avalon mclean-smits

💝💎 modern whore 💎💝 Beyond proud of our work on this puppy. So grateful to @weenerwoman for letting us into her world and helping her and @nicobazuin tell Andrea’s story. 💅Art Team💅 Production designer extraordinaire: @chareese.dehli Art director/ insane person: me 💝💫 Props master/ also insane person: @kendra_bowes 👛 Set dresser/ freak: Iliya pajkovic & sometimes his conjoined twin David Naranjo 2nd unit art director: @sonjarainey Standby art director: @unofficialcowboy GFX: @lyndseyconstable Carps/ Scenic team: 16 Tonnes Art department therapists: producer @cliquepictures and line producer/boyfriend @geoff.ewart Special shout out and thank you to everyone’s partners and families who also went through this one with us and lent us props and set dressing 💝

K I get cute sometimes! Got some headshots by the ever talented @lyndseyconstable 📸 ❤️ I mostly wanted to show off our house but Clementine refused to leave my side for the duration of the shoot and Lyndsey came ready to play and take care of me while i was endlessly embarrassed of getting my photos taken. And i finally updated my reel and website for the first time in like 5 years 🥳 Weee!

I asked @ragtime.willie out while he was working at a coffee shop. On our first date he told me his dream was to open up is own coffee shop. Maybe in like 5 to 7 years - he said. 6 years later he’s opening up his 4th cafe and the 5th coffee venture. Bobo never stopped working and never stopped dreaming about @larrys_world and its future. He insists on providing the best service and the best coffee. And he insists you enjoy yourself. I’m in utter awe of this human. His brain and his vision and his work ethic and his care and his calm. So proud of him and so excited for him. Folly has been a TIME. Equal parts pain and joy. I cannot WAIT for you to see the next chapter he has cooked up. And I cannot WAIT for you to see the last photo in the post of baby Bobo so cute and excited to open his doors to you but so mad at how bad my phone is at taking pictures. Cheers to Folly and see y’all down the street next month ❤️

Have not had even 4 seconds to process that @backspotfilm is out in THEATRES. Absolutely beyond grateful to have been apart of this film. So grateful to be trusted by DW and Devery to help bring their vision to life and to be trusted by my beautiful team and their beautiful teams to get us all through a cute 17 day shoot ❤️ A petit soupçon of my time on Backspot. More to come ❤️

THE KING TIDE is out in theatres across Canada today ❤️ beyond stoked about our work on this project. August 2022 - I got a text from some friends saying I had a week to pack my life up and come shoot a movie in small town Newfoundland for 3 months. Lots of textures, colours, and wind ❤️

Final Section of the @station11onmax St Deborah’s set #ArtSafari! This section is the camp site for the traveling symphony and a couple notes on the road. The infamous conductor’s truck with the “Survival is Insufficient” slogan on it. One of the buyers had a custom tent sewn for us to attach into the truck when the lid was lifted. I’m obsessed with how detailed the interior decor is. We had sheet music printed on translucent paper to put into the windows of the cab and it truly feels like a special place for the conductor. Tent city was always “fun” to set up. Since we couldn’t go into the ground anywhere we set up the tents, the dressers drilled into giant pavers and the put those inside the tents and attached them on the inside. Many tents were destroyed during the filming of the quarantine at the airport which was shot first and they learned all the tricks then - but so many tent poles were broken and missing and I think we had 4 dressers full time building and organizing tents and tent poles at the studio before they were shipped out to sets. Kirsten’s tent is the low orange one. One of its duplicates got lost at some point and props had a different one from set dec and camera cut a hole to shoot inside the tent here and i didn’t notice if there were two different tents while watching and hopefully you don’t either! We just pretended everything was fine and it was. We “installed” the globe street lights - luckily they didn’t have to work. And the photo of the steel barricade was a test patch for rust colour from scenics - that test was too red and too thick - but the ended up adding more brown tones (i believe) and they had to paint the barricades surrounding the whole of the set, front and back. They also painted on angled on parking spot lines on the roads and i added some “cement” parking bumpers that we had aged (see pile of vvv heavy plastic bumpers in slideshow). Everything was aged temporarily - even the ageing on the yurts - and we were fighting with a lot of rain. But in the end - it worked out ❤️ Only a couple more sets that i was involved in. Maybe some light gas station touring to finish us up next!

