Preacher_Emmy_2017 by Dave Blass

T H E

J O U R N A L

T H E

A R T

D I R E C T O R S

G U I L D

13'-0"

2'-6"

3'-6"

2'-6"

3'-6"

1'-0"

2'-0"

3'-6"

6'-7"

1'-2"

4 1/2"

E 01

O F

4 1/2"

1'-2"

PE RSPE CT I VE – T H E JO UR NA L O F T H E A R T D I R E CTO R S GU I LD

PERSPECTIVE

5'-0"

E 01

4'-0"

2'-6"

1'-4 1/4"

PLAN (POP-OUTS OFF) 13'-0"

4 1/2"

E 01

3/4” = 1' - 0"

13'-0"

1'-2"

1'-0"

2'-6" 2'-6"

4'-0"

1'-4 1/4"

4'-0"

2'-6"

1'-4 1/4"

-C

5'-0"

PLAN (POP-OUTS OFF)

JULY – AUGUST 2017

3/4” = 1' - 0"

PLAN (POP-OUTS OFF) 3/4” = 1' - 0"

4 1/2"

J ULY – AU GUST 2 017

1'-2"

2'-0"

3'-6"

6'-7"

2'-0"

3'-6"

1'-0"

Above: A high dynamic range photograph by Mr. Blass of the exterior of All Saints Church. The cemetery with the full-size church behind it was built just behind Q Studios in Albuquerque, NM. The road, cemetery and trees were brought in and made ready for filming in 28 days. Opposite: Construction drawings for the church were created in Revit®, modeled on the comic book’s first cover. Ten or twelve proposed designs were drawn based on different roof pitches, steeple heights, window placement and other details. Bottom: This small detail of the church exterior showcases the weathering and patina lead scenic painter Virginia Hopkins and her team brought to every set.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2017

I often try to summarize the story of Preacher for people; it’s nearly impossible. It’s a series about a preacher and his girlfriend, on an epic adventure to find God, with his friend who’s a vampire. And then there are angels who regenerate when they’re killed. And there is the Saint of Killers, an invincible cowboy from 1881. Oh, a guy who has a fetish for meat. A kid named Arseface whose face looks like...well... The search for God is not metaphorical; the preacher wants to find God and kick his ass. What happens and how it happens is the stuff of legends. But first, I had to create the world of Preacher. The season was to center around the small rural town of Annville, Texas. The hero, Jesse Custer, has just returned to his hometown to take over his father’s old church.

Preaching

to the Choir by Dave Blass, Production Designer

This was my second comic book adaptation—after Constantine for NBC—and I had learned quite a bit about fan expectations and the backlash you can face for getting things wrong. There are recognizable images that people are so attached to that you just can’t mess with them. For Preacher, it’s the first edition cover art by Glenn Fabry. It’s Jesse hovering over his church which has a simple center steeple. I told the author Garth Ennis when I met him that I always felt that that image was basically a giant middle finger to the world, which I felt described much of the tone of the books. Garth, Glenn Fabry and artist Steve Dillon had also worked on Hellblazer which was adapted into Constantine, so I had spent quite a while pouring over their artwork and wanted to do it justice. The pilot had featured a visual effects church with an off-center steeple that just wasn’t as dramatic, but convincing executives to go back and pay to redo tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of set extensions just because I didn’t feel it served the stylistic integrity was probably a bad way to start a project. Nonetheless, I knew in my heart it was the right PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2017

Top: The interior of All Saints Chapel, built on Stage 1 at Albuquerque Studios (aka Q Studios). Above: VectorworksÂŽ construction drawings of the church. The Church was based on the Mission Chapel of Our Lady of Light in Lamy, New Mexico, that was shot in the pilot. A foyer and balcony staircase to the attic were added and the foyer was duplicated on the fullsize exterior set to allow seamless entrances.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2017

decision, pushed the concept, and I was surprised when they relented. It wasn’t till six months later, when the billboard for the series appeared on Hollywood Boulevard, and the single image they chose to represent the series was a shot of the church giving its pronounced middle finger to the world, that I knew the fight was worth it. Meanwhile, two miles away onstage, Art Director Mark Zuelzke, who I have worked with on a number of projects, and Assistant Art Director Kirsten Oglesby were tackling the interior of the church. A vestibule was designed into the exterior church that would allow the actors to walk up into the church, or play scenes looking out to the exterior. That vestibule was replicated in detail onstage as well so there was a bridge between sets. The interior of the church was a modified replica of the Mission Chapel of Our Lady of Light, built in 1926 in Lamy, about fifteen miles southeast of Santa Fe. The stained-glass windows were printed on both sides, the leading on one side and the textured glass on the backside. In an initial lighting test, cinematographer John Grillo was striving for shafts of refracted colored light through the windows, but the massive lights actually melted the plexiglass, so they were then rebuilt using laminated tempered glass. I have spent many years building decrepit scenery; it’s harder than it looks. Finding the right balance in the

