A Backdrop Trio: Concept to Delivery in 5 Weeks
The Devil’s Pool, Wissahickon Valley Park
“There is no biz like show biz and once the train starts moving it doesn’t stop to wait for vendors,” or so I was once told by a seasoned art director. Budgets can be tight, but deadlines even more. So when we were called about providing three wintry backings for a feature film this past January with only a notion of what the production needed, but delivery by March 10th, we got moving on concept and location ideas, photography, editing and printing.
In the Last week of January 2025 we were contacted by the production team of a new feature film. Filming in Connecticut, the main scenes take place in a house overlooking a lake surrounded by rocky outgrowths. Given this is an actual house, the dwelling is built high enough to provide sweeping views of the lake, why would it not. However the book the feature is based upon has a more claustrophobic feel and the design team wanted to take artistic liberties with two of the sets, placing them within rocky gullies. Unfortunately no such views are available at the filming location, so we were approached to see if we could create (at first) two backings to match this art direction.
At the time we did not have any images in our catalog that fit their exact needs, however Pennsylvania and Connecticut are similar in look and it was currently winter. So I knew we could find a location near us that would fit the art direction. Within an hour I had sent a few locations to the production designer where we could potentially capture images for these backings.
By January 30th, the Wissahickon Valley Park was selected by production as our backing shoot location and I had captured several vantages from within the park. These included many rocky outgrowths to choose one from, the Devil’s Pools (a natural gully carved by a running brook), and an overlook of the Wissahickon Creek, which did not fit their art direction exactly but I was particularly excited to stumble upon and add into our catalog. (It’s a great landscape view for a backing given the opening in the forest, and I am now planning on capturing multiple versions of throughout 2025.) Turned out the production liked the latter as well and added that onto the order for now three backings in total.
During the first two weeks of February the weather in both PA and CT went from seasonally warm with all snow & ice melting to snowing 3 inches to warm once again. This created continuity headaches for the production and they were unsure if the snow cover in the images would work. Given the proximity of the Wissahickon to my house, I was able to capture all three scenes with more snow and without any. Ultimately they decided on keeping the originals since the light covering of snow and ice would be a good average for the changing conditions on site.
By February 17th production approved the final selections and provided the crops along with retouching notes. Retouching included replacing the skies, editing out the sun and blows outs from, and removing a significant amount of graffiti from the Devil’s Pool image along with the barrier on the aqueduct bridge above. The graffiti removal is what gave me the most concern, but given the new tools added to Photoshop we spent not even two hours removing it whereas a couple years ago this would have taken an entire day. We also increased contrast and saturation, and added an overall coolness to the rocks.
All this took place over the next week and the images were approved for prepress February 26th. All three backings were then printed, seamed, edged, off-gassed and delivered by March 7th, three days ahead of deadline.