Archive - December, 2008

DK’s True Blood Titles Pt.2

Follow up to DK

Follow up to DK's True Blood Titles
Following up on last week’s post about Digital Kitchen’s title sequence for HBO’s True Blood, DK producer Morgan Henry provides some background for the creative process:

“With regards to “Wrong Eyed Jesus”- it was indeed a source of inspiration. Along with several other documentaries of the south and several that focused on Pentecostalism. We also had on our team a designer/photographer who grew up in the south and his photos from the region served as a great source of inspiration and authenticity. The umbrella for all this imagery was of course our mission to create a sequence that was appropriate to the series- to that end we spent a lot of time watching and rewatching the pilot, reading the series of books that the series was based on and developing a narrative response.

“True Blood is, as I’m sure you’ve seen, is a heady mix of sex, violence, taboo, humor, religion and mysticism. To introduce the viewers to a taste of that, we shot the majority of the imagery to be specific to the sequence. To be clear- there is no footage from “Wrong Eyed Jesus” in our piece, there are a handful of stock shots- mostly of wildlife and archival. The team here shot the rest mostly in Louisiana, with some shots in Chicago and others here in Seattle.”

DK’s True Blood Titles

DK

DK's True Blood Titles
Just started getting into True Blood, Alan Ball’s latest HBO series about a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana who falls in love with a vampire. Like Ball’s previous project, Six Feet Under, the title sequence was created by the talented team over at Digital Kitchen and presents a perverse montage of imagery that perfectly captures the juxtaposition of sinister and spiritual underlying the American South. Better still is the “True Blood Featurette” that links from the same page which I can only assume is a director’s cut of the more twisted material that was collected for the project.

UPDATE: I was showing these clips to my friend Doug today and he directed me to some additional “disturbing deep south fun” from the documentaries Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus (which we both concluded was a primary influence for the DK title sequence, some footage seeming to be directly lifted from this film) and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia of which I can find very little in terms of footage online but did find a gallery of the photographs on which the film was based. Disturbing fun indeed.

The Amen Break

The Amen Break

The Amen Break
In 1969, soul music group The Winstons released the single “Color Him Father” which would go on to reach number 2 on the R&B; charts and number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and win them a Grammy Award in 1970 for Best R&B; song.

However what is most remarkable about this record comes from the song on the B-side, “Amen, Brother”, specifically a six second drum break in the middle of the tune that has since become one of the most heavily sampled drum breaks in the course of electronic music and played a foundational role in the evolution of hip hop, jungle and breakbeat genres.

Nate Harrison provides a brilliant look into what has come to be known as “The Amen Break”.

Colour Palettes in Film and TV

Colour Palette for Sophia Coppola

Colour Palette for Sophia Coppola's Virgin Suicides
A current obsession of mine is the use of strictly defined colour palettes in films and television shows. Ironically this recent interest comes as a result of a late 90′s TV drama called “Once and Again” that my wife Jane has been watching repeats of on the PVR while she nurses our daughter. The thing is, I can always tell the show from the distinctly grey colour palette that runs through the majority of the scenes. Lighting, costume, and decor all contribute to this effect that is punctuated by out-of-scene reflections by the characters that are filmed in black and white. I find it all strangely curious especially when I consider that this monochromatic character of the program is what makes it seem boring and unremarkable to me.

Anyway I hope to explore this idea further in future posts. In the meantime, my research into this area has turned up Alan Woo’s Pie project which contrasts and compares the colour palettes of movies by running a Processing script that captures each frame of the movie and creates a ‘pie chart’ of the colours contained within.

On Infrastructural Domesticity

“Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – … the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct … is totally awesome;”

-BldgBlog