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[Wednesday at NAB]
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‘Pushing Daisies’ Pushes Vibrant Visuals
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by Douglas Bankston,
~ April 16, 2008
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DV MAGAZINE
In a television landscape choked with procedural and medical dramas, little room is left for fairytales.
But ABC’s newest hit series “Pushing Daisies” broke through the stranglehold to become, in the words of NPR TV critic David Bianculli, “the best program of the entire season last year.”
In the Tuesday morning Content Theater Case Study, “Pushing Daisies,” the forces behind the whimsical series revealed how the vibrantly colored show is produced.
Creator and Executive Producer Bryan Fuller, pilot episode director and Executive Producer Barry Sonnenfeld and Director of Photography Michael Weaver were quizzed by Bianculli.
“Pushing Daisies” is about a pie maker who can bring back the dead with a touch. A second touch returns the resurrected to his or her previous state. The show is visually unlike anything currently on TV. “There didn’t seem to be a fairytale on TV at the time,” Fuller said.
About the pilot episode Sonnenfeld said, “It was the first script that I had read since the first thing I shot, which was ‘Blood Simple,’ where the second I read the script I knew exactly visually how it should be shot.”
Critical to achieving such colorful imagery is the use of the digital intermediate, usually reserved for feature films and color timing the picture.
“We realized this had to have such a vibrant look all the way through that we would need more control than what you would normally get in television color timing,” Weaver said. “It gives you a lot of control over certain areas of the frame. You can make a gray sky blue, for example. It’s become a mainstay on the show.”
Sonnenfeld, a jokester himself, was the ideal choice to helm the pilot episode, directing a scene while wearing a beard generously donated on the spot by a camera operator. “The actual process of making movies and television shows is profoundly boring,” Sonnenfeld said, “and often I will wear fake mustaches and stuff, and I just ran out of a decent mustache that day.”
That prompted Fuller to reveal another Sonnenfeld quirk: “Oftentimes, instead of sitting in a director’s chair, Barry will sit in a saddle on an apple box.”
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