Welcome to the world of Castlevania: a show adapted from a Japanese video game set in a gothic world of vampires, demons and monsters. We’ll speak with the Deats brothers about how they turned the original video games into an exciting animated series. We’ll also speak with Adam Connaroe, the technical director/key lighting about what goes into making this dark show come to life.
Welcome to the world of Castlevania: a show adapted from a Japanese video game set in a gothic world of vampires, demons and monsters. We’ll speak with the Deats brothers about how they turned the original video games into an exciting animated series. We’ll also speak with Adam Connaroe, the technical director/key lighting about what goes into making this dark show come to life.
Brandon Jenkins: The year is 1475, and while the sun has gone down, it’s still bright in the small Romanian village known as Wallachia. A massive fire burns in the middle of the town square. Tied to a stake, engulfed in flames, Lisa Tepes writhes as she is burned alive. Lisa has been convicted of being a witch and sentenced to death. Her last words are a plea to spare the people of Wallachia.
Lisa (clip): They don’t know what they’re doing. Be better than them, please.
Brandon Jenkins: After Lisa’s body has been turned to ash, and the flames begin to die down, a man’s face enters the fire as if by magic, demanding to see his wife.
Dracula (clip): I am Vlad Dracula Tepes and you will tell me why this thing has happened to my wife.
Mayor: Oh no, oh god! Dracula. He was supposed to be a myth, a story made up by heretics.
Brandon Jenkins: You heard right….Dracula! And as revenge for the murder of his human wife, the world’s most famous vampire unleashes an army of demons and monsters on the Wallachians.
Dracula (clip): You took that which I love so I will take from you everything you have, and everything you have ever been.
Brandon Jenkins: Across three seasons, the hit Netflix animation series Castlevania — based on the wildly successful Castlevania video game franchise — infused the Gothic fantasy of the original adventure game with anime sensibilities and action packed fight scenes.
Sam Deats: So season one, we had like a good number of action shots that grew in season two and then kind of exploded in season three.
Brandon Jenkins: This is series director Sam Deats. Deep in the heart of Austin, Texas, far from Wallachia, Romania, Sam and his brother Adam Deats have been working hard over the years to turn Castlevania into one of Netflix’s most beloved animated series. They grew up playing video games — from Atari to Super Mario Brothers, and of course, Castlevania. And as adults, their first foray into animation was creating trailers for games like Battle Chasers and Agents of Mayhem, with the animation studio Powerhouse Animation. This is the older brother Adam.
Adam Deats: The running joke in the studio is that I'm his Luigi to his Mario. Is that what it is?
Sam Deats: He is the Luigi to my Mario. I'm the short, stocky one. And he's the tall, thin one.
Brandon Jenkins: I’m your host Brandon Jenkins and this is the Behind the Scenes podcast. Each week we go behind the scenes of an incredible Netflix animated series and hear the stories of the people who bring them to life. This week we’re talking to the Deats brothers about their adaptation of the Castlevania story, and how the series was influenced by the original game, and by Japanese anime. Then, we’re talking with Adam Connoroe — the Head of Post-Production — about how the anime influence changed his team’s approach to lighting, and therefore, the animation itself. You might be surprised to hear us talk about lighting on an animated series ... but stick around to hear just how Adam works his lighting magic to give Castlevania a more intimate, realistic look. Keep your stakes close and your holy water closer. This is Behind the Scenes: Animation.
Brandon Jenkins: In 1986, the Japanese arcade game company, Konami, premiered Castlevania, its newest video game. Castlevania has gone on to become a successful franchise with dozens of sequels and spin-offs, like Symphony of Night, Rondo of Blood, and Bloodlines.
Brandon Jenkins: The story revolves around Dracula and the trio determined to stop his reign of terror. That team includes Trevor Belmont, a human descended from a family of monster hunters
Trevor (clip): I’m Trevor fucking Belmont, and I’ve never lost a fight to man nor fucking beast.
Brandon Jenkins: A magician named Sypha
Sypha (clip): I am a Speaker and a scholar of Magic. I serve no demon and I do no evil.
Brandon Jenkins: And Dracula’s half-vampire, half-human son, Alucard.
Alucard (clip): My father has to die. And we three, we can destroy him.
Brandon Jenkins: We’ll be talking light spoilers about the show, so if you’re ready, let’s get to it.
Brandon: I'm sure you guys have it worked out. Who goes first in these but, can you introduce yourselves and what you do on Castlevania?
