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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For the most part, New Mexico's geography only adds to the quality of life that led both Christensen and Orona to base them- selves there full time. Before they moved to "The Land of En- chantment" (the state's official motto), they both lived in other places doing myriad other jobs. "I worked cattle, drove trucks, did scenic painting for a couple years and I built crates for ship- ping art," Christensen says. "All of it ended up being college for locations." He got his start in Los Angeles on a TV show and almost immediately started working on big-budget features. Orona studied architecture in college and is classically trained in feng shui. She ran a landscape design business in London for more than a decade before she moved back to the States and got into locations by way of an extra's casting gig in her home state. That led to a job as an assistant on the 2008 miniseries Comanche Moon. "It was brutal so I got broken in quickly," she remembers. "All Westerns are brutal. We filmed 16-hour days for three months in 100-degree temperatures. I remember days when there were two of us with pop-up tents and we'd have 400 extras and people passing out from heatstroke." Not long after that, Christensen hired Orona as an assistant on In the Valley of Elah and they've been working together ever since. "Shani and I are on the same page in terms of how we deal with a location," Christensen says. "I could go back to every location I've ever been to and they'd be happy to see me and Shani has done that too. She has the same sensibility." Orona says it's always a difficult dance to advocate for a location on the same level as a director's vision but it becomes a matter of survival in an incentive state. "It's our bread and butter. There will be many times when we have to go up against production and say we can't do this or that for whatever reason, and we're really the only department that faces that dynamic." She's also gotten politically active, working to increase state and local lawmakers' understanding of how incentive financing works. "I lived near the border for a year doing these deals to shoot there and I discovered how astonishing the locations are, but there's no infrastructure to support filmmaking," Orona says. "So I met as many politicians as I could to explain why film companies have to be near infrastructure. It's been this mission of mine to continue to bring film down there so they start to see the dollars coming into their communities." Christensen and Orona are particularly proud of the relation- ships they've cultivated with tribal representatives on the state's reservations. "We have both cleaned up messes that other peo- ple made," Christensen says. "It's on my mind every time I do a show—to try to prove there's a way to do this job successfully that makes both sides happy, to give everything the director and the production needs, and at the same time, to be good guests. It's easier to do it the way Shani and I do than any other way." Orona adds that living outside of Los Angeles helps keep her objective focused on the art of making movies. "There's a buf- fer here and we just don't get caught up in the story of what it is to be in film. There is a huge story built around that and here Border crossing set for vehicles crossing into Mexico