A key decision the filmmakers made was to develop a script that acknowledged the existence and success of the original film. Book of Shadows therefore follows five college students who are all big fans of The Blair Witch Project and decide to travel to Burkittsville, Maryland as many of the film’s fans did throughout the summer of 1999 to visit the sites featured in the film. What begins as a happy trip takes a strange turn after the group spends one night in the woods. The amateur filmmaker in the group, Jeffrey Donovan, suggests that the others come stay at his apartment, which is where the rest of the story unfolds.
"People [familiar with Blair Witch Project] will be surprised by how little of this film takes place in the woods!" Schreiber says with a laugh. Despite that, the cinematographer says that shooting in the forest was surprisingly difficult. "We were just outside of Baltimore, not far from where the first movie was shot. The perfect clearing we found was on top of a hill, and the only access for lighting was downhill from the site," Schreiber recalls. She knew that her primary source for those scenes would have to be a Musco Light; there was a partially paved road downhill and a small clearing in the trees through which the light could be projected. "After it rained, it was touch-and-go as to whether we could extend [the Musco] all the way up so that I could shoot wide without flare. Fortunately, we went full extension, and my gaffer, Jay Kemp, supplemented the three-quarter backlight with an 18K in a Condor to simulate warm campfire light."
The production had to contend with the East Coast’s variable winter/spring weather throughout the shoot. "I went to Baltimore in January to scout locations, and I remember trudging along our locations in thigh-high snow, wondering whether it would ever melt in time," Schreiber recalls. "We were shooting from March to early May, so we saw snow turn into rain, and cold turn into spring. Then we had to hurry before the leaves grew on the trees!"
Scenes set in Donovan’s living space were filmed in an enormous, abandoned warehouse built into a hill outside of Baltimore. While the crew was relieved to move inside, Schreiber says the location posed a different set of obstacles. "At first, it looked as though we’d have to shoot a month of night-for-night, because there was a [noisy] machine shop operating during the day about 200 feet from where we were shooting," she says. "Shooting at night would have been really hard on everyone." Fortunately, the shop owner agreed to a temporary shutdown, and the grips were able to tent the enormous windows in the warehouse to facilitate day-for-night shooting. "It was a challenging location for key grip Sean Crowell, because the building was on a hill over a creek, and the 40-foot windows were 30 feet off the ground and had to be tented over water," Schreiber notes. "But it worked out perfectly."
The cinematographer used big soft sources such as HMIs for the daytime scenes in the warehouse (which weren’t tented). As darkness falls in the film, the lighting pattern becomes much more mysterious and increasingly moody. "There was an additional loft space within the loft apartment, a partial second floor, which functioned as Donovan’s work space," Schreiber details. "It was about eight feet off the ground. Its floor was made of metal grating, so we could underlight from below and create delineated shadows, and we could also light downstairs shots from above, creating striped patterns on faces."
The ceiling in the work space was so low that Schreiber asked production designer Vince Perranio to incorporate funky, rust-colored track lighting into his plan, and the crew used its own bulbs to create strong enough illumination. The rest of the building’s ceilings were incredibly high, and gaffer Kemp used a range of tungsten lights to illuminate the area, including Source 4 Lekos, Peppers, Dedo lights, and large and small Mole-Richardson Fresnels. He also used Par cans in the building’s long hallways.
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