You may know everything about Booth and Brennan. You may know everything about The Jeffersonian. But you didn't know these 100 fun facts about the production process that goes into making each episode of Bones.

1. The Angelator was 100% VFX. The new Angelatron is 100% real time graphics.
2. Hart Hanson's dad and David Boreanaz's dad have both made cameos in the show.Emily's dad has directed an episode.
3. On average, there are 18.5 hours of dailies shot for each episode.
4. The Egyptian room backgrounds are all VFX.
5. Tamara Taylor gets the giggles the most.
6. Sometimes for inserts, body/hand doubles are used.
7. The driving scenes are all shot in stationary cars with the backgrounds projected on to screens.
8. The first cut of each episode is usually 8-10 minutes longer than the aired episode.
9. There are 3 editors and 2 assistant editors that rotate on the show.
10. BONES won the 2009 Prime Time Softball League Championship.
11. BONES is the most fertile writers' room in television. Every season but one has produced a baby for a writer on staff.
12. The writers collect stories of bizarre real-life deaths.
13. The writers have a penalty box on the writers' room table. Each writer has a "penalty" and must pay every time they commit their penalty. For example, one writer must pay every time he shows a disgusting picture during lunch. Another must refrain from mentioning bowel movements while others are eating. A third has to pay up every time he leaves the room, promising to return in "two minutes," only to emerge an hour later.
14. The writers have killed multiple writers' assistants and interns (meaning they used their name and/or likeness) on the show and have used another's nose as a murder weapon.
15. Writer Dean Lopata was written in as a victim before he was a writer on the show.
16. The writers keep a show bible in the room. It lists every murder, weapon and motive used on the show.
17. The writers' room has a bathroom in it, but no one uses it because it's not soundproof.
18. The top three writers' room snacks are Trail Mix, cheap String Cheese and Orbitz White bubblemint gum.
19. The writers' room has an eerie ability to predict the future with the stories they write. A real-life Santa robbed a bank shortly after "The Goop on the Girl" was written. A human body part was found in a chicken nugget shortly after "The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken" was written. And a real life murder in the world of Midget Wrestling occurred shortly after writing "The Dwarf in the Dirt."
20. As research, the writers will go often on fieldtrips. Recent excursions have included The Aquarium of the Pacific, Club Jiggle and Lucha Va Voom.
21. Upon hearing stories of a friend's personal injury, writers will often think of ways to turn said injury into a bone clue for a future episode.
22. The beer hat Booth wears in the bathtub in "The Pain in the Heart" sits on the desk of an Executive Producer's assistant. The cup holes are used to hold pens, highlighters and scissors.
23. There were 16,000 chickens digitally created and inserted into the background of the chicken factory in this season's "The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken."
24. There were 24 chickens used for the VFX plate shoot for the same episode but after the shoot only 23 came back. One flew away
25. We did not really shoot in Amish country for "The Plain in the Prodigy." The background was digitally painted in.
26. In "The Dentist in the Ditch," there were 1000 CGI spiders modeled in the scene.
27. Early cuts of episodes are often missing key visual effects since they are typically added after the show is locked.
28. We have filmed at some of the same locations as Academy Award winning films. We filmed in a closed hospital in Pasadena and a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles where parts of Million Dollar Baby were filmed.
29. We bring everything to location. Power, food, tents, restrooms, trash bins, security, police officers. We set up a base camp for ourselves, akin to a small village.
30. We knew we had a hit show when we had to change the "Bones" name on our directional signs for our crew because they started to disappear.
31. Because "Bones" is set in Washington D.C. but filmed in Los Angeles, one of our main challenges is to avoid seeing palm trees or any other signs of being in Southern California.
32. We sometimes get access to places closed to the general public, such as water treatment plants, electrical generating stations, and other highly secure areas.
33. While meant to be disposed of after one use, we try to use the same latex gloves several times so as to minimize the impact to the environment. (We are not as concerned with the "contamination" aspects as some other professions)
34. Every time David Boreanaz is on camera he has craps dice, a brass Zippo lighter and a St. Christopher's medal in his pants pockets. (Unless he's not wearing anything with pants pockets in a particular scene).
