Widow’s Bay from Apple TV received 19 nominations for the 78th Emmy Awards. The show spans 10 episodes and stars Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, the mayor of a small island town off the coast of Massachusetts, who is desperate to revive a struggling economy through summer tourism. The residents of Widow’s Bay are wary however, noting the island’s cursed history. But Tom refuses to buy into the superstition — that is until he starts witnessing a number of unexplainable occurrences himself.
Hiro Murai directed five episodes in the series, which includes an ensemble cast led by Rhys, Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root, Kingston Rumi Southwick, Kevin Carroll and Dale Dickey. The show’s on-screen talent were recognized with Emmy nominations for Lead Actor (Rhys), Supporting Actress (O’Flynn), Supporting Actress (Dickey), Supporting Actor (Stephen Root), Guest Actress (Betty Gilpin) and Guest Actor (Hamish Linklater).
Production and post production nominations include those for Directing (Murai), Writing (Katie Dippold), Music Supervision (Toko Nagata), Music Composition (David Fleming), Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Casting and Comedy Series. The show received three Emmy nominations for Picture Editing (Isaac Hagy, Jen Bryson and Kyle Reiter), and its lead cinematographer Christian Sprenger was also recognized with a nomination.
For Sprenger, Widow’s Bay continued a long-running relationship with director Hiro Murai. The two collaborated in the past on Atlanta, Station 11 and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and in the case of the latest series, Sprenger was involved in early conversations about how the show would look.
“We had a lot of very early conversations about it, (as) it’s both a comedy and this sort of horror/mystery genre,” he explains. “A lot of the work that Hiro and I have done, we’ve tended to find avenues in which we can subvert what’s kind of expected out of the logline of the project. We had a lot of conversations early on about how do we do something that’s a little bit outside of the box? We’ve done comedy before that is this kind of darker, more dry humor. And we’ve had a lot of success with not shooting it like comedy — shooting it more like drama. So, we feel pretty comfortable with that language.”
In terms of the show’s horror element, the team referenced films such as The Shining and Jaws, in which the visuals don’t necessarily match the intent.
“The first act of The Shining is not dark or scary, or really shot differently at all,” he notes. “It’s kind of pretty straightforward, and there’s a lot of tension being built with camera movement and pacing. But visually and lighting-wise, it’s not super long shadows or super high contrast.”
Likewise he says of Jaws, which Widow’s Bay pays homage to: a small-town mayor trying not to let anything scare away summer tourists.
“You know, that film also is like that,” says the DP. “For the most part, it’s very bright and sunny. And we really liked that idea. That was sort of in our initial pitch of what the show should look like. It wants to kind of fight against what it naturally should look like.”
Sprenger will often shoot with Arri’s Alexa family of cameras, as was the case on Widow’s Bay. He called on the Alexa 35, but not before conducting a number of tests by shooting on film.
“We’re referencing these [nostalgic] films,” he shares. “There’s a lot of John Carpenter references and Spielberg references. It did feel important that we were sort of referencing the nostalgia of the looks of those films, so we did a lot of camera tests. We shot side by side with 5219 Kodak stock. And then we did emulation to go into more vintage feeling film stocks. Then, we basically took our Alexa look and we essentially matched it to the look that we built on film.”
The production did shoot some film for parts of the series, mainly for Episodes 9 and 10.
“All of our LUT decisions were all based off of those tests,” Sprenger recalls. “Same thing lens-wise. We were using a lot of older, more vintage lenses. We carried two different types of lenses that were built and rehoused by Zero Optic — the Tamashiis and the Olympus OM Zuiko lenses, which I’ve used in the past as well.”
Episode 6 in the series has a much different look than the other nine episodes. The timeline flashes back hundreds of years to the island’s original inhabitants, helping viewers better understand the “cursed” element of the storyline.
“I had proposed to Hiro on day one of prep, 'What if we change camera formats, and change lenses, and change aspect ratio so that this feels almost like a standalone piece that’ll still feel like it’s in the universe of the show, but it will be heightened and elevated?'”
Episode 6 was shot using Arri’s Alexa 265 large-format camera, capturing imagery in the 1.43/IMAX aspect ratio. He matched it will classic spherical large-format lenses that were recently pulled out of retirement, having been used on The Sound of Music and Cleopatra.
