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
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469312
28 • LMGI COMPASS | Spring 2022 Matt brought in local Calgary LM Mike Johansen/LMGI, KALM Jason Liadis/LMGI from Vancouver and scouts Ken Noda and Warren Cronin. Together, they began searching Calgary and its surrounding environs for the more than 100 unique locations the series would require. As soon as they'd found locations they thought could work, they'd hop on Zoom to share everything. "I absolutely hated 'Zoom Scouting,'" says Matt, "but thankfully, Renée was incredible at dealing with it and once she was here, the experience got better." Matt would provide photos of the various locations for Renée or she'd go get them herself, taking photos from a ton of angles. "On occasion, I'd have our art director act out the scenes and then I'd frame the shots in the way I had discussed with the DPs," says Renée. Back at the ofce, after a bit of post tweaking to maybe change the color of a wall, she'd add tonal and historical images, then combine them with shots Matt had taken and put them all into PDF les that the team would view in Zoom sessions. While there is no replacement for actually standing in a location, Matt believes the presentations made a big difference in the way that locations were perceived. "The PDFs Renée created were just beautifully rendered and, even on a laptop screen, blew everyone away," Matt says. "It made things a lot easier." Ultimately, the creative team managed to select many of the locations from those presentations. Of course, they still had to visit in-person all of the pre-approved locations once everyone arrived in Calgary to conrm they'd made the right choices. Only a few had been fully approved from a distance due to construction times. "The fact that I could feel comfortable signing off on shooting in Calgary and start choosing these locations without ever having set foot there in my life," says Lance, "is not just a credit to Matt being able to nd these places, it's a credit to Matt and Renée knowing what lenses to shoot the stills and video on so that I could get an understanding of the physical space—because you don't want to walk into a location and go, 'guys, this is a 3x3 box … it looked like a mansion!'" Anchors Very early in discussions about the look and feel of the show, Lance had set a unique challenge for the team that would factor into nearly every location they had to nd: He wanted the characters to be able to walk from an interior to an exterior without breaking the shot and without the use of digital trickery. It wasn't that a hero house had to be period, but that every house in frame once the camera came out the door had to be period! In other words, they needed entire neighborhoods to be able to double 1980s Utah. In Canada. In 2021. "I wanted the characters to be liberated so you could feel like they were just coming and going, and it just happened to be 1984 out there and that's really hard," says Lance. "In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel like I really owe Matt," he laughs. As soon as he was back in Calgary, Matt started looking at small towns to nd what he called "anchors." "For me," says Matt, "it came down to four locations: the police station, Pyre's house, the Lafferty family house and Brenda and Allen's house where the murders took place." One of the rst places he went to scout was a town about an hour north of Calgary called Didsbury. He had worked there a bit on Fargo Season 2 for FX and thought it might work. "The whole town is sort of stuck in time," he says. While walking around taking photos, Matt spotted the old re station at the end of one of the main streets. The last time he'd been there, it was still in operation, but this time, he noted that it was all sealed up. He immediately reached out to someone from the town but was told it was being remediated for asbestos and was set to be torn down. "That was a bummer," he laughs. But then, in one of the rst instances of fortune smiling on the team, something changed… About two or three weeks later, Matt took Renée up to Didsbury to look at a vacant town ofce. "We stopped for coffee," Renée remembers, "and I saw this sort of '60s-style building on a corner— the re house—and said, 'I love that! Can we have that?' without knowing he'd already asked and been told we couldn't use it." Matt reached out to a new contact with the city and, despite having been told it was a no-go before, decided to inquire about the location again. "The guy was going to bring me the keys for the town ofce, and I From top: The police station before, during construction and after.