American Cinematographer - September 2017 - 36

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Standout Sequences

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n Neil Gaiman's writing, there's
something that is just so unexpected,
and so unlikely to happen in reality, that
all through the series we were improvising and going off road. As co-cinematographer Darran Tiernan, ISC
notes, "The creative tone was always,
'Push it, push it, push it.'"
Given how consistently American
Gods pushed the boundaries of the
crew's collective creativity, it can be a tall
order to single out just one or two
"favorite" scenes from the course of the
first
season's
eight
episodes.
Nevertheless, I asked my colleagues to
do just that.
"I loved Salim's prayer at the side
of the road," says co-cinematographer
Aaron Morton, NZCS, referring to a
sunrise scene in Episode 6, "A Murder
of Gods," featuring actor Omid Abtahi
as Salim. "You shouldn't notice the
planning or the technique involved in it,
because it's quite a heartfelt and
poignant scene in the episode and the
story. I like it because it's completely
fake, but it feels 100-percent real. It was
an opportunity to use craft and technique to create a situation that we
couldn't otherwise have done. It would
have been very difficult to shoot that
scene in reality."
"Nobody watching that scene is
going to know that was a road that was
built on a stage surrounded by 270degrees of bluescreen," adds 2nd-unit
cinematographer Marc Laliberté Else.
"Everyone will just try to figure out how
they shot that entire scene at sunrise.
They won't know that it was all shot on
a soundstage, with a Lightcraft
Technology Previzion system from
Stargate Studios that lets us see comps
as we line up our cameras. The comps
are seamlessly integrated, and the scene
looks amazing, with beautiful photography."
It was a scene that had to be realized with visual effects. I wouldn't have
wanted to try to shoot that much coverage on location, for that long of a scene,
just as the sun crests the horizon.

September 2017

Mr. Nancy (Orlando Jones) prepares gentlemen's attire for Wednesday and Shadow.

Weather conditions notwithstanding, it
would have required multiple days at
the location simply due to the extraordinarily narrow shooting window.
The Previzion system helped
immensely. The guide comps it
produced told Stargate exactly how
everything needed to go together. We
had motion-tracking data recorded
along with the footage, so panning or
tilting the camera didn't have to be
reverse-engineered.
"That's something I really like
about my job," says Morton. "Sleight of
hand, smoke and mirrors -
[employed] to service the storytelling."
Here are a few other favorite
scenes and sequences from the production.
Jo Willems, ASC, SBC: There
were a couple of scenes that I really
enjoyed doing. The hardest was with
Bilquis [Yetide Badaki] in the red
bedroom [seen in Episodes 1 and 2,
'The Bone Orchard' and 'The Secret of
Spoons'] - red is always a difficult
color. When I first walked onto the set,
it wasn't lit, nothing was up. It was this
deep-burgundy room, and there were
no windows; there was one side of the
wall that had a hole in it where there
were supposed to be curtains. We knew
we were going to do this super-lowangle shot, so we needed a ceiling -
and there was no space anywhere to put
lights. [Director] David Slade had this

American Cinematographer

idea of a 'breathing' light, where the
candle flame becomes a metaphor; the
light moves with the character, and as
the scene goes on, it becomes more
excited along with Bilquis. I just went
for an abstract idea. I couldn't really do
anything wrong - it's a complete
fantasy world, so you have a lot of
leeway to make it what you want it to
be.
Darran Tiernan, ISC: I really
love the Bilquis disco sequence [in
Episode 8, "Come to Jesus"]. [Director]
Floria Sigismondi asked, 'Could we get
star filters?' And I said, 'Star filters on
anamorphic lenses? Why not?' It
worked really well. It's a heavy visual
because now Bilquis is in Tehran and
it's 1979; the scene that comes right
after the disco was the interior of the
airplane, where you almost couldn't
breathe.
The 'hill of skulls' [in the same
episode] is a beautiful sequence that
was so much fun to shoot. It turned
into one of those scenes that became an
exploration even in post. We had ideas
about what it was going to be, but then
there were little happy accidents. One
day the visual-effects house dropped a
temp red sky into one of the shots, and
[showrunner] Bryan Fuller looked at it
and asked, 'Can we make all the skies
red? Can we make the whole scene
red?' It grew out of a happy accident
from an artist temp-comping something arbitrary one day.

American Cinematographer - September 2017

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