Sam Deats: Hi, I'm Sam Deats, I'm the director of Castlevania. Basically, once we receive the scripts for the show, I'm in charge of everything else like after that point.
Adam Deats: And I'm Adam Deats and the assistant director. And I am the second in command in terms of creative eyes. And I also kind of dual wield overseeing editing and post-production as well.
Brandon Jenkins: When we think about this transition from video games into television, into animated series, what were some of the challenges of adapting a video game to a whole different medium? Like remove gameplay and now we're watching this thing through our television sets or laptop screens?
Sam Deats: You know, the funny thing is that I don't know that it's all that different from adapting just about anything else. You have a story to tell and you have the characters that you want to have in that story. And you kind of build it around that. So, you know, I don't know that it's all that different from say taking a comic book and adapting it to an animated series or to live action. I think that it's a somewhat natural progression.
Adam Deats: And, you know, there's a lot of pitfalls that people want to fall into to kind of beat the audience over the head that this video game. Remember how this is a video game? And you just don't do that. Don't. Don't worry about that kind of stuff. All you need to care about as a creator is what is the story that this game was trying to tell? Is there more that can be drawn out from it? And in terms of it making it feel integrated into the videogame universe, there's just little references that you can pull that can fit narratively into it. If you're just clever about it, like we have The Bestiary from Castlevania games in the show.
Brandon Jenkins: Okay, Adam, for those for the people who don't know, can you define what the Bestiary is?
Adam Deats: The Bestiary is an in-game listing of all the monsters that you fought. So when you encounter a monster and you kill it for the first time, it ends up in the Bestiary and it has a listing. And in this show, The Bestiary is a similar listing. The Belmonts are cataloging the creatures that they fought so that later Belmont generations are able to tackle them.
Brandon Jenkins: Which is dope, because when you think about playing a video game, it feels like a very sort of utilitarian item in the video game. But in your show, it's like a storytelling device.
Adam Deats: Right.
Brandon Jenkins: Sam, are you on the same page, do you agree?
Sam Deats: Yeah, I mean when you're, when you're kind of taking even those things, those things are all nice little references and nods and that sort of thing. But, it's also just looking at things like the general visual stylization and the feel that the original source material had. So, what are these things that we love about it? And it's that Gothic anime art style and some of the creature designs and that sort of thing that just naturally fit.
Adam Deats: Yeah. You can't.... You have to have a respect for what the property was, you know, and Castlevania has always had anime sensibilities. The second it got out the 8-bit era and it was able to do more with its visuals, Rondo of Blood, for example, and Castlevania: Blood Lines had very, very heavy anime influences and both of them. And so there was plenty to pick from in terms of core art design and stylings. And yet you have to have a respect for it. You had to know what it was trying to do and go, “You know what? They were trying a thing. Let's go that direction.”
Brandon: I like that you both brought up multiple touch points of anime. I think when people first hear the word anime, they think about the visual style. But very much like what you're saying, Adam, is the storytelling that's in it. I'm curious, where can viewers of Castlevania see the influence of anime? Can we see it in both the visual storytelling and the narrative storytelling?
Sam Deats: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Adam Deats It should be everywhere.
Sam Deats: Yeah, it's a bit of everything, and it's the visual storytelling is certainly a part of it, as well as kind of learning tricks of the trade as far as that goes. So, you know, we try we look at how anime chooses to frame shots when we're storyboarding and how to make the viewer feel, you know, certain emotions through, when we choose to hold onto on a shot or we cut to, you know, the setting during a long monologue or something like that.
Brandon Jenkins: Alright, let’s stop there for just a second.
Brandon Jenkins: I want to break this down a little more. What Sam is saying is that anime isn’t just a style of drawing: big eyes, sharp chins, and crazy colored hair. No, anime is so much more than that. It’s a genre unto itself. Anime has its own unique storytelling techniques, like using pictures to evoke different emotional beats. Here’s Adam:
Adam Deats: You know, anime is well known for trying to do whatever it can to save budget in places. So they would cut away from characters and show an object that sort of symbolic of the conversation characters are having and such. And, you know, it's funny, like it was always made fun of for that. But they were borrowing from a certain kind of cinema, like French new wavey-style cinema to kind of get away with this sort of stuff. But amusingly, I think it made the storytelling very interesting in places.
