Director Scott Winant talks to DGA Quarterly (Directors Guild of America) about his experience of working on the television series True Blood. Winant has directed seven shows for the hit HBO show so far. He is impressed with the commitment of the cast and crew to the realism and quality of the show saying:

“For Winant, a crucial moment came late in the second season, when he had to shoot a scene in which Sookie watched a vampire willingly kill himself by standing on a rooftop at sunrise. “To the credit of the production, they did not want to do it as a CG effect,” Winant says. “They wanted me to go 30 stories up and shoot a four-and-a-half page scene at dawn. Now, dawn doesn’t last that long—30 to 45 minutes, maybe.” Fienberg, the executive producer, worked out a schedule so Winant could take the entire cast and crew to a downtown Los Angeles rooftop days in advance, where they rehearsed the scene and blocked out every movement of the actors and cameras. “I marked every camera position, every alternate position, and every lens change on the roofof the building,” he says. “And knowing that we were going to move fast, they allowed me to keep bold markson the fl oor that we would later remove optically.”

When the shooting day arrived, the call was set for 2:30 a.m. “We had our positions worked out, we knew our shift moments, and we shot the whole four pages, with lighting and special effects, in 40 minutes,” he says. “And then that was matched to a reverse that was shot on a stage, because we had to create a fake sunrise. On most shows, if I pitched taking the entire company up to the top of a building and shooting in a 30-minute window, they’d turn me down. On this show, they insisted on it.” ”

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