As was reported here earlier today from postings made on Twitter, True Blood was filming in Los Angeles at the Trainon.
Here are more photos showing Anna Paquin on the set.
Seeing these new pictures of Anna Paquin filming a scene for the HBO hit at the Trianon Apartments in Hollywood, California today truly help to feed our True Blood obsession. Anna was rockin’ a short denim mini skirt, a lace tank top with a cami below, and some trendy sunglasses.
Reported on Twitter by JimHegarty and LafayetteTB about True Blood Season 3 shooting at the Trianon in Los Angeles.
To quote JimHegarty: “The vampire craze has literally landed on my doorstep. And taken my parking. Oh, for the record, I don’t care about True Blood filming on my street. I have a job/other things to do. The joke was the important part.”
The Trianon is this apartment building in LA.
And here are some more tweets from LafayetteTB on Twitter about the crew at the building with pics.
True Blood filming – smoke machines
Here’s the crew in front of the building and filming set up. “Atmospheric smoke effects” sounds more like fog to me. They also say they will have interior and exterior dialogue.
Kevin Alejandro attended the 14th annual Art Directors Guild Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 13, 2010 in Beverly Hills, California. Kevin will be playing Jesus Velasquez and Lafayette’s new love interest on the show in the upcoming season 3.
The Art Directors Guild awards celebrate the accomplishments of production designers and art directors in film and television.
The nominations for 2009 included our favorite show, True Blood! Production designer on the show, Suzuki Ingerslev was up for an award in the Single Camera Television Series, for the episode entitled, “Never Let Me Go”.
Sadly, True Blood lost out again to Mad Men, “Souvenier”.
True Blood’s second season showed us an interesting variety of sets. The most sinister of them all is without a doubt the eerie Fangtasia dungeon where Eric locks up his human prisoners.
I asked True Blood Production Designer Suzuki Ingerslev, about this set that she designed. “It was definitely the writers who inspired the design of the Fangtasia basement with their grisly depiction of what they called the “Saw” room”, Suzuki answered.
The writer of the episode Alexander Woo explains how they came up with the idea of the dungeon: “Since we decided that Lafayette was going to survive into season two, we obviously needed to address where he had been during the two weeks after his abduction. Alan Ball came up with the idea of having him in a sort of horror-movie room where he would be suffering the consequences of dealing vampire blood. From there it was a matter of coming up with the bleakest, darkest place we could imagine. Suzuki Ingerslev and our Art Director Cat Smith were the ones who brought it to life.”
According to Woo the dungeon he created represents “the secrets that all of us prefer to keep hidden and buried. The vampires in our world have come out of the coffin, but that room is a concrete representation of the darker side of vampire-human relations.”
Suzuki explains how the oppressing atmosphere of the Fangtasia basement was created on set: “Ordinarily it would have been any kind of basement or storage room but in the hands of Eric it became a grisly prison where the worst kind of atrocity is practiced. It was built entirely on stage. All the blood, rust, gore and decrepitude were created by our fantastic painters and plasterers. The wheel itself was built by our prop makers and is actually all made out of wood to look like metal. The wheel was dreamed up by Alexander Woo, as a device Eric rigged to torture people. It is a complete view into his utter lack of compassion. “
The significance and purpose of the wheel to which the prisoners are chained were discussed and speculated upon to great length on the True Blood message boards. Sometimes we try so hard to see symbolism in every scene that we overlook the obvious and simple explanation. Alexander Woo explains that the purpose of the wheel is surprisingly connected to one of the primary human bodily functions.
“I thought it would be funny to find a very complicated solution to a very simple problem, namely how do you let the prisoners go to the bathroom while still keeping them far enough apart so they don’t kill each other? I suppose you could chain them all to the wall and give everyone their own bucket, but that’s a lot of buckets to empty. Why not have a single bucket that only one prisoner can reach at a time? That’s where the idea for the wheel began. I also thought it was funny that any time one prisoner needed to use the bucket, it would inconvenience everyone else. In the end, the wheel became a great visual representation of the hopelessness of everyone’s fate in the dungeon, but it all started as a way for the prisoners to use the toilet.”