Brandon Jenkins: A second traditional convention of anime that Adam and Sam leaned into is unscripted moments with no dialogue. Shots that linger on the characters’ faces, that give the audience an idea of what’s going on inside their heads. Maybe the best example of that in Castlevania is the opening of the episode “For Love” in season 2. The Belmont Library has been destroyed, trapping Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard deep underground. The trio needs to get above ground to fight Dracula’s army. And Sypha is able to use her magic to free them.
Adam Deats: There's the moment where the three characters are on the ice pillar that's rising up to the top of the Belmont hold…
Sypha (clip): We don’t need ropes. Here we go.
Adam Deats: And the characters take a moment where there's a silence before the storm. They’re kind of thinking over and being introspective about what they're about to do. And that kind of stuff is pretty typical in anime, to kind of tell a story with visuals without being sort of tied to dialogue.
Brandon Jenkins: But — maybe the most important stylistic anime convention is lighting.
Adam Deats: You know, a lot of American cartoons are sort of trying to peel away from hyper realistic lighting in a lot of ways. They’re trying to simplify it for animation and anime, decided to sort of that out the window years ago and just go, “No, we're going to do exactly what we need to do to get something that feels somewhat integrated in real life.” It results in something that's very stark. And these days, we're able to do a lot of things digitally that emphasizes that in a big way by having a lot of atmospheric effects and whatnot, that integrate photography effects into the footage that really sends home a certain kind of feeling..
Sam Deats: Yeah, if you guys saw the before and after on some of these things of how the episode looks when it's just sort of the raw footage versus what Adam and his team does to add all of this great atmosphere that I think is very important and perfect for the show. It's incredible and it's absolutely necessary to hit the tone that we're going for.
Brandon Jenkins: The “Adam” Sam is talking about is his older brother. But there’s another Adam — Adam Connoroe. He’s the head of post-production on Castlevania and a Creative Director at Powerhouse Animation, one of the studios that produces the show. It was his job to figure out how to use lighting techniques from anime to make a story of demons and monsters feel realistic and truly bring the characters to life.
Brandon Jenkins: Think back to that scene from the very beginning — the one where Lisa Tepes is being burned as a witch. The scene takes place at night, and the only source of light is coming from the bonfire. The fire is harsh on Lisa, as she’s being burned alive. But it’s also telling us something about the man responsible for Lisa’s death — the bishop. He stands in the shadows, half in and half out of the light. Reminding us that this man has secrets, and a dark side. He’s someone that you don’t want to cross.
Bishop (clip): Wallachia could be God’s own country had I but time to burn out all the evil that hides here.
Brandon Jenkins: And when Dracula appears in the flames —
Dracula (clip): What have you done?
Brandon Jenkins: The fire grows and fades according to his moods, reminding the viewer of Dracula’s power and rage. In that one scene, we learned everything we need to know about the time, the place, and the people in Wallachia, which is partially thanks to how it’s lit. Adam talked to me about how important lighting is to animation, how it impacts Castlevania, and how he used lighting to bring his identity as a gay man into the show’s narrative.
Brandon Jenkins: How did you first initially get into animation and, more specifically, lighting?
Adam Connoroe: I originally went to school for animation and eventually kind of found my way to Powerhouse. But about a decade ago, like Powerhouse basically had no compositing department.
Brandon Jenkins: Can you define compositing for us?
Adam Connoroe: Compositing is the art of taking the various puzzle pieces of animation, character animation, background, art, effects animation and layering those together in a final composite image that enhances the mood and tone for a particular scene. And me, Adam Deats and Sam Deats were kind of the three pioneers of the compositing pipeline at Powerhouse. And over the years, Powerhouse kind of started developing a certain language to the way that we approach compositing. We saw the power that compositing and good lighting can give to a scene or a project.
Brandon Jenkins: When I think of lighting, I think of it in a live action sense, like with studio lights. What does lighting mean when we talk about animation?
Adam Connoroe: You're really kind of looking for ways to enhance the mood and the tone of a scene. So, you know, it's something that's, you know, very sentimental or overly romantic. You might have, you know, a soft, lense sort of effect to it. And it's really just kind of trying to enhance whatever the scene is telling you. Definitely, there's a degree of stylization when it comes to lighting, especially for something that is taking on this kind of anime aesthetic. And from the second that a character design was approved in pre-production, we immediately began working on post-production development, looking at ways that we could take this flat character artwork with flat colors, add in those gradients, add in the bevels and embosses, the highlights, he shine's, everything to really kind of make it stand out in a scene.
