Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1490572
Art Director Zak Faust found clear acrylic hemispheres that we had frosted on the inside for VFX to digitally reproduce as screens for the elven workstations. The idea looked so good he found some giant versions of the hemispheres to add to the walls for VFX maps to land on. Beth Goodnight of Goodnight & Co. put together huge panels of switches, buttons, hand cranks and colored flashing lights to fill in the control room's overlook. The ceiling of the set was lowered to seven feet to seem normal for the children who played the elves, but make the average human seem comically out of place. The hallway idea worked so well, it was repeated for a connection between the conference room, where Santa would decide who was naughty or nice, and the E.L.F.S. headquarters, a sugar-coated police station in which detective Philip Marlowe would be comfortable. Mel's purchase of almost all the vintage Christmas-inspired wallpaper from a store she found in New York proved incredibly useful in these rooms. Green button tuft-looking paper in the conference room's vestibule gave way to red and silver stripes of the forced perspective hallway, losing a foot of height for every three feet of run. The main office in the headquarters had a mint-green base with vignetting on every wall, making the room look like a well-worn postcard. Mel reasoned the two most disliked treats are fruitcake and black licorice, so a jail cell for the North Pole's baddies (are there any?) was a fruitcake- textured wall with three hundred pounds of gummy candy randomly applied before the plaster dried. Complete with partially edible twisted licorice jail bars, this was truly the set to produce a tummy ache. The reindeer stables needed to be much larger than the stage footprint could provide, so we opted to create one hundred eighty degrees of stables and leaned on VFX to handle the rest. Geoff Leavitt, the visual effects supervisor, who is also a member A. & B. E.L.F.S. CONTROL ROOM. SET PHOTO. C. E.L.F.S. HALLWAY. SET PHOTO. D. E.L.F.S. POLICE STATION. SET PHOTO E. E.L.F.S. JAIL. SET PHOTO. F. E.L.F.S. CONFERENCE ROOM. SET PHOTO. G. STABLES. SKETCHUP MODEL BY HARSHITA REDDY. H. STABLES. SET PHOTO I. LA BEFANA'S HOUSE. SET PHOTO. J. LA BEFANA'S HOUSE. ILLUSTRATION DONE IN SKETCHUP VRAY AND PHOTOSHOP BY HUNTER BROWN. A B C D