“They’re like 70-year-old lenses and they ended up in a museum,” Sprenger reveals. “The [American Society of Cinematographers] and Alex Nelson at Zero Optic rebuilt them. And Brad Wilson at Keslow Camera called me one day and was like, ‘If you’re going to shoot large-format, we have these lenses that we feel you would love.’ We negotiated with the ASC. We got this whole thing to happen and became the first show to use those lenses.”
Sprenger shot the show’s initial block of episodes, and then alternated blocks with Cody Jacobs, who handled four episodes.
“Cody was once, many years ago, our gaffer, who did several shows with Hiro and I in the past,” Sprenger explains. “We felt like, spiritually, he sort of knew our playbook by heart and had been studying our playbook for the last decade or so. And now that he’s stepped up and become a cinematographer, he would be the perfect person. That’s always such a challenge when you’re sharing DPs. Does everyone see eye to eye? Does everyone understand what the recipe of the show is?”
The show has its share of visual effects, but surprisingly, many of them are environmental, which the audience would be hard pressed to pick out.
"I think that’s the biggest compliment you can give a show with visual effects — that you don’t know where it is. Ultimately, the elephant in the room is that we didn’t shoot on an actual island, so a lot of times, whenever you’re shooting oceanfront, we are not on a secluded island off the coast of Boston somewhere. There’s a great deal of paint-out, and there’s a great deal of painting in hillsides, distant lighthouses and stuff like that. So there is a lot of environmental work happening.”
The production tried to capture as much of the imagery in-camera as possible, but the reality they faced was that there aren’t a lot of underdeveloped beachside communities that could represent the aesthetic of Widow’s Bay.
“We painstakingly tried to get as much as humanly possible in-camera,” says Sprenger. “And what that usually resulted in was, we would shoot a location that was 85 percent of what we needed it to be. And then the visual effects team would either do set extensions or paint out or whatnot. But there really are no big-ticket items. When we’re out on the boat in the water, We went out at night on the water in the ocean and shot. We did everything as practical as humanly possible, because, again, we’re sort of referencing this nostalgia of filmmaking from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and they didn’t have huge visual effects teams and couldn’t do a lot of that stuff, so we really were trying to like play by those rules.”
Most of Widow’s Bay was shot in and around Cape Ann, which is northeast of metro Boston.
“What’s nice about that is, it is a cape, so there’s at least three edges that look out into the ocean. We definitely shot a lot up there.”
A unit also captured aerials and wide shots in Maine. The series' town hall exterior was located about an hour and 45 minutes west of Boston, while its entire interior and basement was built on a set. Exteriors were also shot for the Loftis house, with the interior created on a stage.
“I would say 95 percent of what you see on the show is on a stage,” Sprenger reveals. New England Studios in Devens, MA, served as home for much of the production.
“[It’s] a modest-size studio, but up to Hollywood-level expectations in the way it’s built and how big it is,” notes Sprenger. “It was amazing. I mean, we had four sets. A lot of the boat interiors were on-set. We built these giant gimbals to make the boats move. We would go outside on the ocean, shoot the exteriors, and then we would go on a blacked-out stage and shoot interiors on the boats.”
Harbor in New York City handled the show’s dailies.
“Basically, we recorded in-camera,” says Sprenger. “We downloaded everything and then we set up a fiber drop at our production office that would allow us to take drives and upload them over a secure network to Harbor. Then Harbor would sync everything, color the dailies, generate everything, put it all up on the cloud, and then (we) would be able to see them the next day. Our DIT, A. Kyo Moon, was super instrumental in making sure that workflow (was) rock-solid and consistent throughout.”
Most of the show was shot with a single camera, with a second camera prepping for the next scene. In the case of Episode 9 — the sequence in which Mayor Loftis ventures out to the lighthouse during a fierce storm — the scene was shot over several nights and is a combination of practical effects, set extensions and visual effects.
“That sequence was probably shot over the course of 12 different shoot days and nights,” says Sprenger. “And it required an unbelievable amount of practical effects, rain towers, lightning strikes, wind machines and our actors just getting drenched the whole time. The lighthouse is a combination of a practical lighthouse, a CG lighthouse, a set build (and) VFX. It’s just this massive marrying of all departments, and when you watch it, it just like feels like such a fun journey to go on.”
EDITING
Kyle Reiter is one of four editors who cut the series, along with Jen Bryson, Isaac Hagy and Cameron Ross. Like cinematographer Christian Sprenger, it was his prior work with director Hiro Murai that led to his involvement on this show.
