10 Cameras (and One Dog) Helped ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Blow Up Episode 6
[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for Episode 6 of “Only Murders in the Building.”]
In this streaming age, where a lot of television seems designed to stretch a story across eight to 10 hours of bingeable content, it’s fantastic to watch a show commit to a stylistic bit for a single episode. “Only Murders in the Building” has always loved tweaking its format in cheeky ways, and it feels right that for Season 4, with Hollywood interlopers (and an unwilling Zach Galifianakis) interrupting Charles’ (Steve Martin), Mabel’s (Selena Gomez), and Oliver’s (Martin Short) investigations, “OMITB” plays with styles of filmmaking themselves.
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Episode 6, “Blow Up,” does so in a couple of ways. The most obvious is that the episode is presented as a companion documentary made by in-universe directors the Brothers Sisters (Catherine Cohen and Siena Werber), using only found and specially recorded footage: The episode’s events unfold from the viewpoint of archival material, Brothers’ Sisters talking heads, film footage shot by both of them and by Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton), plus drone and surveillance footage, and a truly staggering number of cameras hidden around our main trio’s apartments.
Originally, series creator John Hoffman was excited to shoot an episode entirely on Super 8, in part because of the release of a new Kodak Super 8 with an HDMI out, making it possible to fold Super 8 footage into the show’s workflow. But in true “Only Murders in the Building” fashion, the initial concept ended up offering the series a much, much bigger conspiracy to solve. Hidden cameras, drones, dog cams, and an aggressively dark student film made by the Brothers Sisters all feature in the episode, which required a lot of planning and testing by cinematographer Kyle Wullschleger.
A Sony Venice (which is the series’ regular workhorse camera), a Sony FX6, two Beaulieu 4008 ZM-2 Super 8mm cameras, Canon Vixia HG20’s for the high school cafeteria archive footage, of course, Panasonic HVX-200’s in the film seminar, and then a Venice cropped to the center 4:3 ratio and working with a black and white film LUT all provided different textures, senses of time-period, and that inimitable Brothers Sisters vibe for the various sequences throughout the episode.
All of the cameras were chosen in part because they’d be able to cope with the increased lighting requirements for the Super 8s to create a signature look and not give away the seams of the set. “We’re just on a stage and we still have to sell it as the building, as the Arconia,” Wullschleger told IndieWire. “I was so excited and nervous to do it. Jessica Yu, our director, and I agreed that we didn’t want to use our regular Sony cameras unless for the behind-the-scenes documentary. The Brothers Sisters would have access to our professional cameras.”
But even then, Wullschegler tried to find the weirdest lenses they could still shoot on so even the Venice would feel a step out of place in Episode 6. In a lot of ways, the hidden cameras were easiest to manage — Wullschleger and his team used regular iPhone cameras, which they could stash in key spots throughout the set and easily monitor. What was trickiest to nail down was the thing that looks the clumsiest: the student film.
Wullschleger paired the Venice with “super wacky” anamorphic lenses and then popped into the very center to give it that arthouse 4:3 aspect ratio, all while indulging in “the funkiest out-of-focus and [going] to town creating the most contrast-y lighting scenario so that it would go back to feeling like Super 8,” Wullschleger said. No choice was too unsubtle or too bold, a thing that Wullschleger and colorist Tim Vincent embraced as they pumped film grain into the final look of the short film and surrounded Richard Kind in a halo of darkness for Vince’s surprise cameo.
“We’re using all of our modern tools in that scenario to give us full flexibility while we’re doing it, but really leaning into the black and white,” Wullschleger said. “We were all literally high-fiving each other on set at the end of that little moment and just so excited to have that pull together in the way that it did because it’s not easy to make a bad short film, but I feel like we did it in such a way that was so bad, it’s good.”
That deliciously brutal level of kino the Brothers Sisters are going for was also something that editor Matthew Barbato finessed — even within an episode where timing, texture, and visual clarity are so key. “I’m very sensitive to doing fake pretension. I find that if you do that badly, it’s not interesting,” Barbato told IndieWire. Director Jessica Yu pulled references from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” so “OMITB” would have some funny comparisons (with how Lang and the Brothers Sisters both treat eyes, specifically) and a solid level of visual expressiveness to aim for. But Barbato had to sort through the many takes of Kind commanding the Brothers Sisters to kill in his name.
“He did a bunch of them as if he was acting the part. And he’s got a wig on, and it’s black and white, and it was almost like we wouldn’t know who this is,” Barbato said. “Then they did one take at the end where he delivers his line in the movie as Richard Kind.”
That take was the perfect way to puncture the pretension and make the moment work for the series’ style of comedy, and that’s the take in the episode. But the entire construction of the found footage episode was a balance between being as authentically in the fake documentary as possible and giving the audience handholds to see — and laugh at — the construction of the fake found footage.
“We’re balancing the comedy with the mystery with the character development on ‘Only Murders,’” Barbato said. “And then to add on top of that minor characters’ perspective and to tell the story that we normally have to tell through a different perspective was daunting.”
Barbato started tackling the daunting challenge by creating a cut that dove into the in-universe reality of the found footage documentary. He didn’t want any transitions or watermarks and even played with nixing the show’s usual opening title card and working without the show’s score cues.
“From the beginning, I wanted to show as little editing as possible, to leave it as raw as possible. There are full one-take scenes, theoretically, and that can really tie your hands in a number of ways as an editor in terms of pacing and take selection,” Barbato said.
But Barbato’s hands were not completely tied, and there is some fun editing trickery to make sequences feel like oners and static shots when they are composed of several edits and finessed so that the comic timing shines through. Part of what helps sell the pacing adjustments and the transitions between camera formats throughout the episode is very slight variability in the audio, too.
“Howard is the backbone of the documentary because he’s following them around. So a lot of the footage is from his perspective, but, of course, on set, they’re not focusing on him,” Barbato said. “So I wrote a bunch of ADR for him behind the camera, little reactions and little things and asked the director, ‘Can you get him to just wild track a bunch of stuff?’ It’s just little comments and noises that helped. He’s almost like a Greek chorus.”
Howard’s audible agita keeps the viewer on track, as do some diegetic clues added in the edit so that security cameras and drone footage read instantly as what they are. But the different format types forced Barbato, Wullschleger, and Yu to think about the show’s comedy a little differently.
“It’s funny to hear Martin Short’s character say something on the way out of the room that we see just from Mabel’s perspective, getting a reaction and leaning into the reality of what that was,” Wullschleger said. “You realize, ‘Oh, you’re getting an eye roll that you wouldn’t normally see,’ so it’s flipping the show’s tendencies upside down a little bit.”
“In a typical comedy set-up, you wouldn’t normally go to an overhead wide shot for a punchline or a joke. So you have to figure out a way of going to those moments to get what you need out of them,” Barbato said. “You start to pull it together, in a way. And I really love doing in-camera effects, even just on the switch pans, just getting away with things that I can do in the AVID that no one’s going to notice.”
The audience’s attention is on the format shifts until it isn’t, and we become enveloped in the mystery itself. That’s a credit to the entire “Only Murders in the Building” cast and crew and their plans to make Episode 6 feel comedically the same while looking quite different.
“I have to give a huge shout-out to my first AC, Tim Trotman. We basically put him on prep duty for this one because we had so many different cameras,” Wullschleger said. “It’s almost like we opened a door into a territory we had no idea about, and it was a lot of work, so much to wrap our brains around. But that said, [I just] really enjoyed the fact that we are doing something different. Let’s do more of it.”
“Only Murders in the Building” is available on Hulu and Disney+.
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