Making New Moon Shine

The Twilight Saga: New Moon began shooting in March 2009 in Vancouver and ended in Montepulciano, an ancient walled city in Italy. The two cities provided a strong contrast—the dark nights and mysterious, deep green forests of British Columbia, and the organic, burnished tones of Tuscany inform the film’s look equally. “The light in the Pacific Northwest provides a great deal of diffusion and coolness,” Chris Weitz says. “Within that, there are plenty of beautiful colors, and our intention was to use the lion’s share of them. Shadows are also important —the forest at night, the blackness of depression. “The light is much different in Tuscany,” Weitz notes. “It has much warmer tones and is literally much sunnier, with pops of color from the costumes. The architecture is different as well. Montepulciano is known for its Renaissance architecture, with remnants of medieval architecture as well.” Production designer David Brisbin worked closely with Weitz to establish the film’s signature palette.

“Chris came to the table with some very specific conceptions about what he wanted the palette to be like,” says Brisbin. “It revolved around pre-Raphaelite paintings, which emphasize saturated colors in natural settings.” “I love classic, wide-screen epics like Dr. Zhivago and Barry Lyndon,” says Weitz. “I was also thinking about what sorts of paintings made sense for this world. For me, it was narrative painting and pre-Raphaelite works. They share a very strong emphasis on story, on sentiment, on love and loss, heartbreak and longing. These are the paintings that accompanied Tennyson and that whole era of sentimentality. They also revived a jewel-toned palette and treatment of color that made sense to me, that was going to be different from the first movie but would be faithful to the spirit of the second book,” Weitz says. Brisbin’s eclectic résumé proves him to be something of a Renaissance man himself, uniquely qualified for his task. As a young man, Brisbin received a Henry Luce Scholars Grant to study in Asia and worked as a TV reporter, covering the fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines. Initially trained as an architect, he interned under renowned American architect Robert Venturi, who famously turned Mies van der Rohe’s maxim on its head by stating, “Less is bore.”

“At its heart, this film is about romance,” says Brisbin. “Yes, it’s a vampire movie, but it’s really a love story. The whole idea of production design for me is absolutely rooted in 13 storytelling. What I care about is that the drama the actors and the director are trying to assemble in front of the lens is cradled in an environment that’s perfect for the story being told.” In Meyer’s book, the Volturi reside in the ancient Italian city of Volterra, a real location in Tuscany. “The choice of Montepulciano as our Volterra was a big discussion,” Brisbin says. “Chris wanted architectural antiquity to guide us in making the world of Volterra. Montepulciano is in fact a medieval city, and the piazza and the city hall there gave him an access that would allow him to do a symmetrical shot. And that quite specifically was the reason we ended up in Montepulciano.” Meyer’s descriptions of Volterra and the Volturi stronghold provided a solid blueprint for Brisbin to work with. “If there’s such a thing as fiction writing for production design, Stephenie Meyer’s Volterra is a very successful example of it,” he notes. “She imagined a world in which the architecture contributes to the story. “The Volturi hold court in a circular hall almost like a vortex. It has a drain in the middle, which is where the blood goes if the most dangerous thing happens,” he says. “She envisioned an endless corridor, which we were able to create without too much effort using CG technology. These are spaces that are designed to reflect one’s position in the world, and one’s experience as one moves through the world.” The production designer borrowed liberally from well-known examples of Tuscan architecture.

“We haven’t matched any particular piece of architecture exactly, but we use a motif of the green stripes that are drawn from the green and white marble used in various Tuscan cathedrals and churches. There is an exuberance in medieval and Renaissance architecture in Tuscany that is followed up with a kind of excessive nouveau riche architecture in subsequent years, and that provided us with very, very rich inspiration.” Costume designer Tish Monaghan was tasked with complementing the sets with a refined and elaborate wardrobe for the Volturi, whose look literally spanned centuries. “The key point that Chris wanted to impart was that the Volturi were very elegant,” says Monaghan.

“We looked to the 1700s and chose a silhouette that developed roughly around 1790—a long, lean look. “We wanted to operate within the specific color palette David and Chris developed, but it changed between the 18th century and the 21st century. The characters meet in the 21st century, but we also see them in flashback in the 18th century. In the 21st century we tried to make them as dark as possible, with the character Aro being the darkest of all, because he has the most power. And in the 1790s, I did the reverse, and I tried to make Aro as light as possible, 14 because then we could see him at the top point of that triangular color palette where he would naturally take focus, while the others would resemble his courtiers.” While the exotic cult of the Volturi is recreated through an Old World, handcrafted process, their nemeses, the werewolves of the ancient Quileute tribe, are represented on screen through cutting-edge 21st century technology. “One of the most important additions to the world of New Moon is the CG characters,” says producer Wyck Godfrey.

