The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

True Blood’s costume designer, Audrey Fisher has been interviewed over at HBO about what it’s like to have to come up with awesome clothes and styles for the actors on the show.

Click on the image to read the article at HBO.com.

13 fangbangers like this post.

True Blood’s Costume designer, Audrey Fisher, talks below  that a lot goes into finding those dark and delicious stilettos and boots featured every Sunday night.

To outfit demure waitress Sookie (Anna Paquin) and her blood-sucking lover Bill (Stephen Moyer), as well as Louisiana’s vampire sheriff Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) and his fashionable progeny Pam (Kristin Bauer, at left), Fisher has staked out styles from Apepazza, Giuseppe Zanotti and just about every brand in between.

“I shop everywhere for our show, from Goodwill to Neiman Marcus,” Fisher said, ticking off Aldo, Bebe, Steve Madden, Pour La Victoire, Jeffrey Campbell, John Varvatos and Target as some of her favorite go-to brands.

“I use every resource available to me to get everyone shod well,” she said. And it looks like Fisher’s hard work has been recognized by the show’s writers.

“I became so obsessed with getting Pam the perfect hot shoe for her [ladylike] and vampy costumes that they started putting her fabulous footwear into the script, and her shoes started getting cameos.”

Who makes the show’s best-dressed list?
“The Queen (Evan Rachel Wood, at left) has a 1940s vibe, but she’s really quite a dominatrix. And happily, Wood adores beautiful, sky-high shoes, so I can really go nuts with her footwear. I put her in a gorgeous pair of DSquared heels with her white Norma Kamali swimsuit at the end of last season, and this season she rocked an even higher Bebe wooden platform sandal.”

The men aren’t too shabby either. Who tops that list?
“Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis). He wears a lot of fashiony Timberlands and really cool kicks that coordinate with his crazy outfits, [like a pair] of candy-apple, patent high-tops.”

How tough is it to find blood-friendly footwear?
“We usually have to get the shoes appropriately ‘rubbered’ so the actor has good traction. And, of course, we often have to get multiples of the shoes because if there’s blood involved we have to be ready with a backup.”

Read more at Insider

14 fangbangers like this post.

In Season 3 of True Blood, Sam Merlotte finds his family, the Mickens, and what a surprise he gets. Discovering that the Mickens, are using their son, Tommy, who is also a shifter, to fight in the ring at illegal dogfights was disturbing, to say the least.  

In the article below from Animals.change.org, the author also gives credit to the show for doing it right.

In theory, when a popular show decides to address an issue, it can help raise awareness. Or, it can end up diminishing — or even glorifying — the issue, and this is one show that’s not exactly known for taking the high road with violence. But here are 10 ways that True Blood got it right this time:

1. You meet the pit bull several episodes before fighting was brought up; he was just another dog who ended up being a victim of people he trusted. Marshall Allman, the actor who plays Tommy, said of his canine actor counterpart, “He’s totally sweet and like the nicest dog I’ve ever met.”
2. The dog fighters weren’t glorified characters a la Michael Vick, nor were they given any street cred for what they were doing. Sam and Tommy’s dad is an abusive alcoholic and all the other guys in the scene were just random small town men there to gamble and watch dogs fight. No one was famous or particularly charismatic.
3. The fights weren’t portrayed as lucrative. A lot of money can change hands at dog fights and focusing on the cash can add a kind of Poker World Tour attractiveness to the abuse.
4. It wasn’t about animal violence. HBO could’ve gone for the cheap thrill of animals attacking each other or the adrenaline at the scene. But they skipped most of that and focused on the human relationships and animals as victims.
5. The fight was hard to find and well-guarded — a good reminder that just because there aren’t many high profile cases hitting the news, it doesn’t mean fights aren’t happening.
6. There are a lot of ways to portray dog fighting on TV, but apparently facing off two pit bulls isn’t one of them. Allman said, “They weren’t allowed to have two pit bulls in the ring at the same time because of animal protection laws.” So, the presence of other breeds in the scene may not have been motivated by the producers’ desire to take the heat off pit bulls, but for the viewers, the end result was the same: This wasn’t about demonizing pit bulls.
7. Sam freed the dogs from their kennels and they all ran from the scene. None of them went after him or each other, which showed them as prisoners and victims, not wild animals who can’t be rehabilitated or are undeserving of a second chance at life.
8. When you first see the fighting pit, you see a dog — presumably the loser — getting shot, and its body unceremoniously dumped on a pile of other bodies. They could’ve shown some guy celebrating with his bloodied winner, but instead they showed how the dogs are expendable, not beloved pets.
9. By putting a shapeshifter in the ring, it raises the question: Would you do this to a human? Would you put your own child in this situation as the Mickens do?
10. Tommy and his mother’s relationship with their father, who is their handler in the pit, is a classic abusive relationship. Loyalty and guilt keep them with him, even though they get hurt. Now transfer that to their dog forms and, again, in puts dogfighting in a new light. Dog men often say that their dogs love to fight, that they wouldn’t go in the ring if they didn’t. But the shapeshifter angle highlights it as the result of an abusive relationship, not a real choice.

