“We wanted to lean into the feeling of nostalgia and familiarity,” adds Hamburg. Together, they added and deleted pieces to shape what is finally seen. Separated by the pandemic, Doyle chronicled each step photographically and sent it to the production team. He built it this past spring in his Westchester, New York studio. The dirt underground spans between four and five feet. “Don’t throw that away, it could be used for something.”īy Doyle’s estimate, the model stands over six feet tall. “There’s a lot of picking through the trash as well,” he jokes. A lobster pot in the first scene is the top of a Chapstick tube painted silver. Any household item is fair game in Doyle’s mind. Materials came from anywhere and everywhere. I focused on the details to that level.” Thomas Doyle’s miniatures. “I spent a lot of time looking at that to recreate the look of her wedding dress, her computer, that mailbox. “The team provided me with tons of background material, photos, the home movie imagery,” he says. Doyle felt that they were so prominent in the story that they needed to be precise. But since the ones here needed to evoke the documentary’s subjects, there was extensive cutting, sculpting, and painting to arrive at the Murder on Middle Beach miniatures.Īll the objects were created from scratch. Model railroad shops, toy stores, and architecture kits are Doyle’s typical go-to places for figures. But it became apparent that the sequence would be more impactful with human figures. The initial plan was to only display objects. “Then, when people see episode two, they start to make the connection of things they’ve seen - like there’s a tiny birthday cake in the model that represents the first episode,” explains Doyle. In an effort to draw viewers in, episode one opens without the title sequence. “They brought that to me and I just fell in love with it.” “Madison and his producer Solomon (Petchenik) put together a teaser reel with my work and the flash flutter cuts as a way to sell the idea. A series of miniatures depicting families and homes in various stages of disarray, it evoked the feeling the filmmaker wanted. Courtesy HBO.įor inspiration, Hamburg turned to one of Doyle’s works - Distillation. ‘Is what I’m looking at real or fake?’” Thomas Doyle’s miniature recreation of the Hamburg house. “Miniaturizing helped to push that idea, especially when it is done with such detail that it blurs the lines of reality. “We wanted to parallel this overarching theme of duality between the outward ‘American idyllic’ setting and the darkness that lay beneath, prevalent throughout all of the major story arcs,” continues Hamburg. So by the end of the call, we were talking about going forward and working together.”Ĭoncluding that recreations weren’t feasible, Hamburg conceived the idea of building a title sequence around miniatures. “It certainly sounded like a great project. “He got in touch with me because he liked my work and wanted advice about what’s possible - get the lay of the land,” remembers Doyle. Hamburg originally reached out to Doyle to explore the idea of using miniatures to recreate scenes that couldn’t be captured on film. His work has appeared in galleries around the world and graced the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time. The model for the opening was created by Thomas Doyle, an artist known for his striking miniatures. “There was intention behind every minute detail of this sequence, down to the color, shot design, and even the clothes that the subjects are wearing.” “I have a habit of skipping title sequences and wanted to create something that was more a storytelling element than a backdrop for credits,” says Hamburg. The shot finishes on a model recreation of the house where the murder took place. Intermixed are jarring flash cuts of family photos and home movies. In total, five unique dioramas detail the story arc. As James Lavino’s eerie theme plays, the camera pivots upward past a series of miniatures buried deep within the earth. What he ultimately discovers is how little he knows about his family.įraming this unsettling sojourn is a haunting title sequence that sets the tone for what’s to come. He spent years interviewing his father, sister, aunt, other relatives, and law enforcement searching for answers about who his mother was and why she was killed. Ultimately, he decided to make a documentary about his mother. Madison was 18 years old at the time and a film student in college. But what makes this unsolved murder story even more compelling is that it is being told by Madison Hamburg, Barbara’s son. An unlikely victim, police were unable to find a suspect. On March 3, 2010, Barbara Hamburg was found stabbed to death outside her home in Madison, Connecticut, an unassuming beachfront town. As the title suggests, Murder on Middle Beach, the four-part HBO documentary, revolves around a tragedy.
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