Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1184216
N O E L L E | P E R S P E C T I V E 6 3 The inciting incident of the story line for the Disney Christmas fi lm Noelle is the passing of Santa Claus. His eldest son, Nick, who is in line to be the next Santa, hates the cold and has no Santa skills. He is incapable of distinguishing a nice kid from a naughty one, and in his training runs he keeps crashing the sleigh into the practice roof. His fl ighty sister Noelle, who basically does nothing but shop and make fancy Christmas cards, suggests that he take a quick break to some place warm. So Nick runs off to Phoenix and, loving its heat and his new job as a yoga instructor, sends word to the North Pole that he is never coming back, and will never be Santa. So Christmas is approaching and there is no Santa. Everyone at the Pole is angry at Noelle for telling her brother to leave, and she has to travel to Phoenix with her nanny to try to get him to return. Much of the fi lm is set in the North Pole, and this gave me the opportunity to design a number of North Pole interiors, including Santa's cottage, his workshop, the town hall, the cookie cottage, the wrapping cottage and several others. But the biggest undertaking was the design and building of the North Pole town itself. Most often Santa's villages in movies are built within the comfortable confi nes of a studio, where there is the kind of control that one always gets from shooting on a stage set, with the added advantage of not having to deal with real snow. However, a town on a stage can look cramped or claustrophobic. Although Marc Lawrence, the director of Noelle, wanted the set to look like a Christmas card (a lot of the research I pulled was literally from Christmas A. SANTA'S VILLAGE SET. PHOTOSHOP ILLUSTRATION BY HOWARD LAU BASED ON ANDREW LI'S SKETCHUP MODEL. MARC LAWRENCE, THE DIRECTOR OF NOELLE, WANTED THE SET TO LOOK LIKE A CHRISTMAS CARD, AND YET AS MUCH LIKE A REAL TOWN IN A REAL PLACE AS POSSIBLE, SO IT WAS BUILT OUTDOORS WHERE THE SET BUILDINGS WOULD BE COVERED BY REAL FALLING SNOW. B. FIRST PRELIMINARY VILLAGE LAYOUT. DRAWN ON LOCATION BY PRODUCTION DESIGNER MAHER AHMAD. C. PLAN FOR THE VILLAGE TAKEN FROM THE SKETCHUP MODEL BY ANDREW LI. THE SET AS BUILT CONSISTED OF NINETEEN FULL BUILDINGS (MOST OF WHICH HAD FINISHED INTERIORS), A GAZEBO, A BRIDGE AND A SKATEABLE ICE POND WITH CONNECTING ICE CANALS.