CG was the only way we could accomplish the horse-sized wolves Stephenie described in her books.” Weitz brought in effects supervisor Susan MacLeod, with whom he had worked on The Golden Compass. “We got along really well,” she says. “When he asked me if I was interested in this project, I was on board from the word go. The wolves are probably the sexiest things in the script.” Tippett Studio, founded by visual effects pioneer Phil Tippett, created the wolves for The Twilight Saga: New Moon. “We were excited to be able to establish what they will look like for the whole saga,” says MacLeod. “We tried to stay very true to the descriptions in the book. Even though they’re discussed as werewolves, they’re not the stereotypical bipedal creatures that start bursting hair out of their fingertips and faces. They’re very elegantly transitioned from human beings to wolves with four legs. “Everyone who read the book and fell in love with Team Jacob is dying to see how we’ve done it,” MacLeod continues. “It’s not animation—they look like real wolves. We started by CG-scanning the actors into the computer prior to principal photography so we could transform them into wolves in mid-shot.”

The scanning process proved surprisingly simple—for the actors, at least. “I was expecting to be in a green suit, with little pins everywhere,” says Alex Meraz, who plays the character of Paul. “They just had me stand on an apple box, and this big machine just came up, over and down. And that was it. “I could watch on the monitor and my body was right there on screen, a perfect scan of it. I was blown away how quick it was. The best way to describe the transformation is like popcorn. The image just pops and there’s the wolf.” But that was just the beginning for the effects team. “We built the wolves from the inside out in the computer,” explains MacLeod. “So we started with a skeletal system with moving joints that can be animated. And on top of that, we laid muscles that can flex. And then a layer of skin and fur. We wanted them to look and act like real wolves without any sort of anthropomorphic quality. 15 “The guys at Tippett Studio actually went to a wolf preserve,” she says.

“They shot lots of video of them, as well as referencing everything they found on the Internet. Wolves are fascinating animals, so it’s quite easy to watch hours of footage of them.” To give the actors a point of reference during shooting, the filmmaker used wolf standins that come in all different shapes and sizes. “Some of them were stuffed, three dimensional figures,” says MacLeod. “Others were full-size cut-outs that were more durable and could be posed to line up the shots accurately. Then we could shoot a template for the animators to use for positioning the wolves. We also used fur pelts, because we wanted to light the CG wolves so that they fit into the plate seamlessly.” Twilight was shot primarily on location in Portland, Oregon, but for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the filmmakers moved further north to Vancouver, British Columbia. “I think it was important for the studio and important for the fans that this stage of Bella’s life have a good correspondence to the first stage of Bella’s life as they know it,” says production designer Brisbin. “For Bella’s house, that meant we had to build the interior and the exterior to match the first part of the movie. We looked obsessively at the original location and studied the footage from the first film very, very carefully.” In some cases, however, the design team decided to change certain architectural elements for specific story reasons.

“In the first house,” he says, “if you look very, very carefully, there’s a flicker of a moment when you can see actually the side of the house, and there’s no bay window there. But there’s this enormous sequence where Jacob leaps “parcours”-style into her window, and it’s one of the most important scenes between them. For that, it was worth it to deviate from the old diagram to support the storytelling.” The Cullen house provided a different challenge. “In the first film you actually do see the exterior of the Cullens’ home clearly,” says Brisbin. “You see the front stairwell. You see connecting rooms. You see Edward’s room, and you also see the kitchen. Most of our work was in other parts of the house, creating additional rooms that fit into what we already knew like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.” The production designer’s final assignment was to realize the two homes around which the wolf pack’s lives revolve. “Jacob’s house and Emily’s house did not exist in Twilight,” he continues. “We looked very carefully at the book and debated intensely what we could deviate from. Jacob’s house is described as a red house. We found this fantastic location that was connected to the forest in a way that implied wolf life behind the trees. Everything seemed perfect.” Except for one thing. The house was green. 16

“It was important to us to keep the red of Jacob’s house,” according to Brisbin. “We knew it as a red place from the book, and we wanted that. So we ended up painting the whole place red to match the book.” The house in which Emily, Sam Uley’s girlfriend, lives was designed to reflect Weitz’s interpretation of her character, says Brisbin. “He felt that Emily represented solace in the world of the wolf pack. They’re dynamic, they’re crazy, they run around, and change back and forth. But there is this anchoring place that is centered and thoughtful. We were looking for a secret forest place that carried this sort of wispy feminine lightness. “The fellow who owned the house we used built it when he was 17, and I think some of its sort of sylvan majesty comes from the fact that it really is a place that a 17-year-old kid built as his ideal cabin,” Brisbin continues. “I believe fairly soon after he built it, he married the woman he still is married to today. It was their house for a very long time. They eventually outgrew the house, but it was traumatically difficult for either husband or wife to agree to leave this place, because it is just so magical.” That attention to detail and faithfulness to the letter and spirit of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series informed the entire production process, says Weitz. “If you loved the characters and the romance of Twilight, if you love the supernatural, The Twilight Saga: New Moon has that and it has more. It expands that world to include the larger mythology that will eventually provide the bridge between Twilight and the third chapter, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.”