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”.

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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.

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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.

Read the specials and interviews we did with Suzuki.

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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.

Godric’s lair, a beautiful composed set was sadly destroyed by a suicide bomber.

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.”

The next scene of destruction is Sookie’s house.

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
© The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

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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 and Hotel Carmilla. In this  article we show you Maryann’s house.

A very elegant and luxurious set is Maryann’s house, or the house with the red door that we thought was Maryann’s in the first few episodes of the second season.

This beautiful house with large garden and pool is an exciting house and is located in Chapman Woods, CA. The house was used to shoot the inside scenes as well as the external scenes in the garden and at the pool. Suzuki explains that they did have to change a few things in the garden. “We actually did a lot to change the mood and dressed the patio with furniture, drapery, many plants, flowers and fruits galore.“

The mural of Pan and his human lover was not part of the original property. “It was based on a relief sculpture Alan Ball found from the Roman Empire. We took liberties to make the female figure resemble Maryann a bit more and amped up the already lusty Pan.”

The female statue that is shown in the first episode of Season 2 and triggers Sam’s memory, is a replica of “The Bird Lady” figurines that are part of the Egyptian collection of The Brooklyn Museum.

The script called for “a primitive piece of art; like a dancing girl” to be placed on the character Maryann’s coffee table. Suzuki and Cat Smith, Art Director, went on Google to look for images that fit these requirements, hoping to find something that inspired them. They looked at many different types of ancient images including Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Minoan examples. And they came across the Bird Lady.
Suzuki says: ““We liked the dancing posture of this statue and thought it represented the character of Maryann perfectly. We commissioned a local artist to sculpt multiple copies, which we then aged with paint.”

Read more about the Bird Lady

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In the first part of our series about the True Blood season 2 sets, Production Designer Suzuki Ingerslev, revealed the story behind the Queen’s day room. In this article Suzuki tells us about other elegant True Blood set: Hotel Carmilla.

The set of the elegant vampire hotel “Hotel Carmilla” in Dallas has a very modern look, nothing like what we traditionally would expect from a vampire hotel. The rooms are decorated in light and dark colors, a lot of white and black combined with red and purple.

Suzuki explains why this look for the hotel was chosen. “It was meant to be an upscale, luxurious resort for vampires. It needed an international and sophisticated appeal. The colors reflect a dark world, a life lived in night, obviously representing the myth of the vampire, but the hotel also has human visitors who would be seduced by the brooding color scheme.”

Part of the scenes for Hotel Carmilla were filmed in April of this year in the Los Angeles Sofitel Hotel. Shooting took two separate days and a total of 18 hours one day and 24 hours the following week.

“The front lobby was used, as well as the lounge”, says Suzuki.

“We mainly encountered time restrictions, having to work with the hotel to maintain their guests’ comfort. It was somewhat of a challenge masking so many mirrors and reflective surfaces for our camera crew without simply covering them all up.

The large metal piece of art we see in the lobby scenes is not a prop. “It belongs to the hotel. Another lucky break because the cost to commission an original artwork of that caliber would’ve been very expensive. We had to ask permission from the Sofitel, however, in order to show it on camera, and if they had said no we would’ve had to build something, an obelisk for example, to go over it.”

Photos courtesy of Suzuki Ingerslev

In Hotel Carmilla we see the corridor and several different rooms. The suite where Bill and Sookie stay, their bedroom, Jessica’s room and Jason’s room. The hotel rooms are very similar, but it is not the same room that was just for all the sets.

“We built the main suite for Bill and Sookie, and an attached suite for Jessica, The room Eric was a redress of Bill and Sookie’s suite. Jason stayed in Jessica’s suite. When you entered this set on stage it really felt like you were in a hotel, complete with key card locks, fully stocked True Blood mini bar, and roll down lightproof shutters. We also built the corridors outside the rooms.”

© The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com

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True Blood’s second season featured several new sets: The FOTS church, Hotel Carmilla, Godric’s Lair, Maryann’s house, the dungeon and my personal favorite the queen’s residence. The creative force behind all these amazing sets is Suzuki Ingerslev, True Blood’s Production Designer.

Suzuki Ingerslev

Suzuki previously worked on Six Feet Under, Shark and In Treatment; she received six Primetime Emmy Award nominations and an Art Directors Guild Award nomination for her outstanding work.

I was very curious to know more about the True Blood Season 2 sets and Suzuki graciously answered my questions about how she created the sets.

In this first article Suzuki tells us about Queen Sophie-Anne’s dayroom.

