“What We Do in the Shadows” has spent five seasons making fun of every imaginable vampire trope. The mockumentary follows a cadre of undead and one wannabe — Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), Nandor (Kayvan Novak) and his familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — who share a decrepit house in Staten Island and engage in bloodthirsty shenanigans and mundane roommate tiffs. The immensely silly comedy is abetted by its extraordinary production values, with the Emmy nominations to show for it.
Editors Yana Gorskaya and Dane McMaster have been working together for almost 10 years. When Gorskaya heard that an episode based on reality television home renovation shows was in the works for Season 4, she was elated. (“Go Flip Yourself” is one of 17 “Shadows” episodes she also directed.) “I had spent the entire epidemic watching those shows as my comfort watch,” she says, speaking via Zoom with McMaster. “I wanted to write a love letter to the shows that gave me comfort when I was deeply uncomfortable.”
McMaster says working on the episode, for which they were nominated, “was very much like creating a pilot, in terms of finding the right tone, searching for new music, creating a new title sequence, figuring out the graphics, all of the things we’re both used to when cutting a pilot, but here we are in Season 4 doing something that harks back to finding those building blocks, which is a lot of fun.”
The self-delusion and self-absorption factors stay high in Season 4 while leaving room for a little personal growth and heart.
“A lot of the tricks of reality television were in Marika Sawyer’s bonkers script,” Gorskaya says. “We thought, ‘Well, what else can we do?’ We found the graphics company that does ‘Property Brothers’ to do our animation. I found the woman who did the voice-over for ‘Love It or List It’ to do our voice-over. Dane came up with these split screens, and flashbacks, and we played with speed ramps [speeding up and slowing down footage]. We have a wonderful music supervisor, Nora Felder, but in this case, we knew we had to use what reality television shows use — music libraries.” They spent free evenings and weekends searching for the perfect music cues.
The two work separately, splitting up scenes and sending them back and forth to take passes. “I know I’ve done well when I can hear Dane giggle in the next room,” says Gorskaya.
When sound effects editor David Barbee started working on “Go Flip Yourself,” “I had to keep stopping, because I had tears of laughter rolling down my face,” he recalls. He and the rest of the sound editing department are nominated for another episode, “The Night Market,” that sends the cast to an underground cavalcade of mayhem so Nadja can find an illicit item to bribe a wraith with. You know how it goes when you’re running a vampire nightclub.
Supervising sound editor Steffan Falesitch explains their work: “99% of everything you hear on a show is artificial.” From footsteps to thunderclaps, little is heard on set other than the actors’ dialogue. The rest is layered in afterward.
“The Night Market” involved extra layers, from international vendors hawking their weird wares to vampires cheering on the battles of the familiars. At Falesitch’s suggestion, Barbee recorded himself as two different monsters arguing, using a handheld recorder in his walk-in closet. “Then I run them through my processers and trip them out, and I make them sound completely bizarre,” Barbee says. “I don’t know how well you can hear it anymore, but that’s in there, and it was hilarious fun to put that together.”
Falesitch recalls looking for the precise sounds for a musical fart sequence. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this.’”
Then they had several fight scenes to build out, including the bellowing crowds. Gorskaya, who directed that episode as well, says, “Our sound team basically did an action movie on a TV schedule” of only four days. Barbee jokes, “I always facetiously say they should have a category for finishing it on time.”
“The Night Market” looks as good as it sounds, thanks in part to the production design, which garnered another nomination. Production designer Shayne Fox was given notice about the episode at the end of Season 3, “so it was percolating for a long time in my head,” she says, speaking from her office in Toronto. “It’s a place where nonhuman beings barter and trade things, but it’s also a place where Laszlo teaches the child Colin that adults don’t always tell the truth and things are not always what they seem, so I needed to convey all that, and hit all the marks — the timing, the budget, the schedule.”
The vampire mockumentary series was a surprise Emmys 2020 comedy series nominee, but don’t look for hidden meaning behind the fun, say its writers.
The building it was set in was so cavernous that two real subway cars used in one scene looked small. “My worst nightmare was having this space, with this huge ceiling height, feel unimpressive with no impact. So we had to go high and have things that are glowing and textural.” Fox filled the place with cocoon lights, flame bowls and literally tons of creepy elements, from bloodsicle treats to 14-foot bookcases with a skull made out of book spines. She and set decorator Kerri Wylie tracked down “beautiful and creepy things. Kerri’s super resourceful, and we ended up loading in 18 50-foot trailers of stuff into this space. It took a month, and an army of people, to unpack and install.”
The results were captivating. “Shayne transformed the space into an actual, magical night market,” Gorskaya says. “She created so many details that people will never really get to see.” But the actors can see them, Fox notes with satisfaction. “One thing we love to do with this mockumentary shoot style is give them 360-degree sets and give them a forum to do their best work.”
From the Oscars to the Emmys.
Get the Envelope newsletter for exclusive awards season coverage, behind-the-scenes stories from the Envelope podcast and columnist Glenn Whipp’s must-read analysis.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