You’re invited to the #stationeleven Hootenanny #ArtSafari at St Deborah’s! First off, we love the word hootenanny as much as we love a hootenanny. With this bbq/ shindig set, we reused a bunch of set dressing that we already had from the traveling symphony. I don’t think the cooking trailer ever really got its due on the show. The kids did such an amazing job decorating it and making it feel like a true kitchen. They truly took the time to dress it and we worked through to make sure it felt useable. We imagined how it would be most efficient, but kind of food they would have on it, etc. We incorporated Habermaker shopping carts to carry demi johns of what we pretended in our head was full of dandelion wine - not that anyone asked. There are a lot of beautiful brand new charcoal bbqs and fancy brand new camping equipment we bought for this and then had scenic beat and paint to age it as if it had been through 20 years of the end of the world. It all felt truly bizarre. SFX helped with our bonfires. We had construction provide the bases for the fires. A special fire rated board thats name escapes me. SFX tried to get me to find them wood to make molds of for logs but I think I pretended to look, said no luck, and then they miraculously had access to logs and made a bunch of ceramic logs to use and they then inserted their cute looking gas lines into the “bonfires” before surrounding them with the “logs”. Set dec gathered rocks and i sourced galvanized metal fire pits to get aged so we could have a variety of sizes of pits. We struggled throughout the show with showing clean cut logs because we weren’t convinced people would still have gas for chainsaws lying around. In some pics you can see trees lying down and giant “Habermaker” trailers. These were used to hide crew, trailers, cranes, etc. One trailer we stored all our set dec that would need to be dressed in. And another was used to block a ship with cranes that was CLEARLY working. One more St. Deb’s Art Safari coming up 👀! And then onto other bits and bobs.

Oh look 👀! Another #ArtSafari on #stationeleven ! Backstage at St Deborah’s! By this time, i am quite sunburned, sufficiently rained on, and exhausted in this picture. But Backstage is always a lot of fun in real life. And no exception when it’s a set. I always loved being backstage. There is an intimacy and an energy and an exclusivity. You are behind the curtain. The magic. You see how the trick is done. We dressed this set based off pictures we had from the final performance that was already shot. In the script the backstage was written in way more than in the edit. There is a whole scene in the wardrobe tent. We had to dress the wardrobe tent for right after being unloaded and also after being unpacked. We imagined them using mesh camping sacks to protect wardrobe and it became a whole thing for how they would hang and look. As seen in slideshow. I had a dresser write labels for each outfit to be a different character from various shakespeare plays. We then had to keep it within a tent for rain protection for real life and also for the look. At one point this tent backstage was a key location. Flashlights were also a key decorating item for the symphony. A practical lighting element that can’t get blown away. Flashlight photos in the slideshow are probably from my group texts to dressers quickly indicating what needed batteries and where flashlights were. I have many photos like this backstage 😅 They also all had to do camera tests to make sure they weren’t going to flicker on camera. We made a props table which the real props team would add the real props to in certain cases if we were to see them actually picking anything up. Otherwise we invented props. It is important to have a good relationship with props department and wardrobe on jobs because the amount of items that will be ambiguously props, set dressing, or wardrobe are endless and this is ever more present when you are shooting “backstage”. Art Direction map included. It changed vaguely based on the landscape but this was our starting point for dressing. Next up, Bonfire/ Hootenany!!!!! 🔥 #setdecorator #setdecoration