“Hiro Murai, Christian, Isaac and myself have worked on every narrative thing that Hiro’s done,” shares Reiter. “Starting with Atlanta — I cut two episodes of Barry that he directed — Station Eleven, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. So our, our post team and our post producer, Kaitlin Waldron, we sort of go project to project with him. We’ve been working together for over a decade, and I think what’s important is that, even though we have varying degrees of experience, I think we all sort of came up in this space together and we really trust each other. It feels like one brain trust between all of us. It makes the work a lot easier because we have a shorthand.”
Reiter cut the first episode and helped to set a tone for Widow’s Bay, knowing the story arc for Mayor Loftis would evolve from a non-believer to much less skeptical as the show progressed.
“This one very much functioned as a pilot,” he says of Episode 1. “You’re setting up the world. You are leaving it, hopefully, with the audience wanting more. I had read all 10 scripts prior to doing Episode 1, so I knew the arc of the show. I think the game is to not give too much away, but also making sure people feel that this world is expansive enough that they’re going to want to come back in future episodes.”
While production took place in the Northeast, Reiter and the editing team were in Los Angeles for the show’s duration.
“I’ve done that in the past with Hiro,” he says of setting up close to the production. “On this show, it wasn’t necessary. There were three of us working here in LA, and Harbor was doing the dailies and sending them back.”
The team was set up in space at Post Script in North Hollywood, which specializes in editorial rentals. In this case, they worked on Avid systems.
“We did Atlanta on Premiere,” Reiter recalls. “And I like Premier a lot…[With Avid], I think it’s stability. I know our AEs prefer it...I love using script sync. When you’re with a director or producer, and they just want to see every take of that line, it’s so easy. It’s a real time saver for me.”
In the case of Widow’s Bay, Reiter says the production did not shoot endless takes, so the material wasn’t overwhelming him from a media management standpoint.
“They’re very confident in their work,” he states. “You can see that in the footage. They know what they want. They know when they have it and they move on.”
Editorially, he would receive material and begin cutting roughly a day or two behind the shoot, which was close enough for him to flag any issues that might need to be addressed while production was still taking place. Episode 1, for example, spanned roughly 12 shoot days, and with Hiro Murai directing the first block of episodes, it would be some time before he was able to view Reiter’s cut.
“I remember that he came back from Boston to look at (Episodes) 1, 2 and 3,” notes the editor. “He had time before he started prepping his next block.”
While he was cutting Episode 1, Jen Bryson was editing Episode 2 and Isaac Hagy was working on Episode 3.
“I think Jen did 2, 4 and 5. I did 1, 7 and 8. And then Isaac did 3, 6, 9 and 10. That was just a product of the order in which they shot. I co-edited 8 with my assistant Jing (Han). She’s a great editor in her own right. I was busy doing the 107 director’s cut when 8 was coming in, so she was assembling while I was working on 7. And then when I got freed up [from] 7, I went over to 8 and saw what she had done. It was so good! I came on and helped out a little bit and polished it, but she’s the first credit on that episode.”
Reiter often received footage out of order from the script, so his process was to start creating shorts scenes and then he would put them aside.
“And then when I start to get enough scenes to make a sequence, whether that’s the beginning, the middle or the end, then I can start reassessing things because context is very important and my initial cut of something could be totally wrong.”
His reassessment might lead to him turning dialogue sequences into a montage or adding a new piece of music.
“It’s tightening it and then assessing what it needs,” he shares. “'What does this need? Is this working as three scenes? Can we intercut these scenes? Can we cut this scene in half? Does this need to exist?’ But I can’t get to that point until I see most of it or all of it.”
Their Avid workflow made use of NEXIS shared storage, allowing each of the editors to share cuts for the purpose of receiving feedback.
“It’s a very easy to go, ‘Hey, come look at this.’ Or, ‘Hey, are you using that song in this, because I want to use it here,’” he says of the workflow.
The series’ editors also had to factor in visual effects that would be completed at a later date. Reiter would put placeholders on his Avid timeline, knowing that sequences were still evolving. He points to a sequence in Episode 7, where Widow’s Bay founder Richard Warren is unearthed from his grave. The sequence was shot partly on a stage, on a boat in the ocean and enhanced with visual effects.
“They’re out on the boat — they’re fighting,” Reiter explains. “That was so piecemeal…It was a mishmash of stuff. The timeline looked crazy.”
Seeing those sequences come together, he says, is very rewarding.
“There’s nothing, and then you put them together and it’s really exciting and fulfilling when you see it. But, it’s a slog to get it there.”