Synopsis: A glimpse at the power that hardcore fans have to potentially influence the production design of a film franchise. (Guest contribution provided by David Brisbin, a production designer on The Twilight Saga: New Moon.)

During prep on The Twilight Saga: New Moon it hit me that movie design has crossed a line.

I was roaming back and forth on the road scoping out the paint department’s aging work on an idyllic house and barn set in a small meadow. It was a remote spot, so I was a bit surprised when a woman pushing a baby carriage trundled up and said hello. “That’s for a movie, isn’t it?” she asked. 

I go out of my way to be gracious to anyone in the orbit of a location, but on this project the producers had asked for an extreme level of secrecy.  As warmly as I could, I ducked; “Oh, you know, don’t you think someone could just get tired of green and decide to paint their place red?” She shot back, “Sure, but they wouldn’t keep painting over everything until it looked real old.  It’s Jacob’s house isn’t it?” She actually seemed to be salivating at the idea of Jacob (one of the two male heartthrobs in our story). The location owner’s name was spelled out on the mailbox right next to us, so I told her the place belonged to him. She was unfazed. “I can see all the fishing stuff you brought in over there, and Jacob’s dad was a fisherman before his accident, so it’s pretty obvious... can you just tell me this; is Chris Weitz the director?” It was hard not to grin at how much she knew about Twilight -- but I bowed out. “Sorry, can’t answer that.” And on I went about a normal day in movie prep.

Late that night everything changed. There was a shriek in the front of the art department followed by rumble of astonishment. Our art director, Catherine Ircha, had discovered that the woman with the baby carriage had recounted that afternoon conversation on one of the Twilight fan blogs. She contended that my evasiveness -- in contradiction to the evidence in the meadow -- made it very likely that she had discovered a major Vancouver location for New Moon. Jacob’s house was a key venue in Twilight Saga novels by Stephenie Meyer, but had not appeared in the first movie -- so this was a big find. The fan sites were electrified. The next day another fan (credited as ‘YouTuber Sunnykins’) posted a drive-by video of the location with her voiceover explanation of why this was surely Jacob’s place. She saw the red paint as solid proof, but she did note that the “barn or shed thing” did not precisely match the garage of the books.

The fan blogs went on in subsequent days and weeks to enthusiastically pick apart and analyze the merits of any design choices they could find in posted photos, videos and speculations. The sentiment on Jacob’s location in general was exuberantly positive. But a howl of alarm went up when a grey/blue VW Rabbit was parked out front by the set decorating department. The Rabbit in the book was RED and this grey/blue thing wouldn’t wash.  (The red one was, in fact, being prepped elsewhere and the grey/blue one was merely about parts).

To protect from prying eyes, the producers eventually had the grips install a 12’ high barrier of solids around Jacob’s entire property. Despite this and round-the-clock security, a determined set tracker still managed to break into Jacob’s house, take photos of the dressed interior, and promised online to post the shots. A fan blogged “I know these photos are sooo wrong, but I’m still dying to see ‘em! Like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, my TwiCrack addiction is a disease -- I want my PRECIOUS!!” 

Throughout the show -- in closed-to-public wilderness reserves, on distant beaches, at far-flung location build sites, not to mention in a public school and in city parks and streets -- the onslaught of fans shooting photos and video was astounding. Our elaborate and creative production effort to keep it at bay was just never enough to seal every ‘light leak’. And the results -- here’s what counts -- were IMMEDIATE. 

Even the professional paparazzi (hanging off freeway abutments and hiking over cliffs to get shots) couldn’t get imagery posted any faster than the uber tracker fan-base. Oceans were not even a deterrent. Late in the production, I was building a fountain and dressing a public piazza in Tuscany for our last week of shooting. The fan machine was so hungry and efficient that they shot and posted every step of our construction, paint and dressing progress in that piazza so that when the art department in Vancouver came to work each day, they could scrutinize stills and video on public blogs showing precisely what had been accomplished by wrap time in Italy a few hours earlier.

Anyone on the New Moon production could regale you with stories of the online and in person fan fervor -- but a lot of it follows the patterns of previous pop movies. The main excitement, naturally, focused absolutely on the cast. (Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner: Numbers 3, 6, &16 on the summer imdb star-meter). Further, anyone in art departments on other mammoth franchise movies of recent years could tell whopping tales of how internet enabled fan(atic)s have proliferated. Breathless chat room debates and highly networked fan groups responding instantly to every rumor, teaser, or shred of news -- REAL TIME FAN ENGAGEMENT -- that’s old news. 

