Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1507937
3 0 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3 looked amazing in the pictures. We dashed over—it was amazing! Brian had wanted a log cabin of some sort, and this one was a 150-year-old wooden house that had been moved to its current location and then lovingly added on to in the '70s. It was set in a clearing in the woods, down a long drive and it had a lovely private pond. It was missing windows on the second floor we needed, and, in fact, the roof had been pretty beat up in the last hurricane, as had a lot of the trees, but we could fix that! We now had a house that felt like it was special enough, with a sense of comfort and history, that Brynn would choose to stay there despite all that happened to her before the start of the story, and it hit all of the practical marks Brian needed. But what made it "Brynn"? The script made it clear she had talent. She designed her own clothes, and hand-illustrated notes to go with them, as well as decorating the mysterious letters she was writing. There was also a clue in the first pages of the script where it was noted she had been building a village out of Lemax Halloween porcelain houses. There was no way we could actually use those—tons of clearance problems there, with our characters' backstory, and especially in that it all gets destroyed the first night fighting the alien. But we needed that sense of Brynn trying to create a perfect little village for herself. While looking for a way to treat her garden (we decided that Brynn grows as much of her own food as she can, to avoid having to go to the store), I ran across some images of hand- painted birdhouses. Birdhouses seemed like an apt metaphor for the isolated Brynn… So I pitched Brian and the producers the idea of creating that miniature village out of hand-painted birdhouses, ones that Brynn would have carefully adapted as her own, backing it up with a lovely illustration by Roberto Fernández Castro. It showed how Brynn used her skills and talents to make something special, creating her own world. They loved the idea. (A quick shout-out here to Lizzy Klein and A A. EXT. BRYNN'S GARDEN, LAYOUT SKETCH BY RAMSEY AVERY, OVER DRAWING BY JAIME SALAZAR. BRYNN NEEDED TO BOTH GROW HER OWN FOOD TO AVOID INTERACTING WITH THE TOWNSFOLK AND TO CREATE A LOVELY COTTAGE FEEL FOR HERSELF. B. EXT. BRYNN'S GARDEN, UNREAL MODEL RENDERING BY JAIME SALAZAR SHOWING THE IMPROVEMENTS BRYNN MADE TO HER HOUSE. C. EXT. BRYNN'S HOUSE, AS BUILT. SET PHOTO. D. BRYNN'S YARD AND POND. PRODUCTION STILL. B C D