Watch the complete episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFVw6zOFPXA Hello again. I'm back to tell you a little about the making of Children of the Northern Lights. Once the script development process was completed and we were greenlit by ITVS, the making of the film began on the ground in the spring of 2012. First and foremost we had to secure workable locations because of how significantly those locations dictated our design decisions overall. Our production design and locations were by far the most intimidating elements of the film to achieve within our budget. Ultimately, with the help of our tireless Locations Manager Mia Thompson, we found a fantastic metal shop/artists workshop space in Brooklyn for our interior set build. We had the pleasure of sharing the space with practicing circus performers and trapeze artists so we felt right at home. The search for our exterior location ended up being much more complicated. We needed a very large, treeless but natural environment where we would have the ability to capture long wide shots that could communicate the expansiveness of the alien moon and the isolation of our characters in deep space. In the end, we found an incredible multi-tiered rock quarry using Google Earth. It's pretty easy to pinpoint huge treeless open spaces with no buildings in their aerial images, but the trick is finding the right person to speak to who might actually be open to the idea of a film crew doing a week-long night shoot. Very long story short, we were thrilled with the stunning New Jersey quarry and they were game to work with us. It was more than we had ever hoped and all of us felt like we could finally visualize the essence of the project...then a week before the shoot, the location pulled out. I won't bore you with all the nitty gritty but after many conversations and some serious begging, we came to understand that they were still very open to the film, but their own scheduling constraints had been the real issue. So, we were able to reschedule the exterior shoot, but it had to happen over a month late. ITVS was very supportive and saw the undeniable value of the quarry so they worked with us and allowed us to move forward despite the delays. With the locations settled, we focused on working with all of our exceptional collaborators. We were working with Wyatt Garfield and Shlomo Godder as our two DPs—they split the job between the interior and exterior shoots respectively. Our fearless Production Designer Tom McMillan was hard at work at the seemingly insurmountable task of building our space ships (we approached the interior and exterior of the ship as separate builds). Brenda Abbandandolo was working her costume magic despite the limited funds for her department (you'll see how very cool JOHN SUVLU's helmet is.) And Andrew was deep in rehearsals with Mike Crane and Julienne Kim and loving every minute of it. I could gush about the talent and hard work of all these people for pages, but their work will speak for itself. We truly hit the jackpot in so many ways with this team of artists. Their skill, patience, and passion grounded us throughout prep and continued on through our intense production process. Consequently, I can't mention our department heads without singing the praises of our entire crew. Their positivity and enthusiasm started day one and was still on full display even at 5am on our last delirious night in space. We had our fair share of disasters which ate away almost a full day of our shoot in an already jam-packed schedule and we couldn't be more grateful to our team. The film would never be what it is without each and every one of them. There's many more stories to tell but it's probably better to leave those in the past. The honest truth is that we actually shot this in space and the aliens are real. (Side note: Take a look at our Behind-the-Scenes video and you'll get to hear a bit more from the actors and Andrew on some of the creative aspects of the film. ) Enjoy! Cara

• published: 21 Jul 2014
• views: 1