Anatomy of a Shoot

The brief: Create key art for the Jordan Peele movie Us, a horror film about an American family whose summer vacation takes a sinister turn when they encounter their evil doppelgangers.

The creative team at NBC Universal and Lindeman & Associates, Joe Wees and Chandler Chow, came to portraitist Kwaku Alston with concepts for the images that reflected the movie's main themes. “They wanted to play with the concept of dual identity,” says Alston, who shot the images, as well as motion footage, during two nighttime sessions with the actors at his Los Angeles studio.

Lupita Nyong’o, who starred in the movie as the mother of the family (as well as her own evil twin), is featured in the image shown here. “We had to show both sides of her character,” says Alston. “So we shot it over two days, that same shot, because we had to do the mask shot, where she's a normal, introverted mother, and the evil side.”

To convey the impression of Nyong’o emerging from

shadow, Alston used two rim lights to create minimal background separation. “Just to have the hair come out a little bit, but not too much,” he says.

And the tear? “That's real,” says Alston. “She can cry on

command. It's totally amazing to watch.” With only about 15 minutes to capture each persona in both stills and motion, Alston was careful to direct with a light hand. “When she's in character, you have to just give her space,” he says. “When I was a younger photographer, I didn't understand exactly the whole acting thing. I was just happy to be shooting, and sometimes I was overbearing, saying, ‘Do this, do that,’ and trying to be too much of a director.” Experience taught him to pull back a little when photographing actors. “You have to rely on their professionalism and their expertise to help bring that vision alive,” he explains. “That's why I try to give them space—so they can feel like they're part of the creative process, because that's important. And then, you know, it just happens.”

Alston’s prop stylist, David Ross, attached a stick to the

mask Nyong’o held during the evil doppelganger shoot so that she could hold it easily and try positioning her fingers in different ways. “We had to make sure that she looked like she was taking her face off,” says Alston.

Alston used Profoto’s medium StripLights to cast a long and narrow light source on Nyong'o’s face.

“I wanted to have the light fall off very quickly and to have a really high-contrast light that just makes her skin sparkle,” he explains.

Alston used exactly the same lighting for the good and evil

characters but had Nyong’o shift the angle of her head as the good character so that the postproduction team had what they needed to match the lighting on the mask. “I had to make sure she moved a little bit so that they could shape it later, but not that much,” he says. “Maybe a head turn, maybe 30 degrees here, 30 degrees there.”

The lighting on Nyong’o’s face for the mask image

had to match the lighting on her evil character’s face, so Alston found a mask for her to hold during the shoot that matched the shape and size of her face as closely as possible. When he shot the evil character, Alston explains, “We had the mask in front of her face halfway, just so we could have the light fall correctly onto the mask.”