patina of water stains, cracked plaster and grime is what keeps me up at night. I worked with lead scenic painter Virginia Hopkins to create a style-board of age-related cracks and decay. We would walk around the set and black-marker spots on the new flats to add lath and plaster blowouts. Too much character and it looks like you’re building a haunted house, too little and the details get missed. In the thirty-two days before principal photography, there was quite an array of changes and augmentations. First, the church was to have a basement common area with a kitchen where AA meetings and such could take place. The vampire Cassidy also would live in the attic, getting high by smoking the insulation and trying to fix the air-conditioner. Then the producers wanted to add a residence, as Jesse’s bedroom had been briefly seen in the pilot. A three-level spiral staircase from the basement to the attic was devised and a three-tier set was designed, rendered, priced...and rejected as too expensive. We went back to the drawing board in the ninth hour with the clock ticking away. I sold the producers on a single-story concept that would allow people to flow from the Sanctuary into a kitchen or a meeting room for religious consultation. Now from the back of the kitchen, you could see all the way to the front doors, giving extraordinary depth to the set. Show runner Sam Caitlin wanted the residence and common area to have a bit of a

Above, left: The production schedule was so tight that the first phase of the construction of the church began while the floor for the living quarters behind the chapel was laid out and final details were still being approved. Design and building proceeded in chunks. Right: The stained-glass windows were double-printed with thick 3D textured ink on the front for the leading and colored window details on the back. Below, left and right: The common room of the church was built onstage as a part of the main set. Halfway between a public and private space, this was the area where parishioners would congregate after church. The vintage linoleum floor was customprinted and then aged in place. The family living area was designed to allow directors to move from the very front of the church all the way through the living quarters in one shot. The decor gives a frozen-intime look to Jesse Custer’s childhood in the early 1990s.

vintage feeling. As a story point, the place had been boarded up in the 1990s and not much had been updated, even before that. Old rotary phones and tube televisions became a signature of our decor style. Decorator Edward McLoughlin and his team worked the balance between giving the set a retro feeling while not being specifically period. It was a delicate balance. With the exterior church going up on the prairie and the interior now designed and underway, I focused on the next main set, the Sundowner Motel. I was less concerned about doing a rundown motel set, having done dozens of them on five seasons of Justified. Photographer Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places book is a treasure trove of research of the ghosts of Route 66. His images were combined with tear sheets from the Preacher graphic novel to create a wall of inspiration to pitch our concept. This set would have some unique design challenges as it would host the massive fight scene between angels and demons later on in the season. Every wall would need to be destroyed and reset, or augmented for specific stunt needs. I had no idea what the specific needs would be other than an email from the writer saying, “It’s going to be the most epic tiny room fight scene ever.” We chose classic 1970s wood paneling that could be replaced in planks for the fight. The Main image: Forty-five minutes of running time of 1881 period Western sets were shot in just four days on location at Bonanza Creek Ranch, NM. Opposite page: The entire town was dressed, signage added and streets brought to life in under a week. Playing to their strengths, the Art Department artists worked with the series’ writers to script the types of sets that could be done. Signage was designed to mimic the artwork used in the graphic novel, and much of this highly detailed set was only seen briefly as the cowboy rode into town. This page, top to bottom: The hanging tree was deceptively complicated. The perfect tree had to be found to stand alone in the middle of a desolate landscape, something with a unique silhouette. The tree had to be defoliated twice for shooting over the season to give it the proper stark appearance. The painting of the Birth of Venus was added above the bar as a nod to TOMBSTONE and HARD BOUNTY, both Westerns that Dave Blass and construction coordinator Bill Holmquist had worked on, and that shared a mural of that particular piece. Bare skulls and taxidermy were added to give a sense of macabre to the location where death would take over. PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2017

