The Location Managers Guild International (LMGI) is the largest organization of Location Managers and Location Scouts in the motion picture, television, commercial and print production industries. Their membership plays a vital role in the creativ
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LMGI COMPASS | Spring 2018 • 45 But we were in a city park and a state park, so we were dealing with rangers and the state of California." Through it all, Taylor collaborated closely with Shohan. Early on, the production designer spent a lot of time with the direc- tor, and, according to Taylor, "Naomi had a good understanding of what Ava wanted. We had to go through a lot of options to get the ones that really worked." "There was no compromise on anything," Shohan adds. "That's why it was difficult. During the first few weeks (of pre-produc- tion), we put up a presentation for the studio with a lot of illus- trations and references to the planets (a key part of L'Engle's story). Ava, the DP, the visual effects director and I threw around a lot of ideas and images." Taylor and Shohan, who had worked together on the 2001 Training Day, slid into a comfort- able arrangement. "This was a nice reunion," Shohan says. "Lo- cation managers either find you great locations or they don't. Alison finds you great locations." Among those they sought were the Murry house, Meg's attic bedroom, a school, the planets, a grassy field, a frozen lake and a neighborhood with identical houses. "At the beginning of every film, I spend weeks and weeks in a car with the loca- tion manager," Shohan says. "You can just be losing your mind if you're with people who are lumps. Or it can be wonderful. We had a blast. Alison is so much fun. We talked about what we wanted creatively, what we wanted politically and what we wanted creatively and politically in our own lives. We drove hundreds of miles to some pretty far-flung places trying to fig- ure out what to do, and the conversation was always lively and pithy. We formed a really wonderful friendship." Wrinkle is Taylor's biggest job to date, and it came with an op- portunity to learn something new. "This was a big visual effects movie," she says. "I have worked with some visual effects, but I had to learn a lot about what corrections can be made with visual effects and what the location has to be. For instance, the forest comes to life. There's a three-part process. It's the loca- tion itself, and then there are the art department's pieces. They might have a fake rock, and then visual effects builds on that. They're creating the rest of the environment and movement. I learned that they can get rid of things behind a tree but not what's in front of it. I worked a lot with Rich McBride, the visual effects supervisor, who was very clear in explaining what they needed." Taylor had a bigger location budget than she usually does. "That allowed me to do my job the right way," she says. "I could have the right resources, including additional people in the department to expand our scout and money to pay for ex- tra things you sometimes have to have. We did some work out at Venice Beach, shooting by the water for a couple days with a bunch of extras and a bunch of restrooms. We had to build a pathway from the parking lot to the beach—a walkway that got pieced together to roll equipment. Those things are very expensive." KALM Brittany Petros, LMGI has vivid memories of the shoot, which was depicting Red's Beach. "It's in the other world," she says. "It's this big, beautiful, gorgeous beach, and everybody is laughing and playing and having fun. Then the kids start getting sucked in, and they realize they're on one of the bad planets." The production found itself on Venice Beach because, Petros explains, "All the other beaches were booked for other shows. Will Rogers or Malibu would have been good, but by the time we knew when the scene would be on the schedule, Venice was the only beach available. It was a heavily populated scene with a lot of equipment and set dressing. With cast and crew, we prob- ably had 500 people, including 100 children, so we had to have a school room built. We didn't want them to walk too far, so we had to bring in plywood, AC and a big circus tent for them. "Since Venice Beach is public, we couldn't rent out all the park- Filming in a neighborhood with identical houses.