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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10 • LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2026 Behind the Scenes of 'Meet the Finalists' 2026 This year, the LMGI's annual "Meet the Finalists" series looked a little different. For the first time, rather than gathering our finalists together for a series of live Zoom panels, we pre-recorded individual interviews with the location professionals behind this year's LMGI Award-nominated features, television series and commercials, making the conversations available for LMGI members to view and consider as voting opened. This year's series was produced and moderated by me and co- moderated by LMGI members JJ Levine, Miguel Tapia, Gina Vreeland, James Parker, Sonia Villerias, Mick Ratman, Robin Macdonald and JP O'Connor. It was a format we had hoped to explore for several years, and one that finally came together in 2026. Pre-recording gave us the flexibility to accommodate finalists working across countries and time zones—and, perhaps most importantly, working, period. At a moment when our industry has seemed slower than usual, it was heartening to encounter so many finalists who were busy on shows and squeezing us into their schedules wherever they could. And squeeze us in, they did! Some joined us from cars. Others found a few minutes between tech scouts or during breaks in their workdays. More than one interview was conducted from what might be considered the location professional's natural habitat: slightly sweaty, sitting in a vehicle, with yellow directional signage haphazardly strewn somewhere in the background. The new format also allowed us to hear from nearly every finalist across six categories: Contemporary Television, Period Television, Limited Series, Contemporary Film, Period Film and Commercials. This year's Contemporary Television finalists represented Landman Season 2, Pluribus, Slow Horses Season 5, The Diplomat and The Night Manager Season 2. Period Television took us into the worlds of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Fallout Season 2, House of Guinness, Stranger Things Season 5 and Young Sherlock. Our Limited Series finalists came from Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, Beef Season 2, Black Rabbit, Chief of War and Lord of the Flies, while our feature film conversations spanned 28 Years Later, Bugonia, F1, One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams. by Sasha Alvarez Denisoff/LMGI Rounding out the series were the location professionals behind this year's nominated Commercials: 2025 Emirates NBA Cup: Who Will Capture the Cup?, American Express: There's Nothing Like Platinum, Covered California: For the Love of Californians, Toyota Trucks: They Don't Read Reviews and Greater Zion: Why Hollywood Chooses This Landscape. As always, the projects may have been wildly different in scale, geography, period and subject matter, but the conversations revealed plenty of common ground. Again and again, we heard stories about solving the seemingly impossible, adapting to circumstances beyond anyone's control, finding creative answers to logistical problems, and helping filmmakers put something onscreen that audiences might never realize required an extraordinary amount of work to accomplish. There were so many great conversations and anecdotes throughout the interviews, but one in particular stands out as representative of our international mission. The team from The Night Manager joined me and moderator/ translator Sonia Villerias for an interview conducted almost entirely in Spanish. Speaking in their native language allowed the team to discuss their work with greater nuance, but it was also important to them that the conversation could be shared with students and others in their local filmmaking community in Colombia. It was a welcome reminder that while our productions may take us all over the world, the community represented by the LMGI extends far beyond any one production center, country or language. There was something especially fitting about hearing so many of these stories while the finalists themselves were still out doing the work. Instead of asking everyone to step completely outside their working lives and assemble for a formal panel this year, we occasionally got to meet them right in the middle of those lives: on the road, between scouts, on location, and