Honestly, I couldn’t quite make sense of it, but I was curious enough to sit down with creator Tony Yacenda. Tony was interested in me because of my work on Amanda Knox, an all-too-real true-crime documentary. In that meeting, he explained that American Vandal wasn’t a mockumentary, it was a fake documentary. There’s a difference. For the student filmmakers inside the story, this investigation into spray-painted dicks was a deeply serious piece of journalism. I signed on.

We spent a lot of late nights figuring out how to stay true to a fake documentary without slipping into mockumentary territory. Tony and I built a strict set of visual rules to stay grounded in the reality of our high school documentarians. We shot on dozens of different cameras to reflect a true mixed-media look, and developed a technique we called “pivot-point coverage.” This was essentially two camera operators attached at the hip, each on a different focal length zoom, allowing us to simulate the jump cut-heavy rhythm of real documentary footage, even though our scenes were scripted.

American Vandal developed a cult following, and Netflix picked it up for a second season. This time, our fictitious student filmmakers had a bit more budget to work with, which allowed them to incorporate dramatic re-enactments into their visual language.

The series went on to be nominated for an Emmy and won a Peabody Award, with the committee recognizing its authentic portrayal of the modern high school experience.

In the end, this elaborate dick joke turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly rewarding projects of my career.