In the show it was Eric who came up with both the concept of the vampire bar Fangtasia and the torture dungeon that lies beneath it. What does this tell us about Eric’s character according to Woo?
“Eric has no insecurities about who he is. He understands that there’s a side to vampires that would make humans very uncomfortable, so he’s shrewd in keeping that side hidden away. The upstairs of Fangtasia is Eric’s public face. The downstairs is the darker side that humans don’t need to know about – unless they’ve crossed him. I think the bar and the dungeon are both equally Fangtasia, just as the roles of club owner and vampire sheriff are both equally Eric.”
The True Blood vampires obviously all have a very dark side to them, but so do many human inhabitants of Bon Temps. The dungeon shows us the cruelty of vampire nature, I asked Alex Woo if this is really so different from the cruelty Eddie suffered in Jason’s basement?
Woo: “You’re right – they’re very much the same. Jason’s basement in season one was a place for two of our humans to indulge their savage side, much to Jason’s disgust, eventually. The Fangtasia dungeon was one of our first glimpses into the parallel underside in the vampire world. Basements are never pretty, are they?”
Finally I asked if he thinks that humans and vampires will ever be able to live in a somewhat peaceful coexistence.
“Probably not for the life of the show. What fun would it be to watch then?” answers Woo. And I think we can all agree with that. Keep the drama coming!
Photos courtesy of Suzuki Ingerslev.
Video property of HBO.
The new media has enriched the fandom experience immensely and Twitter and Facebook play a very important role in diffusing information about our favorite vampire show. Several True Blood actors are present on Twitter and occasionally they give us little tidbits about what’s happening on the set.
New werewolf hottie Joe Manganiello tweeted about how excited he was about his first table read and his costume fitting.
Wardrobe seems to be very important because also Andy Mackenzie, who plays a creepy biker werewolf, tweeted that he was going to the costume fitting and he wondered what they would fit him in. He doesn’t have to worry about choosing matching outfits with Manganiello because they won’t be sharing any screen time together, but they did meet at the episode 3 table read. Kristin Bauer (Pam) was also present and discussed her bad eyes with Andy who apparently also has some issues in that department.
Andy is the son of Will Mackenzie, actor and director of shows like Scrubs, Dharma & Greg, Everybody loves Raymond and Newhart of which he directed 24 episodes in the years 1982-1984. Andy mentions that he practically grew up on those sets and he reminisced about the series with William Sanderson (Sherrif Dearborn) who portrayed the character Larry on Newart for 8 years.
From his tweets we understand that Andy’s werewolf character does have interaction with vampire Eric. He mentions that he rehearsed a stunt scene with Alexander Skarsgard yesterday where he was “lunging at Eric and ultimately cause true bloodshed”.
He mentions that he was fully clothed during rehearsal but that “tomorrow is another story”. Makes me wonder what will happen on the set today… Andy did mention in a last week’s tweet that he was was getting intimate with Alexander this week…. Now let’s not all jump to the conclusion of erotic man on man action, but as Bill and Sam seems to be heading in that direction, it wouldn’t surprise me if also Eric had a little taste of that.
Andy’s latest tweet that came in only minutes ago says: “Sittin’ in the makeup trailer w/Alex & Anna. A little early for dirt, blood, scars, sweat, fangs, bullets..oh & nudity..”
Below a few photos Andy has put out on the Internet that represent the set from episode 3 shooting including a photo of him and his True Blood chair.
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True Blood actors present on Twitter
Andy Mackenzie
Joe Manganiello
Michael McMillian
Kristin Bauer
Allan Hyde
Mehcad Brooks
Ashley Jones
Tara Buck
Finding the right actor for a part, is not an easy job. Success is a result of skilled observations, grueling searches and just plain luck. In casting Stephen Moyer as vampire Bill Compton the True Blood casting directors Libby Goldstein and Junie Lowry-Johnson searched for “an old soul with modern qualities”.
