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Desperate Housewives is filmed at Universal Studios, where it occupies six soundstages and a street that was once used for the shows Leave It to Beaver and The Munsters. Production designer Thomas Walsh envisaged the street as a character in the show and designed it accordingly, building front rooms into what were formerly just façades of houses. These front rooms are permanent sets, allowing a character inside to look out and even interact with somebody walking down the street. Typically, the second floors of the houses are sets built onstage, but the home belonging to Katherine (Dana Delaney), a character who moved to Wisteria Lane this season, contains a whole floor of rooms at street level, and the entire interior of Bree’s (Marcia Cross) house was built onstage. The practical front rooms are lit by interior units and simulated sunlight pushed through the windows. Peterson says matching that material to what’s shot onstage is his biggest challenge, and the Litepanels “really prove their worth” in such instances. The rooms built onstage don’t lend themselves to taking out walls, and in them Peterson uses various tricks for creating broad sources. One is the wall wedge: “We’ll pick a wall that the camera doesn’t see and put up an 8-by-8 bounce. Then, at a 30-degree angle to that, we put up an 8-by frame of light grid and pound a big light into the bounce. When it comes through the grid, it creates a large, luminous surface. Two 4-by-8-foot sheets of beadboard work perfectly with the 8-by.” The look of Desperate Housewives was established in the pilot and first few episodes by executive producer Larry Shaw and director of photography Walt Fraser. Peterson was brought on midway through the first season and alternates shooting episodes with Eric van Haren Noman, ASC. One innovation Peterson brought to the show was colored light; when he first came aboard, only white light was being used. Production initially discouraged the use of colored gels, but slowly, Peterson began adding them, and now that look is part of the show. “Again, I was thinking of Russell Metty,” he acknowledges. The use of colored light coincides nicely with an element of Walsh’s production design: assigning specific colors to each of the female leads. “Tom worked up a color-palette sheet for each of them, and I use only the gel colors that are within each actress’ palette,” says Peterson. The cinematographer is reluctant to discuss the colors assigned to each actress and the specific glamour lighting each face demands. However, he is happy to talk about “Something’s Coming,” the last episode to air before the writers’ strike shut down production. In it, a tornado rips through Wisteria Lane, destroying houses and claiming a few lives. The program opens under uncharacteristically gray skies, which darken as the episode proceeds. “It was a huge undertaking, but we were determined to shoot it in the same nine days we have for every episode,” recalls Peterson. “That meant shooting in full sun all day long, and the street needed to appear overcast.” In the background, his crew hung a 30'x40' silk from a 70' Champion crane; it was on chain motors so its orientation could be changed. Dull overhead light through the silk enhanced the suggestion of cloudy weather, and Peterson relied on telecine to achieve the cold, gradually darkening light he wanted. He used Power Windows to dull any stray sunlight that leaked into the deep background. In the foreground, the crew placed a couple of “Fly Swatters,” 20'x20' silks suspended from 80' Condors, to keep harsh sunlight off the actors. The actors were softly lit from the ground with 18Ks through additional silks, bringing them into the same contrast range as the background. The episode required one additional element: wind. “We had four 100-mph computer-controlled Turbo fans,” reports Peterson. “Each required a 100-amp generator and a forklift to move it around. Just figuring out how to deploy all this equipment on our 40-foot-wide street required massive logistical planning.” Peterson worked closely with Dave Karriker of Modern VideoFilm, the visual-effects supervisor on the show. (The episode required so many effects shots that a storyboard artist was hired.) Peterson’s visual-effects background includes two years of operating on Star Trek: The Next Generation, one of the shows that pioneered the use of CGI on television. He has also shot second-unit greenscreen work on a number of Hollywood features. “I never thought I’d use those skills on Desperate Housewives,” he admits with a laugh, “but over the years, I have.” In the episode, Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and Mrs. McClusky (Kathryn Joosten) are having an argument in the middle of Wisteria Lane when they turn and see a funnel cloud in the distance. Filmed with a 24mm lens, the shot takes in almost the entire street. The camera cranes up beyond the two women and sees the twister. “That shot was achieved very cheaply by doing a static VistaVision plate,” explains Peterson. “Essentially, we laid a VistaVision camera on its side and photographed a still plate, and the visual-effects artists added a CG funnel to the top of the static frame. Normally, you’d do a tilt up, and they would have to put markers on the frame and figure out how to change the perspective as they tilted up. But here, there was no perspective change. It was like a boom shot up the vertical frame — much quicker and easier to do.” By that point in the action, trees and bushes are blowing wildly. To achieve that effect, Peterson locked off the VistaVision camera, deployed a 30'x40' silk and the four wind machines, and shot each element one at a time — every house, every bush, every tree. “We just worked our way around the set and got everything in the shot both silked and blowing in the wind; the setup probably took four hours. Then the shots were tiled together in post. “I think our final shot consisted of 21 elements, plus the funnel cloud and sky replacement. It was cool, but with the wind and noise of all those fans, it was also pretty uncomfortable to shoot.” Additionally, objects falling around the characters, including a car that lands right beside Carlos [Ricardo Chavira], had to be shot separately and composited with greenscreen footage of the actors. According to Peterson, greenscreen shots are a common occurrence. “For example, the producers might see a cut of an episode and decide they want Teri [Hatcher] to say a different line, but we can’t go back to the location, so we shoot her against greenscreen. We routinely make plates on location with that very thing in mind.” One of the show’s most unusual greenscreen exercises occurred when Cross was pregnant — with two episodes to go before her story arc was finished — and her doctors ordered her to remain in bed. “We went to Marcia’s house and built two sets in her living room,” recalls Peterson. “We shot there for two days, and we also greenscreened every additional shot of her for those two episodes while she lay in bed. Later, we composited her face on a body double and inserted her into every scene for those two episodes. I defy anybody to tell me where the greenscreen was!” Desperate Housewives is shot on 35mm using Panaflex Platinum, Gold II and Millennium XL cameras and Primo lenses. It is framed for 4:3 and protected for 16:9 broadcast in high-definition. Peterson has used Kodak Vision2 HD Color Scan Film 5299 to film the show since the stock hit the market almost two years ago. “It’s basically [Vision2 500T] 5218 that has been optimized for telecine use,” he says. “It removes some of the color mask you don’t need for telecine, so it gives you more latitude.”
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