American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 36) Cutting-Edge Camerawork Tormented vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) prepares to sink his teeth into Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll). True Blood by Jay Holben When writer/director Alan Ball hired Checco Varese, AMC to shoot the pilot for HBO’s horror fantasy True Blood, the cinematographer spent the next several nights “doing my homework,” he says. “I watched everything I could that was on TV at 10 p.m. I flipped to one channel, and it looked fantastic; the show was moody and had lots of camera energy and a bit of a blue tone. Then I flipped the channel, and that show looked great, but it looked just like the first one. Then I flipped again, and again, and saw that most of the shows looked the same. That’s not the case now — there are a lot of great shows with a lot of great looks 36 March 2009 — but at the time, they all looked the same to me! I thought True Blood merited a very different look, something sweaty, hot and sexy, which is what Louisiana feels like. Alan, [production designer] Suzuki Ingerslev and I decided to make it a saturated show, with red reds and green greens.” Another key component of the look is humidity, which had to be artificially created for the Los Angeles-based production. “When you’re in a very humid climate, there isn’t any dust,” notes Varese. “So whenever we shot an exterior, I made sure every inch was wet down.” Fire hoses were used to wet down the vegetation in the background and Hudson sprayers were used to saturate the closer greens. “I was obsessed with that detail because I think it really refines the look,” says Varese. “When you see those details in the trees in the background and the sheen in the foreground, it really looks like Louisiana. The constant wetness was tough on the actors, but it really enhanced the look.” Set in the sleepy town of Bon Temps, La., True Blood is based on Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Series, which was begun in 2001 with the publication of Dead Until Dark. The invention of synthetic blood has enabled vampires to integrate themselves into human society, but the transition has not been smooth. Tensions in town reach a boiling point when a comely local, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), takes up with a vampire, Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), and Sookie’s associates and loved ones begin turning up dead. Varese achieved his nightexterior look by pushing Kodak Vision2 Expression 500T 5229 by 11⁄2 stops (to 1,500 ISO) and overexposing his highlights and deeply underexposing the shadows while maintaining skin tones right at key. “I wanted the night look to have a rough-around-the-edges feeling, and pushing the stock a stop and a half gave it more texture and grain without making it grainy. You have to control your tones, however.” To create overall ambience for night exteriors, key grip Miguel Benavides and gaffer Jonathon Bradley strung lines of aircraft cable 40' above the ground, just over the trees, in a small section of the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. From the cables, they hung rows of 6K space lights. Then Varese incorporated an LRX Piranha, an 80' boom arm with three remotecontrolled fixtures, a 12K HMI and a 12K tungsten as his moonlight backlight. Varese always made sure the “good guys” had an eyelight. For True Blood photos by Jamie Trueblood, Prashant Gupta and John P. Johnson, courtesy of HBO.
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