Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/929567
pulled photos and charts from the period. I wanted to control the color palette to give the sense of looking back through time into 1953. For a modern piece, my instinct would not be to play with complementary colors, I often prefer a more narrow color range, but my research and the mood of the opening of the film led me there—red and green, oxblood and mint, danger and innocence. These colors became a theme throughout the film. The Rainier house Elise grew up in developed from two separate locations. The interior was shot at Mentryville, a historic Victorian that sits in the spot of one of the first developed and longest working oil wells in Los Angeles. The house has the beautiful simplicity of the period, with clean lines that hint at both safety and rigidity. I was attracted to the age of the home, built around 1889, a rather old structure for Los Angeles, and standing in it you feel the thick air of its history. I felt that would be conveyed well on screen. The story being told is of an old pain, a lifelong struggle for Elise that I believed Mentryville provided. I added wallpaper in various rooms and new kitchen flooring, all based in the mint-green hue. The areas in the house that were visited by danger were given red accents: father's chair, Elise's childhood bed. It's a rudimentary concept, but effective for the period, and as a prophesy in color. Oxblood red is a beautiful color and one that entices. That is an important story point in this and other films of the series. The initial plan was to use the Mentryville location as both interior and exterior, but then the production scouted the oil field house, a lone brick house located in the middle of an oil field in the middle of Los Angeles. I cannot remember exactly why we looked at another location. What I do remember is getting really excited by the dry brush and black oil rigs that flanked the dirt road up to this house. It felt like an old New Mexico oil site. A hillside vista was needed to drop in the massive VFX prison that was planned next to the Rainier house, telling the story of the proximity of the two. On reflection, I believe that Mentryville did not provide this adequately so, become water, look around for other options. Of course the red brick exterior of the oil field house, overgrown with dead vines, were features that also attracted me. There was a faded red wooden garage that looked like a place Elise's father would use. Danger. The fact that this old brick house, which appears to be a lonely structure sitting far away from civilization next to a menacing prison, actually exists dead in the center of the city of Los Angeles is just fun. And it was not affordable to shoot this in New Mexico. Become water. It was a fluke that both of the Rainier house locations in Los Angeles were built on oil field sites. There was nothing in the script about oil, just that her father worked for the prison. I think this added visual layer tells a more complex story. I had to press to get to use both locations and press to make them work together. The backside of the oil field house offered a better exterior for blocking with a driveway right up to it, but it had a patio with a river rock fireplace. A brick façade was built on the patio with large rectangular Victorian-style windows and matched the original door from Mentryville, blending it in seamlessly. At Mentryville, a clapboard home, brick spots that could be seen out windows and doors were added. The film opens on the prison gates of Dewbend Penitentiary in 1953, in a close-up of the lock. The lock is an element that is seen numerous times in the film, so the design of the shape and scale were very important. The lock is a transition from one state of being to another, freedom versus imprisonment, reality versus "the Further." I wanted it to be a strong image and I decided to use a shield shape. The shield represents a line of protection, once crossed, safety is in question. As in past chapters of Insidious, the door into the Further is red, but in this version, it is no C A B D E