American Cinematographer - July 2019 - 63

Unit photography by Byron Cohen, John P. Johnson and Russ Martin.
Additional images provided by D.J. Stipsen. All images courtesy of FX.

tt The doc-style
comedy series What
We Do in the Shadows
follows a cast of
characters that
includes (from left)
the vampires Laszlo
(Matt Berry), Nadja
(Natasia Demetriou)
and Nandor (Kayvan
Novak), as well as
Nandor's "familiar,"
Guillermo (Harvey
Guillén). t "Energy
vampire" Colin
Robinson (Mark
Proksch, right) joins
his cohorts for a citycouncil meeting.
qt Series
cinematographer D.J.
Stipsen.
q Pilot
cinematographer
Christian Sprenger.

the pilot episode. "This was a particularly interesting show visually,"
Sprenger reflects. "It's about vampires,
so most of the hair, makeup, wardrobe
and production design are dark and
stylized. It's important that the characters exist in a moody, gothic, nighttime
world, but it's also a situational
comedy, and it's equally important not
to trample the comedy with the look
- and it also should feel like a realistic
observational documentary. Juggling
those disparate but necessary aesthetics was a challenge.
"Taika and Jemaine really
enjoyed the look of the on-camera
light, which D.J. used quite a bit on the
film," Sprenger continues. "We
embraced that concept for the pilot's
night-exterior scenes. When the characters came close and interacted with

the camera, we used a custom-built,
wirelessly controlled LED mounted on
the camera." The custom fixture was
controlled by the pilot's gaffer, Cody
Jacobs, via the Luminair app on an
iPad.
For one of the pilot's night-exterior scenes, the art department sourced
a few dozen street lamps with 500-watt
frosted incandescent bulbs to line the
walking paths of a park. "At the deep
end of all of our hero directions were
three 80-foot condors, each one outfitted with two Arri M90s - gelled with
1⁄2 CTO and 1⁄4 Plus Green - to provide
some depth to the tree line," Sprenger
explains. "The special-effects department also lined haze tubes throughout
the park to accentuate the pools of
light from the streetlights."
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The overarching conceit of the show
is that it's being shot by an oftenacknowledged but always unseen
documentary crew who have been
granted immunity by the vampires.
Establishing and maintaining that
aesthetic was paramount to the series'
actual filmmakers. "A scene often
started with the fictional crew 'arriving' with the actors, as if we're all 'on
the go,'" Stipsen notes. "At other
times, the camera would hang back
on longer lenses, with a lot of foreground elements, just observing the
vampires."
Improvisation is a key element
of the show's style. "We didn't do strict
setups as such," Stipsen says. "We shot
both rehearsals and takes, which were
then built upon with improvised ideas
from the cast and Jemaine. To create
July 2019

63
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American Cinematographer - July 2019

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