Come on another #ArtSafari with me! This time, to the Symphony’s performances at St Deb’s! #stationeleven This peninsula was quite large because we did backstage, two different performances, pre performance, (we had to show them unpacking, doing king lear AND hamlet), a bonfire party, and a fun little scene with Tyler and Kristen (no spoilers). So I will break this peninsula into sections. This post is just about the performance area. I came on after the design and build of all trucks were done and they had already shot the final performances so we had a little leeway to play around with some dressing for King Lear, but not Hamlet. King Lear we did as a winter scene and I got to dress in all the flowers and wild blackberries I sourced because I’m super micromanage-y about flowers. we had scenic make them frosted and then spray a bunch of flowers for Hamlet and King Lear with special fire retardant chemicals so we could light things on fire practically without destroying the set. Hamlet was spring flowers and leaves. The vehicle department on this was so amazing at helping to craft and get all the trucks and trailers into spot. I was personally in awe of the practical transformations the vehicles were able to make to become the stages for the performances, as well as the living spaces for some characters (i will show later). Set Dec and supporting departments basically became the symphony on this as at each performance, we were placing, unloading, and transforming each vehicle. We carefully crafted and dressed backstage, thinking about what characters would have what at each table. how would the costumes travel? (They travel in the van to the left of stage! On rolling racks). How would the Symphony deal with rain? Because WE certainly had to deal with rain. The buyers and dressers on this truly put heart and soul and put aside frustrations to creat some insanely thoughtful and transformative sets. Art department laid out a map for the spots for major items and we filled in the blanks. So grateful to you all for coming on this journey with me! Next time, backstage! #setdecorator #setdecoration

Part 2 of St-Deborah’s-by-the-Sea @station11onmax #ArtSafari ❤️ This is the first thing that the traveling symphony and the viewer see of the community of St Deb’s. This peninsula is the garden and a playground (which I don’t have pics of). We wanted to use a mixture of supplies they would have found at Habermaker’s (a department store) to build out the garden. We assumed maybe they actually would have had some garden inventory in storage at the shop. Everything we built had to be low intervention because we couldn’t ruin the roads or make holes anywhere. We built garden beds and used cement anchors and had scenics age them as well as using construction fencing to create a barrier. We decorated it to be “mid harvest” so we put a table covered in root vegetables and bins stacked ready to collect. An old shopping cart also nearby to transport tools and link the space to the fact that it is close to a store. We also found a mama duck on her nest in the long grass so we actually decorated around her and created a safe barrier to protect her practically making her a part of the set. One of my buyers was tasked with creating Timothée Chalamet scarecrows out of mannequins (which they would have in a department store 😅). It felt very surreal to be filming this during a retail lockdown in a pandemic when you couldn’t actually get anything. You could walk into Walmart but the “unessential“ aisles were blocked off. We had to get more creative than usual. Next stop, the performance peninsula!

Another #ArtSafari! Come with me to St. Deborah’s-by-the-Sea in @station11onmax . St. Deb’s was my bebe. She went through MANY variations in terms of what the life force of this community did besides deliver babies - at one point they were weavers, bee keepers, and also dandelion wine makers. However, they always lived in yurts/ geo domes. The location has 3 peninsulas - art department divided up the peninsulas by use: garden, living area, and where the performance and bonfire would take place. Shown here is the living area. Carps built platforms, set dec built domes and decorated, art department made “billboards” to wrap the yurts in, and scenic aged everything. We definitely went over board with this peninsula by creating shower tents, a dining tent, individual homes, children’s play areas, laundry, dandelions, porch decor, etc. We really thought through how these people would have lived. The domes had to be filled with shapes as they were translucent and would be seen at night. Clementine also helped keep my beautiful set dressers in line. I will do some posts on the other “peninsulas” later! #stationeleven #setdecorating

In lieu of #SeeForMe coming out On Demand tomorrow (January 11th) - come on this #ArtSafari with me!! No spoilers! We started prep on this project in January 2020 and finished it in January 2021 and FINALLY- January 2022 we get to SEE it. @ciaravernon was our fearless production designer on this project. The biggest hurdle on this was budget and location. The location in this film is itself a character in the telling of the story. So finding the perfect location was KEY. The curvy walls, angular ceilings, windows, open concept floor plans, long hallways helped to tell the story and create suspense, but also meant that every room had to be fully decorated the whole time and that obviously increases our budget. We used whites and an earth tone pallette in the decor to compliment the space and attempt to say “rich person things”. Neutrals also let more important set dec pieces pop when needed and not distract the viewer in other scenes. Luckily for us, “minimalism” is trendy in luxury design right now. As the lead character is blind and house sitting a stranger’s home, we wanted to also make the set dec and layouts feel precarious, dangerous, and confusing. We had to start and stop and start and reshoot this project over the course of the pandemic and a lot of hurdles came with that but it was so exciting to decorate a full house and really get to tell a full story with it. Can’t wait to see this one tomorrow!