Meanwhile, Lin began to gather cast and crew. "With the crew, we had to get people who really wanted to work because they weren't going to get paid," he details. "It was a good thing that we had gone to film school and had friends who were willing to help out for nothing." One of those friends was Lisa Wiegand, a fellow graduate student who followed her studies at UCLA with a one-year cinematography fellowship at the American Film Institute. She relished the opportunity to shoot a feature, especially one as wacky as Shopping for Fangs. "It was a great film to work on because there are these very different stories, each with a dramatically different style and approach. With [the character] Trinh, the camera was virtually always handheld and I did a lot of overexposures. The photography was a lot more energetic than in the other stories." Concurs Lee, "Trinh's story is more prone to improvisation. With Katherine's story I wanted to create the sense of a psychological fourth wall, which was done with kind of quiet, still shots." Wiegand further explains that the photography for Phil was open to various interpretations, much like his metamorphic persona. "When it needed to be handheld, it was; when we needed to dolly, we did. We also did a lot of experimenting with darkness and shadows in that section of the film."
But given Fangs' $100,000 budget and breakneck 18-day schedule (which more than 20 locations spread between Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley), the creative option of switching between visual styles was definitely a recipe for chaos. Recalls Wiegand, "Quentin would get us into these locations all over Alhambra that were Chinese-owned. Although they were timid about us shooting there, Quentin convinced them that it would be okay. But this meant that we'd have to get in there, shoot, and then get out very quickly. We would just throw up a couple of lights and work until we saw that they were beginning to freak out, then we'd just finish and run out."
One of the many detriments to shooting on the fly was that it precluded the execution of proper camera tests. "There were at least two locations where I knew I needed to do some tests," says Wiegand, who shot Fangs with an Arriflex BL-4 and Superspeed primes, using Fuji Super F-500 8571 stock for interiors and nights, and F-64D 8521 for daytime exteriors. "We were using a lot of Kino Flos to supplement the fluorescent lighting that we found at our locations. To check the color temperature and flicker of the practicals in these two particular places, I just walked into each with my camera running. They'd say, 'No, you can't shoot any tests in here,' and I'd say, 'Okay,' but by the time I walked out I'd already shot enough footage for my test."
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