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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found the house in the West Adams District, which is where Ava wanted the Murrys to be living." DuVernay went along on a number of the scouts. "The location team took lots of pictures and showed them to Naomi, who fil- tered them," Taylor says. "Then she and I would go scout and filter even further. The ones that got checkmarks from Naomi are the ones we wanted to show Ava in person. She was tireless on the scouts. If she didn't like any of the locations, we'd go back to the drawing board." Once they settled on the house, they then had to find a location for Meg's bedroom. "The book and the movie both start with the line, 'It was a dark and stormy night,'" Taylor says. "Meg is upstairs in her bedroom, but the house we chose did not have a suitable bedroom. So we did a lot of searching." In the book, Meg's bedroom is in the attic. "Ava wanted that attic look," Merrifield says. "We found another house in the West Ad- ams District that had the classic roofline and triangular windows." "The Murry house was a huge set," KALM Pedro Mata, LMGI says. For his work on the film, Mata recently won COLA's Assis- tant Location Manager of the Year. "It was almost like a whole block because of the lighting they did," he says, "lighting from the street before and the street after. There was rain. That was a big, big thing to arrange." An optimist, Mata doesn't see prob- lems as problems. "I call them challenges," he says. "We are on the street filming with people all the time. Lots of things are going on. If we tackle all the challenges while we're prepping, there are no problems on film days. It's like the circus is coming to town, but actually it's coming to one house or one street." Mata, who has worked with Taylor for 15 years, holds her in high regard. "Alison is awesome," he says. "She's very assertive and knows what she wants. And she's very supportive when you need the help. She's very clear and serious. You see how happy she is when you get something, especially when it was challenging." For producer Jim Whitaker, the Humboldt County sequences were the toughest moments to capture. "Patrick's Point State Park and Sequoia Park in Eureka were the most physically difficult locations in terms of what the actors were doing," he says. "It was also chal- lenging to find a way to get cameras into a place that matched the action." Hard work paid off. "We got incredible shots with a Spider- cam running down a gully," he says. "You're traveling through and following these kids running away from the monster that's follow- ing them. That was logistically challenging." "They did a lot of stuff on this film that no one has really done before," Northern California (NORCAL) ALM Patti Stammer, LMGI says. "It was amazing to watch the kids running up and down these steep gullies with a Spidercam coming through the trees watching them." Stammer joined the production after Bal- ton scouted NORCAL locations, searching for a place that could be the forests of Camazotz. "My brief was looking for interest- ing natural environments," Balton says. "I looked at the quality of the trees, the density, the texture of the bark, the spacing of the trees and other vegetation. It depends on what the director wants—claustrophobia or depth of field." Once DuVernay chose the locations, Stammer says, "Alison called me and said, 'I need somebody to fix anything that goes wrong.' In fact, very few things went wrong. We were in Patrick's The Murry house in the West Adams District. LMGI COMPASS | Spring 2018 • 47