Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546154
www.postmagazine.com 13 POST AUG/SEPT 2026 W idow'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 unexplain- able 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 nomi- nations 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 — shoot- ing it more like drama. So, we feel pretty comfort- able 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 referenc- es 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 cam- era 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 flash- es 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 height- ened 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 ep- isodes, and then alternated blocks with Cody Jacobs, who handled four episodes. "Cody was once, many years ago, our gaf- fer, 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 sur- prisingly, 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 ocean- front, we are not on a secluded island off the coast of Boston somewhere. There's a great deal of Most of the series was shot using Arri's Alexa 35 camera.