For The Adjustment Bureau (2011), Macdonald made the small case books and large plan books that have the schematics for everyone's life. "I printed and hand-bound over a hundred of the small books, in four different colored bindings. The large books are bound in a white material that I had custom made. In the scenes in the Adjustment Bureau office, we see shelf after shelf -- over 2,200 in all -- each filled with dozens of copies of the large white book. I made a couple of dozen of those books. The rest are faux." Those scenes were shot in the New York Public Library. After closing time each day, they had to dress the set and shoot all night. "So we wanted some way of quickly converting real bookcases full of books into the Adjustment Bureau cases. The solution was large pieces of styrofoam, molded into a long row of book spines. Those were covered with the fabric. Each night the swing gang would place the faux spine panels into each book shelf, and strike them each morning after shooting wrapped."

For This Must Be The Place (2011), which has yet to be released, Macdonald did Sean Penn's fathers notebooks and sketchbook. The drawings in the sketchbook were done by someone else. "I did all the writing and printing. I also did some letters and various documents, and tons of paper for the office of the Nazi-hunter character based on Simon Wiesenthal. He has lots of old Nazi documents in piles all over his desk and shelves. There's also a large map on his wall of all the camps in wartime Germany. His wall is also covered with diplomas and awards. I haven't photographed this stuff yet -- I hope to do that in the coming weeks. Lots of interesting documents. One of the things you have to be concerned with when working on period documents is something called clearance -- making sure that you can use something without fear of being sued by someone. It's the reason why every phone number you see mentioned in a movie or TV show has a 555 exchange. When doing something as innocuous as a pile of mail, you have to make up fake addresses that don't exist, fake names, fake companies." Two of the awards on the wall were from Jewish organizations that sounded real, but weren't. The Simon Wiesenthal museum gave him photos of his office walls, and "I loosely based the awards I made on the ones that were on his wall," Macdonald says.

And for Boardwalk Empire (2010 & 2011), Macdonald did a little work on the first season -- lots of blank notebooks, a hero photo album, some books. And "I've just finished eight months of work on the second season, which starts later this month," he says. "I did probably 15,000 pages of documents, books, passports, tickets, newspapers, notebooks."

Macdonald has become a master of aging. "Water is my first go-to technique for aging documents. I also have lots of different stains that I use," he says. "Shoe polish is one, others are water-based. Heat is good too. Typically to age a single page, I'll get it damp, spray or blot on a couple of stains, wrinkle it and fold it, and then press it against an industrial hotplate. Some stains are activated by the heat. The intense heat flashes the water into steam, which seems to loosen up the fibers of the paper a bit. Then I might wrinkle it, and rub some graphite powder on the corners and sand them. Some guys use an airbrush to spray on faux stains. I prefer man-handling stuff and staining it in ways that quickly replicate the real process by which documents get aged. When I'm aging a book, I bash it lightly with a sculpter's mallet, rub lots of different stains into it, and wrinkle and smooth out every single page."