“It was tricky,” says Lowry-Johnson. “We had to find someone in his 30s that you believed was 150 years old, and Steve had that quietness, that stillness, an older quality. You could believe that he had been alive for 150 years that he had lived many lives. The fact that he’s British may have helped. Americans seem very modern.”
Goldstein and Lowry-Johnson won the Emmy “Outstanding Casting For a Drama Series” last year for their casting on True Blood.
Suzuki Ingerslev
True Blood’s production designer Suzuki Ingerslev has been nominated by the Art Directors Guild for Excellence in Production Design Award single-camera series for the episode “Never Let Me Go”.
The other nominees are Mark Hutman for the pilot of “Glee,” Dan Bishop for the “Souvenir” episode of “Mad Men,” Michael Wylie for the “Kerplunk” installment of “Pushing Daisies,” and Mark Worthington for the “There’s No Place Like Mode” installment of “Ugly Betty.”
Winners will be announced at a gala ceremony on Feb. 13 at the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
The writers of True Blood sit down with fans at the Los Angeles Paley Center to answer questions.
True Blood Writers Alan Ball, Nancy Oliver, Raelle Tucker, Alexander Woo, and Brian Buckner talked about how to write for a series in live discussion at the Paley Center in Los Angeles.
Here are two clips that explore True Blood’s technical work first shown on The Science Channel show, “Science Of The Movies”.
Part 1 – Behind the Scenes – True Blood we see how they devised the look for the death of Long Shadow. And, as we posted, in pictures, back in September we are now able to see how the effect of the sun burning Bill was created during his attempt to save Sookie.
Part 2 – Behind the Scenes – True Blood we finally get to see just how the fangs are done via CGI so that they click out on the vampires.
Production Designer Suzuki Ingerslev is responsabile for the look of the True Blood sets. Previously we published our interviews with Suzuki about the Queen’s dayroom, Hotel Carmilla and Maryann’s house.
All very elegant sets. But there were also sets in season 2 that looked like a bomb exploded…. and in one case a bomb did explode.
Suzuki tells us about the choices she made for Godric’s lair. “It was modern with many relics and artifacts from various cultures. The primitive sculptures served to remind Godric of his evolution, of all the places he had been and all the things he had witnessed during his “life”. Most of the paintings were commissioned from artists specifically for the set. We wanted paintings that would be atmospheric and modern. The art in a set should never compete with the overall design (unless intended) but should also maintain a clear viewpoint or voice. We also knew that we would be destroying it, so that enforced our decision to create it as well.”
Not knowing anything about set design I asked Suzuki if the same set was used before and after the bombing or if a different set was created to serve as disaster zone. “No, the original set was destroyed for the explosion”, she explains. “It is hard sometimes to see a set destroyed after you put so much love and attention into making it perfect but ultimately they are all temporary. The crew was just as upset as we were when it got destroyed. Everyone had their favorite pieces that they were hoping to take home.”
Destroying a set is not done randomly as Suzuki explains: “We always start with extensive research to get an image of what it would look like in reality, then we just let our painters and carpenters go wild and really mess it up. They do have fun with that.”
Gran always took great pride in her home and she would have been so sad to see what had happened to it under Maryann’s influence.
“In keeping with the pagan nature of Maryann the writers decided it would be interesting to bring the outside in and the inside out”, says Suzuki about what Maryann did to Sookie’s house. “I liked how it turned out with the art and artifacts looking out of place amidst the mud and branches. Once we started filming, it turned out that we had to put the dirt in, then clean it up, and then put it back in again. It was really messy.”
A very important element in this set was the meat tree. “We used real meat and lots of it!!! It had to be replaced every other day because it would start smelling and decomposing. Our crew affectionately called him “ Demetri” as in “De Meat Tree””
Photos courtesy of Suzuki Ingerslev
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