location scouts were still looking for an exterior for the motel when the Art Department came up with the concept of adding concrete breeze block walls outside the doors and windows that would serve a double purpose. This would provide an interesting element to see outside when someone would come to the door, and then this detail could be added to the location, using the structure as a bridge. There was a scene with two inept angels in the motel room that I had read in an outline that I thought would be fun to pitch to take place in the bathroom, with one on the toilet while the other was in the tub. The writers loved it so much that, not only did it make it into the episode, but also became one of the key promotion images for the show. From the executive producer’s second-floor office at Q Studios, you could see the church going up two miles away. It was like the barn-raising scene in Witness with dozens of carpenters raising trusses and nailing shingles. It was an impressive sight. I was extremely proud of what we had accomplished in such a short period of time. It was standing in that room, looking at the setting sun on the church exterior being built, that they first mentioned the name Ratwater. Having read the comics, I knew that the main villain of the show, the Saint of Killers, was a cowboy in the Old West. His family falls ill and he heads to the town of Ratwater to get medicine. He falls prey to some evil townsfolk and by the time he gets back to his family, they’re all dead. He returns to Ratwater and goes on a killing spree of epic proportions that culminates with him being sent to hell, where he kills the devil as well. I had thought that the writers would wait for the second season before introducing the Saint of Killers character, as the scope was staggering. It was decided that this storyline would play interstitially throughout the first season, but the kicker was that we would have to film forty-five minutes of 1881 period Western sets in the middle of shooting the rest of the series. I had several aces in the hole, so I wasn’t worried. Set decorator Edward McLoughlin had just wrapped the Western Jane Got a Gun and construction coordinator Bill Holmquist had done one of my favorite Westerns, Tombstone, so I very quickly went from nervous to excited. I set out scouting in the snow with location manager Dennis

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2017

Muscari looking for just the right Western vista. New Mexico is one of the go-to destinations for Western films. After a week of looking at all of the options, we settled on Bonanza Creek Ranch. The juxtaposition of the saloon to a building that could be turned into the apothecary, and a schoolhouse worked best, and the farmhouse was a near match for the one in the comics. The ranch also had another key element: the hanging tree, which was used as a bridge from the town of Ratwater to the present-day Annville, built on the same location. The tree needed to look not just dead, but ominous. The dedicated greens team that had just spent weeks building a row of trees leading up to the church, now had the task of defoliating and pruning the hanging tree from a beautiful oak to a visage of death incarnate. For the town of Ratwater, I wanted to play to our strengths. Edward McLoughlin, Mark Zuelzke and I sat down and went over the list of what could reasonably be in the town and, more importantly, what we could do best. I often use the term “paint with a bigger brush” to highlight areas that would play in the background or were less emphasized; providing big impact with fewer details. The scene in the comic took place in the snow at Christmas. We didn’t want to create snow, but I did want to have a nod to the comics, so sad Christmas decorations and a stack of Christmas trees were added to one of the buildings that was turned into a lumberyard. Keeping with the bigbrush idea, I went with an undertaker’s shop with caskets on display, a big vintage Chinese laundry with boiling pots, the Hex Livery in the comics which was a nod to Jonah Hex. I added that as an Easter egg for the fans, and peppered other shops and stores that I knew could be outfitted as well. After ten episodes, the season came to a close and, like the town of Ratwater, the new town of Annville was wiped from the earth by a horrific disaster. There was a running theme throughout the season that the towns were modern-day versions of Sodom and Gomorrah, one destroyed by a tornado and the other by a methane explosion. The season did turn out to be insanity beyond anything I could have imagined, and then the city of Annville was wiped out in an atomic bomb-style explosion. I hope the bar was raised on the mixture of lunacy and highly detailed craftsmanship that can be created on a one-hour drama. If not, Season Two premieres on June 25 and we get to do it all over again. ADG Opposite page, top to bottom: The interior/exterior of a farmhouse shot on location at Bonanza Creek Ranch, NM. An existing structure was augmented to have more of a log cabin feeling as opposed to the stuccoed adobe that was common in the Southwest. The set was designed to feel isolated and match what had been established in the comics. Construction drawings of the farmhouse were created in Revit. The interior of the cabin was shot in one location and the exterior in another, so horizontal logs were added to the façade to tie the locations together, along with a door at the center of the structure and plant-on windows. Due to the tight production schedule, two units shot simultaneously and the interior of the farmhouse needed to be built closer to the town so the actor playing Cowboy could run back-and-forth between setups to shoot scenes with the other unit. This page, top to bottom: A concept rendering of the interior of the Sundowner Motel stage set, created by Mr. Blass in Thea working over a SketchUp® model. The room is the scene of an epic fight between Jesse and both replicating angels and a demon, causing mass destruction. Wood paneling and carpet tiles were designed into the decor to allow for bloody resets. Perforated breeze blocks were added to the location to allow a good match with the stage set. This photograph, shot onstage, shows how the blocks bridge between the stage set and the exterior location.

Dave Blass, Production Designer Mark Zuelzke, Art Director Kirsten Oglesby, Gregory G. Sandoval, Derek Jensen, Assistant Art Directors Tyler Standen, Brandon Arrington, Graphic Designers Taura C.C. Rivera, Set Designer Paulo DeFreitas, Jr., Amy Lynn Umezu, Storyboard Artists Edward McLoughlin, SDSA, Set Decorator