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A Christmas movie?

I am very excited about being hired to direct a Christmas movie for next year. I have been working extremely hard on preparing for our production which will begin at the end of this month. The star of the show is a dog who saves Christmas with the help from one special little girl. I am still waiting for the final word from the producers as to which actress will play as the little girl but I am confident that we will have a strong leading actress for the part. For the Santa in this movie we are trying to create something different from the traditional Swiss chalet style Santa. I want our Santa to be believable counterpart to the main character who is a very bright young girl.

 

This week I have been scouting out locations and prop shopping with my art director. We checked out some great prop facilities in the valley earlier this week. The first stop on our list was "History for Hire". If you have ever been there, then you know how amazing this place is. They have every period prop that you could possibly imagine.

 

As far as locations for our North Pole we found an amazing old factory location in downtown Los Angeles that we will be adapting for our Santa's workshop and living area. The location has so much character and has really grown on me. I hate to use the term Steampunk but that is sort of the inspiration for the look and feel of this version of Santa's world. The best part about finding this factory locations is that is has so many various locations in one central place. Shooting in this warehouse will enable us to shoot more than half of the movie in one location. So far of the places we have scouted we are convinced that we can lock our shoot down to just three locations for the entire movie. We will have the warehouse in downtown, a house possibly one we've already scouted in Simi Valley and a movie theater. The theater we are looking at now is an amazing old theater with a Gothic motif inside and a more retro look on the exterior. So far everything we have been looking at has added new depth to our story. Each location has pushed our creativity to the next level and each challenge has helped us forge a stronger connection between the story and the design.

SANTA'S DEN AREA
 
EVIL VILLAIN'S LAIR

I am continuously surprised by the amount of production value we are getting out of the locations we have found here in L.A. and by the quality of crew members who really care with a passion about what they are doing. Everyone on board for this production so far has been amazing. Each person has gone above and beyond my expectations. I only hope that we can all continue down this path until the end and come out with a movie that each of us will be proud to show to the world.

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