So we shot on the Sony A7 [Editor’s Note: The Sony A7 is a small, relatively inexpensive camera]. I used the smallest of the Ronin stabilizers — it’s two handles that form a sort of Y that connects to the camera. So, I’m holding it about chin height in front of me.

And one of the reasons that we tried as much as possible to shoot in sequence was I wanted to show how [the ghost] learns how to look at things as the story progresses, and in order to do that, I had to go through that learning process too. You’re breaking it down to little things, like if you have a shot and somebody starts to move and they’re going to leave frame, how anticipatory, or not, can I be in a pan to hold them? Should there be a little bit of lag time because it doesn’t know when people are going to move? On the other hand, there are scenes that I felt demanded real choreography between the camera and the cast just to keep it feeling like a movie, and so I was discovering that as we would shoot. There would be takes, unfortunately, sometimes some of the longer takes, where I would get to the end of it and just go, “I can do it better. I screwed up.” Like I made a choice and it was the wrong choice, we got to do it again.

I didn’t want to go into something that felt too distorted, but I wanted it to be wide enough that you really felt it when you were moving through space, that it really was enveloping when you went through a doorway or up or down the stairs. So, we ended up using a 14mm prime on the [Sony] A7, that just seemed right to me. People could get close to it without turning into cartoons. But, if you were in the corner, you saw the whole room, and I wanted that.

2K to 4K, that’s a difference that you can barely see in a butterfly test… The real difference is the extended dynamic range, the difference between the SDR and HDR is so massive and something that anybody can tell the difference if you put them side by side, it’s just fantastic.

It’s pretty standard to do the SDR pass first, and then do HDR. Recently, I started doing the opposite because the SDR was so depressing to look at that I wanted to spend more of the hours looking at HDR. I mean, I never saw prints growing up that looked like that, that had blacks like that, that had whites like that. It’s staggering how good that shit is.

The videos follow a sinister pattern. One video… uses CNN’s logo and branding to impersonate the news organization, with text at the bottom of the screen describing the “breaking news.” On the screen, a likely AI-generated newsreader starts talking.

“Good day. My name is Kristina Lawson, reporting from New Jersey,” the anchor says in the nearly minute-long clip. “Just in: We have received a credible report regarding a disturbing incident.” The fake presenter says that a “young lady” has come forward to allege that they were sexually assaulted by an older man. In the video, the man, who is the target of the scam, is named, and a photograph of him appears onscreen.

Other videos seen by WIRED feature different news readers and names of news channels, but they also show more graphic photos of the potential blackmail targets, including nude and explicit images.