35. Though Zack was the youngest member of the team, Eric Milligan is actually older than Emily, TJ, and Michaela.
36. Chad Lowe and David Boreanaz are the only two people to both direct and act on the show.
37. Three Deschanels have worked on the show, Emily, Zooey and Caleb. Two Boreanazes have, David and his father (cameo appearance), and two Hansons have, Hart and his father Paul (cameo appearance).
38. Over forty years ago, Ryan O'Neal (Max Keenan on BONES) worked on "Peyton Place," which shot on Stage 9 at the Fox studios, where we now shoot the FBI set.
39. There are 72 bone boxes in Angela's office.
40. There are 304 bone boxes in the Bone room.
41. There are pictures of three American Presidents eating in the FBI kitchen. Nixon eating Chinese food, Ike eating a chicken leg and Kennedy eating a hot dog.
42. There is a black and white photo of FBI agent Mark Felt hanging in Booth's office.
43. There are approximately 1,520 bones in the Bone room.
44. All the offline editors currently on BONES were at one point assistant editors on the show. This is extremely rare, which lead to an article being written about them in the editor's guild magazine.
45. On the pilot, production built a makeshift "laboratory platform" in the Annenberg Building at USC. It was raining during the shoot and post had to digitally remove raindrops that got past the protective tarps.
46. It takes approximately 21 days to post a show. This process involves cutting, mixing sound and music, adding inserts, visual effects and color correction.
47. Between cuts, dailies and miscellaneous DVDs, post production creates and distributes approximately 350 DVDs per episode. All DVDs are copied, labeled and distributed by one human being and he is not very fit.
48. Each episode goes through a revision process that involves four cuts; editor, director, producer and studio/network.
49. At the end of each season, our master tapes are stored in a vault in the Kansas salt mines, 650 feet underground.
50. According to local lore, the BONES offices are haunted by the ghost of the architect. If you are alone at night, there are strange knocks that can be heard in the wall. Luckily, we all work late.
51. Our DVD duplicator is named Sven.
52. Whenever a scene is set in an environment with background actors, additional dialogue is recorded in an ADR session in order to create an audio space. You may not notice the audio, but a group of six professional actors ad lib dialogue that is pertinent to each setting and scene.
53. Because actors are asked to record additional audio weeks after shooting an episode, we have used stages all over the world. For example, we have recorded ADR in New York, Cleveland and England.
54. The abandoned hospital where the alien autopsy is performed is named after our associate producer Todd Copps.
55. When a scene is set in a car, we use a technique called poorman's process. This process involves projecting images onto screens just outside of the car windows. This is how Booth and Brennan can drive through DC streets without ever leaving the LA sound stage.
56. We go through an average of over 4,000 actor submissions per episode to find our guest cast.
57. We have cast more than 1,300 people over the course of 100 episodes.
58. Before being hired, each actor must be approved by the Casting Director, episode director, the executive producers, the writer, the studio (20^th Century Fox) and the network (FBC).
59. The casting bungalow is a protected historical landmark in the city of Los Angeles. It was one of the first buildings on the lot and was originally used as a tack room for horses. It became a dressing room for actors in the late '40s and wasn't used as an office building until the late '80s. Rick Millikan has held an office here since The X-Files began in 1993.
60. We have a pet squirrel named Dr. Sweets (after John Francis Daley's character) who begs actors for food and has been known to cling to the legs of some female actors. We also have a pet cat named Camgela (after Tamara Taylor and Michaela Conlin's characters) who is widely known as the prettiest and friendliest cat on the Fox lot.
61. Our casting couch is brown.
62. All of the women in the office are brunettes with curly hair.
63. The scripts go through many revisions and each set of revisions is assigned a color to differentiate between them. They go in this order: white, blue, yellow, pink, green and goldenrod. Then it goes back to double blue and so on. By the end of an episode, the script is very pretty and colorful.
64. There are six assistants in the Writers' department.
65. The Writers' PA let Props use her head as a model for one of the finials in "The Foot in the Foreclosure." It wasn't the murder weapon, it was the other one.
66. A character on "Veronica Mars" was named after BONES creator Hart Hanson.
67. Showrunner / Executive Producer Hart Hanson has been known to make repairs to his ancient Jeep in front of the production office.