New Media savants have also long kept an eye on the mash-ups, machinimas, lego-film knock-offs, blog sites and other forms of FAN-MADE MEDIA in response to beloved movies -- that’s old news too. What I am arguing here is that on New Moon (and presumably other shows shot in 2009) these two strands converged on the back of the current wave of tech tools in the hands of fans. The result is something new: INSTANT FAN-MADE MEDIA.  And instant, in this case, is a lot faster than movie production:

Consider this. On our biggest shoot day in Tuscany, in the piazza of Montepulciano, we had 1000 extras. Privacy was out of the question. 

In our scene, the leading boy, Edward (played by Pattinson), having decided to do himself in, was to step out the front door of the late medieval town hall into bright sunlight. (Sun being a big problem for a vampire boy.) The leading girl, Bella (played by Stewart) was to race desperately among the throngs, through the fountain and plow into Edward simultaneously kissing him and pushing him back into the shadows. 

This was the climax of the love story. Our shoot was a great success.  But before our negative was processed in Rome... the art department in Vancouver watched a version of the scene on YouTube! Someone had edited a montage of still photos shot through hidden windows, between extras and from nooks and crannies of the piazza into a rather effective little movie scene. Some of the stills were watermarked (from different sources) and many had bits of grip equipment in frame; but those stolen angles weren’t bad, the sampled music track was emotional, and in basic filmmaking terms it worked. It was soon ‘covered’ by a number of other YouTube versions of our climax.

The production and advertising implications of this are huge. But how is it relevant to film design?  In the case of The Twilight Saga, the book author, Stephenie Meyer, was very specific in her text about certain colors and visual elements. She went further in her blogs, even detailing her reasons for choosing the colors and models for the main characters’ cars.

The fans were so attentive to all of this that there were heartfelt posts of disappointment, for example, that the yellowed lace curtains described in the book for Bella’s bedroom were not lace at all in the first Twilight movie. Even before I realized the scope of the fan involvement I had asked our executives from Summit Entertainment what the approach should be to the desires of the fans. They were very centered about it, and made a strong point that the only way forward was to focus not on the minute wishes of fans, but rather to stick to the vision of our director and make the best possible film out of his interpretation. (Music to a designer’s ears!) 

This wisdom was supported by the reality that the fans were far from unanimous -- and sometimes amusingly wrong. Before spotting the real Jacob’s house, for example, the sites went on for days about what they thought was his house. In fact it was a bungalow being prepped for another movie.

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In the end, however, Chris Weitz did have to decide whether to maintain continuity with movie #1 (different director -- no lace curtains) or follow the hardcore fans (add lace curtains per the book for movie #2). And this is the rub.  How many times do we as designers work out detail by visual detail with our directors when to embrace and when to alter source material?

Suddenly, entering into this discussion in very real time is a vocal fan base -- equipped with sound and picture. It is almost as if film production gets pushed in this moment toward something akin to stage performance. Sure, in a stage performance you can choose to be deaf and blind to your real time audience, but it is a whopper of a choice. 

On New Moon, when the fans discovered a new location -- they launched (online) into traditional art department type debates (informed by intense knowledge of the source text) about which colors, buildings, and set dressing worked. Or didn’t. Despite some rather dogged set intrusions on the part of a few -- the overwhelming tenor of the fan base was respectful, excited, and affectionately open minded. And supportive! They gushed over successes of reproduction, as in the case of a house exterior we built on an empty lot in Vancouver to precisely match a location house shot in Portland on movie #1. As for the yellowed lace curtains, Chris decided we should have them.

So who were these fans?  Going from the evidence of some of the bigger sites, like twicrackaddict.com and twilightersitalia.com (in Italian), the activist ones were website happy, blogging adept, YouTube enabled, and video-equipped. And they skewed female. Among them were those who were vigorously entrepreneurial. The one who got interior photos of Jacob’s house apparently did NOT post them. But she did set up a Vancouver New Moon Set Tour service (with very high prices quoted on her site) and supposedly revealed the photos to paying customers. 

