Zoic Studios makes the otherworldly aspects of True Blood come to life realistically by making the effects look as natural and organic as possible. All images © HBO. Courtesy of Zoic Studios.

To say that writer/director Alan Ball has a uniquely skewed vision of the world is quite the understatement. The Oscar-winning screenwriter's got a way of crafting stories that manage to unearth both the gorgeous simplicities of the mundane and the garishly grotesque secrets that lie just under the surface of our everyday lives. Whether it's capturing suburbia mid-life crisis in American Beauty or extreme family dysfunction in Six Feet Under, Ball's yarns demand a viewer's attention.

When it was revealed last year that Ball's next project would be adapting novelist Charlaine Harris' successful Southern gothic vampire stories into a television series for HBO called True Blood (airing Sundays at 9:00 pm)... well, fans and critics alike went into a tizzy of excitement in anticipation for what he would do with the well worn vampire genre. And as expected, Ball hasn't disappointed.

True Blood follows the exploits of Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a genteel Southern telepath that slings beers in a bayou bar in rural Louisiana. Vampires have recently "come out" to the world and humans are trying to figure out how to accept the pasty bloodsuckers into mainstream society. In the pilot, Sookie serves brooding vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) at the bar and lusty sparks fly. While reaction to the series has been mixed, with critics and fans split down the middle on the success of Ball's wildly explicit take on love, sex and vampirism, True Blood is definitely generating buzz and a confirmed second season.

And that's good news for Zoic Studios, the renowned visual effects company enlisted by Ball to make the otherworldly aspects of his series come to life so realistically that you'd swear vampires could be lurking just outside our doors. Visual Effects Supervisor Jon Massey and In-House Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Orloff talk to VFXWorld about the challenges of making Ball's vision of the supernatural world come to life like audiences have never quite seen before.

Zoic previously worked on vampire-themed shows but True Blood's take on the mythology is different. There are no heavy magic elements but instead a dramatic tension that comes from operating within a scope of "real."

Tara Bennett: When you first spoke to Alan about True Blood, what were his visual effects priorities for the series?

Andrew Orloff: One of the things that Alan said to us from the beginning is that True Blood is not an effects show. What that means is that the effects need to look as natural and organic as possible.

Jon Massey: He didn't want to do anything with the effects that would distract from the performance of the actor. He didn't want to have a vampire transition that included faces change or dramatic fangs popping out.

TB: Audiences have come to expect those cheesy vampire tropes, so how did you strip the expectations down in terms of the visual effects design?

AO: We really took it back to the idea that everything we do needs to come out of thinking about the motivation for what's happening on screen. In the case of the fang reveals, we digitally grow the teeth from the mouth of the vampire. Zoic proposed referencing how a rattlesnake uses its fangs when it attacks. The fangs extend in an arc from inside its mouth and so we used that as an inspiration to build our effect from something organic. If you watch the show, you may never actually know they are retracting or extending their fangs in an arc with their real teeth going up inside their mouth. We built it so that it is subtle and viewers may never notice it, because it looks really natural. It's all done digitally, there's nothing practical about the effect.

There are practical fangs that Masters FX created for all of the non-retracting or extending shots. For those we track the digital fangs into the live action performance. The actors don't have the fangs in when they are performing so they need to really think about the process and practical jaw movement when it's happening in the scene.