Along with co-creating, writing, producing, and starring in “Sunny,” Day additionally weighed in on different points of the present, like cinematography. After working underneath Guillermo del Toro in “Pacific Rim,” Day introduced a few of his new-found creative affect to the “Sunny” set.
“I remember we did an episode where we’re in a police station and it’s a flashback and we’re talking about [the McPoyle wedding],” Day recalled on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. “And I was saying, okay, when we shoot it, we’ll do the coverage that Richie Keane — great director — had sort of blocked out. But I said, ‘Hey Richie, after we get that, can we do a few Guillermo takes and just circle the camera around the actors?’ And just started using more, as I would call them, ‘Guillermo takes’ throughout the show.”
Day dabbled in numerous niches of the movie world through the early days of capturing ‘It’s Always Sunny’ when the low manufacturing funds compelled the artistic crew to tackle additional duties on set. “It’s weird how [the process] is the same thing,” he famous to Backstage. “What are the people doing in the scene? Where should the camera go? How can we make this more interesting?”
The troubleshooting that went into his directorial debut, a star-studded multi-million greenback function, mirrored the problem-solving he and his collaborators did on the units of early “Sunny” episodes, like, “Okay, a character is knocking on the door; we have a spyhole in the door. Can we get this little digital camera up there? Can we actually shoot a shot through it? Oh, turns out we can. That’s aesthetically interesting; let’s try that.”