American Cinematographer - September 2017 - 34

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"T

he visual effects had to follow the
philosophy of the show," says
David Slade, who directed the first
three episodes of American Gods and
served as an executive producer for the
first season. "They had to work with
longer lenses and a shallower depth of
field. That [aesthetic] gave us the basis
to know what our visual effects should
look like: Everything had to look
photographic, like it had been shot to
be drama, not visual effects. We shot as
much in-camera as we could, and the
visual-effects vendors could look at that
material as a key to where to go."
Those vendors included Buf
Compagnie, Cinesite, Mr. X,
Mavericks VFX, Stargate Studios, Base
FX, Capital T, Gradient Effects,
Dr.Picture, FuseFX, Tendril, EDI and
GreenScreen Animals. Helping to
guide their efforts, I worked alongside
my fellow visual-effects supervisors
Kevin Tod Haug and Jeremy Ball, and
respective visual-effects producer, coordinator and editor Bernice Howes,
Jessica Liz Smith and Shannon Leigh
Olds. Among other tools, we employed
a Red Scarlet for some drone shooting,
and Sony a7S mirrorless cameras -
nine at a time! - with Atomos
recorders for process plates for driving
scenes. Part of my job on the show was
to manage the various cameras' color
and imaging science.
"The visual effects were always a
consideration in every episode because
it's such an effects-driven show," says
co-cinematographer Darran Tiernan,
ISC. "Neil Gaiman's stories are driven
by so many weird and impossible
things. I don't think I've ever been on a
shoot like this one, where we had to
discuss a visual-effects element pretty
much every second shot. We all worked
collaboratively, nonstop. We were very
much in each other's pockets, and it just
became normal. It was exciting for me
because it was never your run-of-themill, two-people-talking-at-a-table
scene - or if we did do a scene like

34

September 2017

Divine Visions

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that, we ended up with rear-projected
walls that made it look like an interview
room in a police station turns into a
visual extravaganza behind the characters."
"Everything needed to be photographically believable, especially CG
objects," says Haug. "The vendors
needed to pay attention to what the lens
metrics were, and make sure that things
got the right level of motion blur and
depth of field. We spent a long time
trying to explain to vendors why a lot of
the work they did in the deep background ended up being bokeh. The
'Bone Orchard' scene [in Episode 1,
'The Bone Orchard,' and Episode 4,
'Git Gone'] was the first time we really
got into this. For example, the back of
[actor Ricky Whittle's] head is not in
focus; the [CG] tree farther behind him
should not be more in-focus than the
back of his head."
Second-unit cinematographer
Marc Laliberté Else notes, "The visual
effects in the show are a character.
They're as important as the gods themselves. I think they played a big part in
the show's success.
"We had Jeremy Ball with us a
lot, and he was great," Else adds. "It felt
like everything was coming at us like a
freight train, and that we were just
managing to keep our heads above
water, getting everything done. A lot of
the time we were flying by the seat of
our pants."
"It was a very technical show as
well as a very creative one," says cocinematographer Aaron Morton,
NZCS. "It was great having a group of
people that had the show's best interest
at heart, so that we could get straight to
making it as good as it could be. There
was a lot to process in a short amount of
time; we needed to be on the same page
because a lot of things can slip through
the cracks when working in that way.
The result is a testament to the
communication that happened across
all of our departments - including grip

American Cinematographer

and lighting, art department, visual
effects, and special effects. There was a
lot going on in every single episode."
Godflesh and the Sladar Rig
Among the specific visual-effects
demands was "godflesh," which among
other instances is evidenced in the
appearance of Technical Boy (Bruce
Langley) and the faceless beings who
accompany him; the visible "skin" of
those characters morphs in-shot from
flesh to wire frames to other substances
altogether. The jumping-off point for
the effect was the idea that people
hallucinate the reality that they believe.
I knew the effect's 3D geometry
had to have the depth of field, lighting,
and believability of everything that we
shot. One of the things that CGI
suffers from is the curse of deliberation
- it suffers from being the creation of
a human hand. If you are going to have
a performance, I think it ought to be
one from an actor, not an animator.
"The show is full of incredibly insane
things," notes Slade. "If there isn't an
integrity to the actors' performances
that you can see, then it can very
quickly go over the top. It was about
containing that madness in a way that
had integrity."
So I was always looking for that
"life," and what we wanted to do with
the godflesh was to keep it photographic, to remove motion capture and
the animator's hand. We wanted it to
look almost as if it had been Xeroxed
out of the on-set actor's performance.
To realize this, we developed what we
called the "Sladar" array - named for
David Slade and lidar - for volumetric
capture.
The Sladar consisted of a horizontal arrangement of four or six
Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini 4.6K
cameras, which flanked a center Arri
Alexa at a prescribed distance derived
from my tests with Buf Compagnie.
The known geometry of the array
enabled the CGI artists to ingest our
American Cinematographer - September 2017

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