Brandon Jenkins: Is there a scene or particular moment in the show where lighting is especially important, like maybe where it creates a very specific mood or helps tell a certain story or sort of maybe the audience doesn't know it, but that scene wouldn't turn that way if it weren't for the lighting?
Adam Connoroe: I can think of one particularly good example from season one, the end of episode four, when Alucard and Trevor are fighting. There's a moment where Alucard leans in deep and almost like has a sensual moment with Trevor.
Alucard (clip): Do you have a god to put your last prayer to, Belmont?
Trevor: Yeah, dear God, please don’t let the vampire’s guts ruin my good tunic.
Adam Connoroe: And I remember me and the character's designer/supervisor, Stephanie Rainosek. We got together. We made a pact that we will make this the most homoerotic part of this show. I was like, “Sam, we're going to make this as gay as possible. Is that cool?” Right. He's like, “Yeah, absolutely. Go for it.”
Brandon Jenkins: The scene Adam is talking about goes like this. Trevor and Sypha are deep underground in Alucard’s lair. Trevor Belmont, the vampire hunter, decides to fight Alucard, who is half-vampire — and Dracula’s son. Their fight is intense — Really, they’re battling to the death. And at the last second, Alucard disarms Trevor and goes in for the kill. But just as he’s about to bite Trevor, he realizes there’s a stake pointed directly at his heart.
Alucard (clip): I can still rip your throat out.
Trevor: You can. But it won’t stop me staking you.
Alucard: But you will still die.
Trevor: But I don’t care. Killing you was the point. Living through it was just a luxury.
Brandon Jenkins: This scene is a close up of just their faces. To make the scene more “sensual”, as Adam puts it, there are a few different ingredients at play. First, Adam increased the contrast — playing up the difference between the dark and light elements of the shot. Second, is the core ingredient: the rim light — a very intense line of light surrounds the characters' silhouette. Immediately, it makes them stand out against the background, and merges them together in the frame, giving the viewer the idea that these two people are incredibly close to each other. Finally, Adam and his team added a subtle star glow, which gives that scene an almost "soap-opera-esque" sense of melodrama.
Adam Connoroe: And since then, that moment has sparked so many fanfics and people are appreciative of that fact. And so, you know, me and Stephanie got together and we're just kind of high-fiving each other as soon as she saw it. So, in a way that lighting can enhance moments and change their flavor I think that was one that gave me particular pleasure.
Brandon Jenkins: I'm curious, like sort of pulling from this well of information that the audience knows, right? Like it's sort of like, you know, that we know these things about light, even though we, many of us can't articulate it in the way that you can or the way that you all do on your set. But we all feel it. It's like I'm very curious about this bank of information that you're accessing to make something feel more romantic or make it feel frightening or intimate or funny.
Adam Connoroe: I think it'd be hard to put into concrete terms. I think there is something of an intuition to it. You know, you're looking at a lighting scenario and you're kind of just measuring your own reaction to it. You know, I imagine it's much the way that, you know, editors work.
You know, there's a certain way to assembling shots and editing things that evokes a slightly different feeling. But if you tried to put, you know, an exact description of what those decisions are you're making, it just kind of comes down to a gut feeling.
Brandon Jenkins: There’s so much more to animation than meets the eye. And it’s hard working teams like Sam and Adam Deats, and Adam Connoroe who make it look effortless for you, the audience. So next time you’re watching an anime series, and you see a scene that evokes a certain feeling, take a second to check out the lighting. It might be the secret sauce that sets your favorite show apart.
Brandon Jenkins: And that's all for this season of Behind the Scenes: Animation. We hope you enjoyed learning how animated series go from sketch to scene.
Behind The Scenes: Animation was produced by Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios. From Pineapple Street Studios, our executive producers are Max Linsky, Jenna Weiss-Berman, and Bari Finkel.
Our Lead Producer is Melissa Slaughter, and Emmanuel Hapsis produced our Disenchantment and Voltron episodes. Our Managing Producer is Gabrielle Lewis, our Associate Producer is Maria Robins-Somerville, and our intern is Brianna Garrett.
Editing by Maddy Sprung-Keyser.
Hannis Brown is our engineer who also scored our episodes.
Special thanks to all the individual teams at Netflix who helped make this show possible.
And finally, I’m your host Brandon Jenkins.
Make sure you rate, review, and subscribe for the next season, where we’ll be diving into another Netflix series. Till next time.