Suzuki: “I start designing the sets by reading the script and getting a good understanding for who the character is, and if there is something important, we need to convey about their lives. I will work with the writers, producers and directors and pitch ideas and we will come together on a final concept. It is always good to have everyone on the same page, and that way there are no surprises on the day of shooting. As expensive as building scenery can be, and the short timeline of television production, you don’t want anyone walking into a set and saying that it was not what they expected. I also try and do some illustrations and presentation boards to show everyone the style, colors and sometimes furniture.”

As Production Designer Suzuki and her team have quite a lot of liberty in designing and creating the sets.

Suzuki: “I do have a lot of liberty when designing sets. I usually have a general idea from the script, but I am definitely expected to embellish and enhance those concepts. I usually do a lot of research to come up with interesting ideas, and then I pitch them to everyone. Once an idea has been approved, I work with my departments to get the set construction started, and we make sure that it not only looks great, but that it functions well for the crew, the camera and the action that is taking place in it. I will then work with my decorator and come up with an idea for what the furnishings will be needed, and they will go out and see what is available to rent or purchase.”

What can you tell us about the exterior of Queen Sophie-Anne’s residence?

Suzuki: “The Queen’s house is an existing location in Malibu, California, and it was definitely one of those locations that you knew was right from the minute you saw it. The pool house has a nostalgic feel to it, while at the same time seems timeless. We really wanted a space that we could turn into a dayroom and still have it feel glamorous and elegant, befitting of a Queen.

What we did was create dioramas in each window, so that the dayroom looked like it had views to the ocean. Since vampires could not be out in the day, we figured these dioramas represented everything the Queen missed about not being mortal, such as the sun and sea. It was tricky, we wanted the dioramas to appear somewhat surreal looking so that the audience understood that the Queen had created this dayroom, but on the other hand, we didn’t want the audience to think that we built this set on stage and we put some cheesy backdrops outside the windows.
It was funny; the crew arrived at this beautiful location, and was shocked to see that we had covered up all the real views of the ocean, only to have substituted them for our painted dioramas and fake seagulls. Over all I think it worked out well, and the dioramas had an elegant, Natural History museum feel to them, and not a cheap television vibe.
The water element was there as well, and we loved the visual interest it created, so we embraced it and featured it in our establishing shots of the building. It is unique and creates a romantic feel to the neoclassical architecture.”

Is that a greenhouse in the background next to the house?

Suzuki: “Yes, there is a greenhouse in the background and it is a part of the existing property. We chose to feature it as oppose to hiding it. Who knows, perhaps the Queen has a love of Orchids and she collects them in her greenhouse. It is very feasible that this character would have a greenhouse on her estate, and it is wonderful to add some depth and beauty to our establishing shot by choosing to light it up in the background.”

The interior of the dayroom is simply breathtaking. The amount of details is amazing. The entrance and the room are designed in a nature style that reminds me of Art Deco.

Suzuki: “What drew us to this location was exactly what you just mentioned. It does have an art deco/ nature feel to it, and the room is definitely one of a kind, with extraordinary detailing. After all the location scouting I have done over the years, in my opinion, nothing even comes close to the amount of detail that went into this pool house. We all just stood there and took the room in the first time we went there, and pictures don’t even begin to do it justice. The Statues, chandeliers, chair rail and ceilings are all made out of a variety of various sizes of seashells and corals. It is astounding, and we could never accomplish this on our budget, and time frame. It is truly breathtaking and exquisite.

I just went along with the existing architecture and oceanic feel. We wanted to just embellish on it and not detract from it.

The decorations in the entry were hand painted by an artist as per the owner. Apparently, he designed a lot of the pool house himself.

The floor is real marble, and since it was already there we had the benefit of shooting it. The owner’s budget is apparently a lot larger than our shows budget [laughs].

The furniture that we used was also the owners; we just replaced the cushions. The chairs and benches were exquisitely made out of wood with mother of pearl inlay. Again, something we could not afford on our budget. We had to be extremely careful with this furniture, and we chose to replace the cushions and add our own fabric, as well as protect the owners’ cushions from getting make up on them. The sculptures and chandeliers were created exclusively for the existing pool house by the owner; however, we did hire an artist to create large planters for the kentia palms we added in the room. She glued on miniature white sea shells to all the pots. We felt that the addition of plants to this room not only softened it, but also added to the exoticness. They also helped us cover up many reflective surfaces that are not helpful to the shooting crew.”

How long did it take to complete this set? How many people do you have in your team working on the sets?