HBO deserves some credit here. Not only did they handle the actual dogfighting scenes well, but the way they introduced it through the human characters added some perspective to the cruelty of facing dogs off against each other. It will be interesting to see how Tommy, like former fighting dogs, goes through the process of learning to trust people again.

Source: Animals.change.org

28 fangbangers like this post.

We love learning about how True Blood is made and have reported about it before.  We have provided interviews with those involved in the making of the series such as Production Design by Suzuki Ingerslev, and Director Michael Lehmann. The article below by Steve Pond of DGA Quarterly further delves into the intricacies of the vampire series development and creation.

Beginning with Alan Ball’s vision there is now an ever increasing team working on the production to insure that it will continue to be quality television and remain the hit that it is today.

On a movie lot tucked away in a nondescript area of West Hollywood, the director of True Blood huddles with actor Alexander Skarsgård on the soundstage where a vampire bar called Fangtasia sits. At the same time, on an adjoining stage, the director of True Blood walks through a basement set with his production designer and AD, trying to decide if a set of shackles should hang from an overhead pipe or be secured to pillars. No, True Blood hasn’t found the secret to putting a director in two places at once. Instead, this is simply business as usual on the lot that’s home to the HBO series about vampires, shape-shifters and other assorted denizens of the night who make their homes in a fictional little Louisiana town called Bon Temps.

“Every year, the show gets progressively more complicated,” says the show’s executive producer, Alan Ball, who directed the first season’s pilot and finale episodes, but now delegates those duties to a relatively small group of directors. “You’re doing what is essentially a 60-minute movie with a lot of special effects, action sequences and storyboarding. The only way to do it in our schedule is to overlap, to schedule three different episodes at one time to best utilize locations and actors.”

Lesli Linka Glatter (center) with Brit Morgan (left) and Anna Paquin directed her first episode this season. Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

For much of its November to July production schedule, True Blood, which began its third season in June, works on a couple of episodes simultaneously: one director will shoot with his team while a different director works on another stage. The show employs two first ADs and two DPs who alternate episodes. “You keep the same DP and AD on your episode, but this crew is so good the rest of the people are pretty interchangeable,” says Michael Lehmann, whose eight episodes make him the most frequent True Blood director. “We share props and wardrobe, and with the script supervisors we try to make sure the actors are comfortable.”

Today, Scott Winant, a veteran of seven episodes, is directing a barroom scene for the season’s ninth episode, in which Skarsgård’s vampire character, Eric, is interrogated by a severe, black-clad female vampire. Meanwhile, Lehmann is taking a tour of his sets before he starts shooting episode 10 tomorrow. “We’re overlapping a lot,” says Winant. “This last episode, I think I’ve only done three days that haven’t been doubled up with another episode. Frankly, we’ve become dependent on the ADs’ ability to schedule, and to make sure we’re in the right place at the right time.”

