American Cinematographer - December 2008 - (Page 14)

Above: After performing a Polaroid emulsion lift, designer/ compositor Ryan Gagnier uses canned air to manipulate the title card, shown at right. Below: Live-action director Trevor Fife (left) and creative director/ live-action director Matthew Mulder (right) work on location. In conversation with the Digital Kitchen team, the term “handson” comes up a lot. Bashore notes with some irony that “coming from a place called Digital Kitchen in a digital age, in an industry that tends to work on a very high level [technically], we’ve done the opposite. This is done on equipment that anyone can afford or might already have in the attic.” Adobe After Effects was used to finesse the final look, but newfangled plug-ins cannot be credited for the chicken-scratch typography glimpsed between the textured flashframes, quick cuts of boiling skin and fleeting glimpses of rotting animals. Team member Camm Rowland invented the font used for all the True Blood main titles; he cut the letterforms using an Exacto knife, drawing inspiration from hand-painted road signs. The short flash-frames were composed from film-camera rollouts, film perfs and damaged emulsion, and the sickening “skin” transitions were another triumph of old- school ingenuity. In order to achieve the effect of one image cracking, boiling and shriveling into another, artist Ryan Gagnier employed a technique known as a Polaroid emulsion lift, which involves using warm water to remove the emulsion from the backing of a Polaroid photo so the delicate image can be transferred to other surfaces. (This is only possible with pull-apart film, such as Polaroid 669.) The actual transitions were created by taking the last frame of one shot and the first frame of the next shot, blowing them up and shooting a Polaroid of them overlapping. The fragile emulsion layer was then transferred to a wet glass backing on a light table and made to dance around with bursts of canned air. Mulder offers, “Our motivation was [the idea of] sloughing skin, almost like a rattlesnake molting. In his conversations with us, Alan referred a lot to the supernatural — not only vampires, but shapeshifters and other [mythical] wilderness creatures — so we wanted to suggest a transformative animal state.” Fedorchuk continued that line of thinking in the editing room. Using an Avid Media Composer Adrenaline, he cut the intro in a way that mimics “the POV of a predatory, beast-like entity that views humans with ambivalence — there’s repulsion, but also a blood-lust, and there’s a perversity to that. They’re also attracted to the human beings and their way of life.” Gagnier set the final look, adding scan lines and splotches and suppressing black levels. His intent was to emulate the look of found footage. Allen and Fedorchuk’s contribution to True Blood will be seen on the show for its entire run, despite any changes or events that may occur within the story. Both say it was a big challenge to reduce an entire series into a comprehensive series of images. “What I like about the result is that it’s all utterly appropriate to its source material,” says Henry. Allen concludes, “It works on so many different levels, and in that way, it’s totally unique as a title sequence. I’m very proud of it.” I 14 December 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2008

American Cinematographer - December 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes: True Blood Titles Tomorrow’s Technology Production Slate: Closer to Truth A High Price for Progress Rags to Riches 1-Man Riot Squad The State of the Art: An Update Post Focus: Deluxe New York New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index 2008 AC Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Donald McAlpine

American Cinematographer - December 2008

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