Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1184216
F E A T U R E T I T L E G O E S H E R E | P E R S P E C T I V E 6 7 E G H A running sheet of scaled elevations of the buildings allowed me to keep an eye on how the size of all of the buildings related to each other. The grandest building was the town hall, whose tower reached a height of sixty-seven feet. Although some of the buildings had complete interiors in situ (for example, the Elfrorium) which allowed inside/outside shots, others, including the town hall and Santa's workshop, had their interiors built on the stages in Vancouver. Long before the buildings were trucked to Whistler and erected, I had the crew outline all of them in the parking lot with two by fours; the director and the director of photography put a viewfinder on them to confirm their placement. Once the buildings were in place, hundreds of truckloads of snow were brought in to raise the grade to the building sills, and the snow pushed into place with snowcats and shoveled by hand. Then sleepers were laid down over the snow and hundreds of 4 x 8 sheets of plastic were placed on top of them to make the skateable artificial ice pond and canals. The plastic ice panels have interlocking protrusions akin to a jigsaw puzzle and the manufacturer warned that in such a large area of interlocking plastic, the thermal expansion and contraction would be considerable. A very clever loose-lay system was developed with cantilevered snowbanks around the irregular edges of the pond that allowed the plastic free movement. The iron bridge was in the form of a segmental arch and jumped the elevation from the ice pond to the schoolhouse door, and a steel gazebo that, based on its massive engineering, was nicknamed the bomb shelter (its 24-foot span had to hold three feet of dead load snow plus the wind load on only eight posts with no portal bracing). E. ROUGH ELEVATION FOR HOLLIES BY HOLLY. F. 3D MODEL FOR HOLLIES BY ETIENNE GRAVRAND. G. FINISHED HOLLIES SHOP ON SITE. H. AN IRON BRIDGE SPANNED THE ELEVATION FROM THE ICE POND TO THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR. NEXT TO IT SAT ST. ELFSWHERE HOSPITAL. PHOTOS BY MAHER AHMAD. F