Suzuki: “This set took us a couple of weeks to get organized. Building the dioramas was the biggest part of our job, and we had to make sure they fit into the existing openings seamlessly.  Also, we had to make them flexible by having them roll away so that the crew could access each doorway. On such a high-end location, our department has to be extremely careful not to do any damage, but yet we still have to incorporate our changes and ideas into the space. I have a large crew, from construction, paint and plaster, to decorators and art director. A lot of work goes into each and every set, and sometimes a location is more difficult to do than building a set.”

I noticed the queen’s gold powder box and the 1920’s Vogue that she picks up. Are those authentic props?

Suzuki: “The powder box was a request from the actress [Evan Rachel Wood]; she wanted to have something to do while she is speaking with vampire Bill. Our prop department went out and found some authentic vanity boxes/compacts, and this one was unanimously chosen. It did add a flare of elegance. The Vogue magazines were all authentic as well. They were purchased on EBay and we had to get permission to use them from the magazine, well worth it.”

And how does Suzuki think the Queen decorated the other rooms in her residence?

Suzuki: “I think the Queen would continue with the 1920’s feel, it is who she is, a timeless, elegant beauty, who appreciated the past. Of course, it would always have a hint of the modern as well.”

Stay tuned for more True Blood Season 2 set secrets…

Photo credit: HBO
© The Vault – TrueBlood-Online.com
Reproduction is not allowed.

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A couple of days ago we reported that Maryann’s female statue that is shown in the first episode of Season 2 and triggers Sam’s memory, is a replica of “The Bird Lady” figurines that are part of the Egyptian collection of The Brooklyn Museum.

The museum was thrilled to discover this and asked HBO how their statue ended up on True Blood. Production designer Suzuki Ingerslev answered their questions.

How True Blood found the “Bird Lady”

The script for Episode 1 of Season 2 called for “a primitive piece of art; like a dancing girl” to be placed on the character Maryann’s coffee table. Suzuki and Cat Smith, Art Director, went to Google to look for images that fit these requirements, hoping to find something that inspired them. They looked at many different types of ancient images including Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Minoan examples. Entering search terms something like “Egyptian female statues,” they came across our very own “Bird Lady.” They printed out a selection of appropriate images and presented them to Alan Ball, the show’s creator.

He was immediately drawn to the “Bird Lady,” seeing something so elegant, beautiful and perfect in her form that she became the obvious choice. As Suzuki pointed out, though she is not the first to do so, this ancient figure looks both modern and primitive at the same time. In terms of the show, she said using it helped to emphasize that Maryann’s character is timeless.

We also found it interesting that Suzuki said they looked at a lot of Egyptian images and chose this one precisely because it is not a “typical” ancient Egyptian representation. This was precisely the thinking behind curator James F. Romano’s choice of the “Bird Lady” as the signature image for the reinstalled Egyptian galleries, which opened in April 2003. As usual, he wanted to get people to stop, look and think twice.

HBO’s version of “Bird Lady” made for the series True Blood by artist Cindy Jackson from a mold she created and casting plaster.  Images courtesy Suzuki Ingerslev.

How True Blood created their “Bird Lady”

As part of Alan Ball’s vision for the show, which involves going the distance to add a level of authenticity, an artist was hired to make a version of the “Bird Lady” based on renderings off the web. Cindy Jackson made three statues in case one got broken during filming. Suzuki wanted a base that let the figure float and emphasized its sense of movement. So the artist drilled a rod into the bottom of the statue that connects to a flat base. We explained that we obviously couldn’t do that to a 5,500 year old object but we do have a special mount that safely produces the same floating effect.

Lastly, a few final bits of “Bird Lady” and True Blood trivia.

One of the characters refers to the statue as “Mycenean or something.” Maryann intentionally raises her arms in the same pose during the episode; this gesture was directly inspired by the choice of the “Bird Lady” for the statue. And yes, the “Bird Lady” can be read as a clue to Maryann’s eternal nature, but no, there is not necessarily any further connection.

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Maryann’s female statue that is shown in the first episode of Season 2 and triggers Sam’s memory, is a replica of “The Bird Lady” figurines that are part of the Egyptian collection of The Brooklyn Museum.

Like the figure used in True Blood, the Brooklyn Museum figurines have white paint on their lower halves, representing a skirt, and their legs are not indicated. They were all excavated from graves at one site in Egypt in the early twentieth century.

Here’s a video of the Egyptian curator at the Brooklyn Museum talking about The Bird Lady.

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