The director is talking as he takes his lunch break; while he and his crew are eating, the actors walk across the lot for the table read for Lehmann’s episode. In addition to Lehmann and Winant, John Dahl and Daniel Minahan have also handled multiple episodes. This season, Lesli Linka Glatter and David Petrarca were hired to direct their first episodes; Ball says he expects to invite both back next season. So what does it take to be a good fit for the show? “I think you have to appreciate the sensibility,” says Ball. “It’s less about shots and more about characters. You have to be okay being efficient in a very laid-back atmosphere— people who need pressure and chaos don’t really work here.”

To read the rest of this article, please go to dgaquarterly.org

19 fangbangers like this post.

This season True Blood went to Mississippi to film and they used Longwood Plantation as the location for the King of Missisppi’s home which The Vault reported on last April.  The King, Russell Edgington, played by Denis O’Hare is a vampire antiques dealer, but we know that he’s got bigger plans and wants Bill Compton to help him attain his goals.

The show’s set designer, Suzuki Ingerslev found the location of Longwood when she decided to take a trip to Mississippi while shooting in Louisiana.

“My art director and I, Cat Smith, knew the next book series took place in Mississippi, so we wanted to see Mississippi before we built a set around it,” she said. “We had always heard Natchez was beautiful.”

Ingerslev toured the city’s historic homes and discovered Longwood.

“We were drawn to the grandeur, the timeless elegance and the unusually octagonal architecture,” she said. “As far as we could see, Longwood was the most unique antebellum home we’d ever seen.”

“There’s something about the land that surrounds Longwood that made it a little foreboding, but at the same time, it was absolutely lovely. It had to be the king’s house.”

Read the rest of this article by going to The Clarionledger.com

10 fangbangers like this post.

During this week hiatus of True Blood, in order to keep us all interested while we waited for the next episode, EW.com asked the show’s production designer, Suzuki Ingerslev, to answer some fan questions and to talk about the inspiration for some of the sets (and their hidden gems).

I was fascinated from beginning to end while reading this interview as it answered many questions I had about certain things you see on the True Blood sets.  For example, I have noticed that Jason always seems to have order-in pizza at his house and I’ve always wondered why we haven’t yet seen Lafayette’s bedroom. These and other interesting trivia is revealed in this very interesting and informative interview.  We have taken a few pieces for you to read below:

Welcome to the King of Mississippi's house. The house has 99 hand-carved Corinthian columns.

The King of Mississippi’s Mansion: Ingerslev and her art director took a little side trip to Natchez, Mississippi last year, and found Longwood, a National Historic Landmark and the largest remaining octagonal home in the U.S., which she was told had never been filmed before for TV or features. “The interior was never completed. After the Civil War, they walked away from it,” she says. “But we just needed it for the exterior, because there’s nothing like it in the whole world. So we convinced our producers, begged and begged, and they let us go down there and shoot it.” As for the interiors, they were created from scratch after studying the furniture, chandeliers, and wallpapers in plantation homes. “The wallpaper in the King’s dining room is completely Mississippi wallpaper,” she says. “It’s got the river, it’s got Spanish moss and alligators. It’s really amazing that we found that in a wallpaper book.” Click here to read more about the Longwood mansion in our previous article written by special reporter for The Vault Lisafemmeacadienne .

When it came time to acquire Bill’s much-storied bed, Ingerslev admits she felt some pressure to find one that would live up to those expectations. ”That kind of a bed is probably $20-, $30-, $40-, $50,000. Our producers wouldn’t have liked that,” she says. They settled on a rental from Warner Bros., which was probably used in a lot of old studio films. Another decision that required some thought: How to decorate the table. “At first, we were like, ‘Let’s get all this great silver,’ and then we realized we couldn’t use silverware in there because vampires can’t touch silver. So we ended up going with a gold flatware. We used a lot of glass displays and crystal. Waterford was kind enough to loan us some pieces because apparently, they’re fans of the show.”

Lou Pine’s: The wolf-related signage in the bar — e.g. Howl and Red Wolf beer — is an obvious homage to what lies beneath in its werewolf patrons, but for a more subtle clue, check out the table lights. When they couldn’t find any they liked, the prop master got an idea: “They look like normal lights, but they’re actually silver doggie bowls and cheap plastic domes,” Ingerslev says.