68. The crew has "Five Dollar Fridays." Anyone on set can put in $5 with their name on it into a bucket. If your $5 gets pulled out of the bucket at wrap, you get to keep all the money.
69. The exploded bits of "flesh" on the cab in the bank robbery episode were made of raspberry preserves.
70. BONES producer Jan DeWitt tells people he is a plumber so they will not ask him for gossip or a job.
71. Executive Producer Stephen Nathan is fond of writing in his pajama bottoms.
72. When Bones transportation is on location, they use 1,600 feet of linear of street parking to set up all the trucks and cast trailers.
73. When Bones transportation rolls out on location, they use 90 batteries (truck amp trailers), 262 tires and 18 generators to service the company.
74. The Unit Production Manager has a tractor and a chicken coop.
75. The production and writers office spends at least $500 a day on lunch.
76. All series regular cast members require hard copies of each script/revision, so including crew, the production office makes approximately 110 copies of each script and script revision.
77. The production office copiers break down at least once a day (see above).
78. There are many days the production office is open for close to 24 hours. We open much earlier than crew call and stay open well past camera wrap.
79. The most frequently used skeletal structures in the hand that are used as clues in BONES murder mysteries are the phalanges (distal, medial and proximal).
80. The configuration of specific features of the skull and the angle of the ilia (pelvic bones) are the two ways that the gender of the victim is usually determined in BONES.
81. The age of the victim is sometimes determined on BONES by the state of the mandibular teeth, including the amount of wear present.
82. When Angela develops reconstructive forensic drawings of deceased victims that are in a skeletal state, she first analyzes the skull and determines gender, approximate age and race.
83. Cam is a medical doctor who has specialized in forensic pathology and is trained to do autopsies and to support her findings within the legal setting regarding the cause and circumstances of death.
84. The Video Playback Department creates all the graphics and animations that appear on the computer screens in all the sets.
85. All the graphics and animation seen on the computer screens are programmed to respond to key clicks by offscreen playback personnel who watch the actors and coordinate what is seen on the monitors with the actions of the actors.
86. The Medio Cam is an actual operating forensic device which is used all over the country to help solve crimes.
87. Some close-ups of the computer screens and Medio Cam are shot weeks after the actors have finished shooting an episode.
88. The lead animator's wife, who is an American of Danish descent, does the show's Japanese translating and interpreting because Japanese is her first language. She grew up in Japan and didn't move to the United States until she went to college after having a lead role in a Japanese television series during her teenage years.
89. All computer graphic artists and animators in film and television video playback departments are in the union for sound technicians. When computer screens were first introduced into film and television, the computer animators were put into the same union as video playback personnel. And before that, when video playback first appeared in the business, the video people were put into the same union as sound technicians because the sound departments had been doing playback of music for decades.
90. It requires 8,000 Amps of power to make daytime in the Lab Set.
91. Angela has had more than one lab coat. She's had six different ones throughout the seasons.
92. Emily only wears all-natural fabric.
93. We have a big screen TV and stereo, washing machine and dryer in our 42-foot costume trailer that goes with us everywhere.
94. The lab coats that are worn by our background actors are embroidered with names of BONES crew members and often the extras know whose jacket they are wearing.
95. Our 42-foot trailer is packed with racks and racks of clothes. We often visit the Fox costume department, where the studio stores our clothes all the way back from season one.
96. The earthquake/flood in the subway during episode 515 was partially done in an attraction at Universal Studios theme park. The interior subway car that Sweets was riding was originally designed and built for the television series Seinfeld.
97. The walls from the ship in episode 408 were reconfigured to create the Jeffersonian Basement Storage (where the rifle was retrieved) in episode 512
98. In episode 408, Booth escapes from the yellow submarine and finds himself inside an old ship decorated with mermaids and pirates. That part of the ship was actually the basement of a defunct 1940s power plant in Hermosa Beach.
99. The "Magicon" convention in episode 409 was a closed furniture store in Santa Clarita. We had very little scenery to design because all of the convention booths were set inside pre-existing furniture displays.
100. Patricia's cottage along the beach in episode 315 was a decrepit, defunct fish restaurant redesigned and cleaned.

I'm done.