Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1184216
card illustrations, along with Thomas Kinkade paintings), he still wanted the Pole to be as much like a real town, in a real place, as possible. From the start, we decided that it had to be built out of doors, in a mountain location where it always snows during the winter, and have the set buildings be covered by real falling snow. Additionally, Marc decided that in this world, the North Pole citizens all skated everywhere, so I laid out a town that was centered on an ice pond surrounded by circumferential ice canals. This real-world approach presented a whole host of serious logistical challenges. The studio, before green lighting the picture, wanted to know how it would look, where it would be shot, and how much it was going to cost. I was hired for a period of three months to work with the director, the visual effects supervisor and a number of concept artists to come up with a plan. The start of principal photography was scheduled for mid-October of 2017; I started in on the development phase in January of that year. Aside from the design work, there were two immediate logistical issues that needed to be dealt with: where to build the town and how to make the ice for the pond. Since the production needed snow, it was a given that we would have to shoot in Canada, and it was decided that we would do the stage work and the many locations in Vancouver. Although about half of the scenes were set in Phoenix, as is frequently the case, finances dictated shooting a lot of the Phoenix work not in Arizona, but in Vancouver—an additional challenge, and a different story. It was a tremendous advantage that the development phase allowed locations to be scouted in the winter, which enabled me to see just what a particular location environment would look like under the snow. I scouted about ten different towns and locales in British Columbia. The fact that the North Pole in reality has no vegetation prompted me to consider some places that were very remote, a flight away from Vancouver, and very difficult to access. Using one of those would have made the entire project enormously difficult and expensive. As it turned out, in one of those rare and happy occurrences that occasionally the gods bestow on a picture, we found Whistler Olympic Park, a location that was only two hours from Vancouver, logistically very convenient, readily accessible to the crew and equipment, financially viable, and yet highly picturesque and aesthetically perfect. Of the four different places that I had initially intended to scout with the director, I started with Whistler. On the day we scouted, big fat snowflakes were falling, the pine trees were heavy with snow, the site was white and magical, and Marc was so taken with it that, based on the photos of the other locations, and my opinion that Whistler was by far our best bet, we did not even bother scouting anywhere else. A. PARKING LOT LOCATION AT WHISTLER OLYMPIC PARK, WHERE THE VILLAGE WOULD BE BUILT. B. DIGITAL MODEL BY ANDREW LI. C. 3D PRINTED MODEL. D. THE BUILDINGS WERE CONSTRUCTED AND PAINTED ON THE STAGES (AND IN THE PARKING LOTS) IN VANCOUVER. E. THE FRAMING OF THE BUILDINGS BEING LAID OUT. F. THE PREBUILT PIECES ASSEMBLED ON SITE. TO GIVE TOPOGRAPHIC VARIETY, THE BUILDINGS WERE SET AT DIFFERENT HEIGHTS ABOVE THE ALREADY SLOPING GRADE, SOME BY AS MUCH AS 12 FEET. TRUCKED-IN SNOW WOULD GRADE UP TO THEIR LEVEL. PHOTOS BY MAHER AHMAD. A B C