Lafayette’s home: “Basically, we started with a leopard carpet and some foiled wallpapers that we found in an in-stock book here in the office. It’s not often that you get to combine those two anymore,” she says. “Also, there was a book called Bachelor Pads that we used as a resource.” They wanted to incorporate religion into Lafayette’s life. “He’s not just a one deity man, he goes to different deities, so we represented all of them,” he says. His home is a location right now, but eventually, if they get to build that set, we may finally get to see his bedroom in all its glory. ”You only see little glimpses of it. We have a feather boa in there, and some kind of crazy art, more foiled wallpaper. We would love to go to town on that. His little boudoir. That would be a fun one.”

Sookie’s house: The heart of the set, in more ways than one. Two readers asked how Sookie managed to clean up the blood that’s been spilled there with a mop. “My theory is that Bill should be helping her because if he can do everything at vampire speed, he’d have everything cleaned up in like half an hour, right? The blood, luckily, has landed basically on the wooden floors, and I do believe you could clean that up. One of the recent episodes, she’s scrubbing the carpet with the blood, and I don’t know how well that’s gonna come out,” she admits, chuckling. “But it’s true with all our things. We spent a lot of time on the pilot. The house was so delicate and beautiful and represented grandma. And then you get into the series, and everything’s about destroying, and fighting, and impaling people. and imploding. And it’s like, Ohmygod, this is one of a kind furniture. Grandma’s house is still in a state of disrepair after Maryann was there. It used to be so cute and quaint. We’ve actually had people visit the set and cry in there and say it reminded them of their of grandparents’ house, and now it’s like this mud and mess. I hate it. I’m sick of it,” she continues. “When we first did it, our construction guy Mike Wells’ mother-in-law passed away, and her daughter donated a lot of her dishes and crotchet items like little pill bottle tops, and Kleenex box and toilet paper covers, and all that stuff. Everybody in the crew has donated stuff, so it feels like everybody’s family has something in there. Lois Smith [who played Gran] has pictures in there of when she was younger. Even Alan Ball has pictures of his family in there. You walk in there, and it does have that homey feeling, and I understand why people maybe cried or it feels like a time gone by.”

To read the rest of this fascinating glimpse of the inspiration behind the True Blood sets, click here.

17 fangbangers like this post.

With the premiere of the third season of the show just beginning, Fancast.com asked Audrey Fisher, True Blood’s Costumer, who is also a seasoned stage, film, and television costumer, to give them her take on which pieces she can’t imagine each character living without. And although Goodwill and Wal-Mart are often her outfitting go-to’s for her work on the show, she offered up a vision for where each fictional character would shop in real life.

SOOKIE STACKHOUSE | Anna Paquin
What She Can’t Live Without: Her tank tops. And bikinis.
Where She Shops: Sookie shops at Walmart and Target. She likes to pick up a cute pair of shorts, and some socks, maybe a bra. She’s just very real. And she also probably likes the local dress shop because she likes to support her friend’s cousin’s sister’s dress shop. That’s also in the books.

LAFAYETTE REYNOLDS | Nelsan Ellis

What He Can’t Live Without: The do-rag. That’s a whole vocabulary! Nelsan has a lot of ideas because he has a lot of women in the family and there’s a lot of do-rag action [laughs] – so he brings a lot of amazing ideas about how he wants to wear it – either from his mom, his sister, or his aunt.
Where He Shops: Lafayette would just shop at Fashion Bug. He would go the girliest, trashiest stores and find something, like some tank top, and wear it backwards, or put it on his head. There’s a shop that I go to called Fashion Time – literally – that I love, and it’s basically Lafayette. He would go downtown, where all the knockoffs are, the fake Chanel, the fake Fendi, and he would shop there and make his own stuff and cut it up.

PAM | Kristin Bauer
What She Can’t Live Without: Her beautiful shoes. She can’t live without a good pair of heels.
Where She Shops: Pam is a very high end lady. She shops of Neiman Marcus, because she likes the personal attention. She probably has personal shoppers across the country.