But there were enormous numbers of fans willing to spend money to get involved in the actual production. Hundreds traveled from North America and around Europe to get in on the Italy shoot.

I arrived a couple of weeks in advance of the shooting crew, and already there were girls hanging about waiting for the movie and hungry for any bit of information they could glean. One trio sat in the piazza of Montepulciano all day, every day watching my team install and rig our fountain.  Finally, one of the girls approached me and pleaded for help getting through to extras casting. She and her two friends had traveled all the way from Wisconsin, hoping to be extras.  I managed to get her the number of someone in local casting who spoke English. 

Some days later the props team was in a frenzy, installing the last of some 600 festival banners for the piazza climax scene. The Wisconsin trio was still there, seated in the shade of the church steps -- now joined by an enormous crowd of other fans all watching the paint dry inside the ropes around the fountain.  At some point, one of the Wisconsin girls called out to get my attention inside the ropes. When I made my way to her, she pointed out one of our banners, two stories up on town hall facade. “That flag up there,” she said, “3 out from the middle.  It’s upside down.”  I scoped the facade and damned if she wasn’t right!  I thanked her and hollered for a prop guy.

Within our art department, we had several fans of the books who eagerly monitored the fan site traffic. They kept me updated on anything visual that was getting attention. It was tough to embrace the project and the world around the series and not be drawn deeper and deeper into the vision of these fans. Fortunately, the visual emphasis of the fan traffic was very much centered on detail rather than themes. The bigger visual themes came from Chris Weitz’s interpretations, period.  But the omnipresence and prescience of the fan base weighed on us.

Getting eventually onto sound stages spelled relief for us all. We had to build some large, fantastical interiors which had not appeared in the first movie and which were well hidden from fans, deep inside the studio. It felt like an old school luxury to be able to execute this part of the project exclusively among the paid filmmakers -- and know that the public debut of this material would be fully controlled by our own producers.

It is impossible to know where exactly the seam lies between pure fan exuberance and commerce in all of this. Certainly commerce (both spontaneous and sponsored) swirls around every aspect of this project. Even before the Twilight Barbie dolls went into production, locally handcrafted soap bars in the artisan shops of Montepulciano were repackaged for sale to fans as New Moon Sapone. The climax scene mash-ups on YouTube were also hybrids, including shots (so it seems) both by paparazzi and by fans. The promotional opportunities in ‘instant fan-made’ are so golden and viral that it is bound to be a fast moving target. The part which is un-sponsored, unsolicited, passion-made fan media might not last long. That’s why I think it is worth shining a light on the phenomenon now before it becomes subsumed and invisible among the multi-layered processes of movie marketing.

It is perhaps also worth a moment of speculation on what this forecasts for production design. It is surely unavoidable that ‘instant fan-made’ media will, depending on the story, be insinuating itself into our future work. It seems likely that heightened levels of ‘film-land security’ will settle over us as we romp around in public spaces pulling together sets. We will probably have to face a growing contradiction between the way film production becomes increasingly a performance medium and the way we designers are contractually bound to be mum. But above all this is the question of where the designer stands in relation to instant fan engagement.

It has always been our job to know (and report to power) the contexts of the environments we create -- and this blogo-sphere is pure context. Where are the boundaries and opportunities for interpretation of that context (which erupts post-screenplay) going to fall within the production or the studio? In some ways we had an easy ride with New Moon in that it is recent material with a fan base coming to it fresh. We were free of the baggage and fan disagreements normal with a remake or a film with source material known to generations. But for all of us designing from now on, the noise, politics, and design dilemmas emerging from ‘instant fan-made’ media can only grow.

The third installment of this series, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (production designed by my friend, Paul Austerberry), went into production before New Moon was even released. The net-fan to production space shifted swiftly for Eclipse. Events on set were transmitted to the world via Twitter with regular tweets coming from the director, David Slade, and from cast members, Peter Facinelli and Billy Burke. This made for enormous fan-base Twilight Twitter traffic. Meanwhile, Summit Entertainment has launched a partnership with the teenage online virtual world, HABBO (which claims 13 million users in 31 countries), to enable users to create ‘Twilight-branded rooms, virtual items, and activities.’  Get in line for online design!

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON was directed by Chris Weitz and produced and released by Summit Entertainment. This article is based on material originally published in PERSPECTIVE - The Journal of the Art Directors Guild - www.artdirectors.org.