ERIC NORTMAM | Alexander Skarsgard
What He Can’t Live Without: His tracksuit – his after hours tracksuit.
Where He Shops: He likes high end fashion. He has very avant garde taste. But he also likes a sexy simple uniform. That’s a tough call.

BILL COMPTON | Stephen Moyer
What He Can’t Live Without: I would say that Bill can’t live without his Henley, but I feel like we’ve moved to a different territory with Bill this season. Bill can’t live without high quality menswear, like he really enjoys a beautiful shirt.

Where He Shops: Bill is more a man of the people. In the books, he shops at Dillard’s but Dillard’s is like Macy’s, so not too exclusive but definitely not Sears.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

12 fangbangers like this post.

In season 3, as you all saw in Episode 1 last night, real wolves are being used to portray the werewolves in the True Blood world and in the video below we see that, and how they are incorporated into the scenes.

Since Stephen loves dogs, I’m sure he enjoyed meeting these powerful, but beautiful creatures. We also see Alan Ball and director Dan Minehan talk about how glad they were to be using real wolves instead of their special effects counterparts.

22 fangbangers like this post.

Jaimie Trueblood/Courtesy of HBO

Alan Ball is in the dungeon underneath Fangtasia, the vampire-owned strip club on HBO’s True Blood, and it’s as cold and creepy as it looks on TV. It’s the place where the bad vampires chain and shackle humans they can torture, then exsanguinate; in one scene last year, a townie named Royce was ripped to shreds, literally. Ball is unsuccessfully trying to turn on the lights, but instead feels his way to a corner to study a mysterious piece of machinery—what looks like an antique boiler. “I’ve never seen this here before,” says Ball excitedly. “It’s gnarly. I’ve got to figure out how to use it.”

Whatever he decides to do, it won’t end well. Few auteurs are as comfortable with death and darkness as Ball, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for American Beauty; whose first series for HBO, Six Feet Under, was about a family of morticians; and whose current show fetishizes the undead. “After Six Feet Under ended, I wanted a change,” he says, “and True Blood seemed so fun and bright.”

Perhaps he means bright as in quick-witted. True Blood, which begins its third season June 13, is set mostly at night; the action, design, and even the acting are steeped in an unrelenting (albeit often mordantly comic) murk. Most sets are located in West Hollywood; the exteriors are shot in Mississippi and Louisiana, where the show takes place, in the fictional town of Bon Temps.

Read the rest of this wonderful article on NYMag.com and read more about the True Blood set design right here on The Vault.

15 fangbangers like this post.

The Wallstreet Journal published a very interesting article about the wolves on the True Blood set.

Producers on the HBO vampire series “True Blood” were in a race to finish several scenes last month. But their deadline wasn’t about budgets or air dates. They needed to wrap the episodes before the wolves shed their winter coats.

“We had to work on their timeline,” says executive producer Gregg Fienberg. A lighter summer coat would make the 120-pound gray wolves, cast in werewolf roles, look smaller and less menacing. “We can’t suddenly have wolves that look different.”

Television producers are used to working with high-maintenance stars. But the popularity of the vampire genre, which all of a sudden has embraced werewolves, has some productions learning to deal with wolf actors. Big-budget movies can afford to craft expensive computer-generated werewolves, but TV, with its smaller budgets, must often rely on the real thing.

Every few seconds of screen time for the growling giant werewolves in the coming movie “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” took a team of as many as six visual-effects experts up to six weeks to create. The cost of live wolves varies, but they typically rent for under $500 a day, plus the cost of trainers. Since the animals prefer to travel in packs, six or seven additional wolves may accompany a wolf actor, but producers don’t have to pay for the rest of the entourage.

“Deadwood,” a Western series on HBO, used live wolves. Animal Planet recently aired “Living with the Wolfman,” a reality series about an English couple that lives with a pack of wolves.

Thunder, a golden timber wolf with deep amber eyes, landed a role as a werewolf on the third season of “True Blood,” along with seven other wolves. HBO’s series, which returns June 13, follows vampires, werewolves and humans who coexist in the fictional town of Bon Temps, La.

Read the rest of the article here.

Photo HBO

24 fangbangers like this post.