Lights, camera and more lights

THE two daughters of “Deck the Halls” production designer Bill Brzeski recently asked him what the family would be doing for Christmas lights this year.

His answer was simple and resolute: “I said, ‘We are not doing anything. I have done Christmas lights for my life now.’ ”

He’s referring to “Deck the Halls,” which opened Wednesday, starring Matthew Broderick as a small-town Massachusetts optometrist named Steve Finch, who lives for Christmas and carries on several cornball holiday traditions, much to the chagrin of his wife (Kristin Davis) and two children.

But Finch’s yuletide bliss is short-lived when a fast-talking car salesman named Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito) and his family move in across the street. Buddy decides to become the town’s new “King of Christmas” by attempting to put enough Christmas lights on his property that it can be seen in outer space.

At any given point there were 100,000 lights used on the house -- both the traditional bulbs and light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the kind used on stadium scoreboards. “We had 800 dimmer packs,” Brzeski said.

“It was crazy trying to find Christmas lights in the middle of July,” Brzeski said. “We had to go to manufacturers. We had to ask every town what they do with their lights during the summer. They were in storage, and we had to get them out of storage.”

But finding lights was just one of the challenges the cast and crew faced. “Deck the Halls” was filmed in Vancouver from May through July this year, one of the city’s hottest summers on record. To keep the cast cool in their winter woolens, “we tried every trick in the book,” director John Whitesell said.

“We cut the sweaters out. We ripped the lining out of the jackets. It was a battle to keep on their coats.”

Because the project came together quickly, “Deck the Halls” had only six weeks of preproduction before filming began. “That was one of the craziest movies I have ever done in my whole career,” said Brzeski, whose credits include “Stuart Little” and “Cat Woman.”

Brzeski quickly had to come up with designs for the Finch and Hall homes and then fly to Vancouver to scout for locations to construct them.

“At one time we thought about building it all on a set,” Whitesell said. “But we realized it wouldn’t have the kind of scope we wanted, and we were nervous about how the daylight stuff would look.”

He found a neighborhood that had a little park area where the two houses could be built. “It still looked like we were in a neighborhood,” the director said. “We built the these two homes from scratch in two weeks, laid in a road and built a gazebo and put in evergreens.”

The master bedroom in the Finch home was also finished off as a set, and “we dressed the hallways and doorways,” Whitesell said.

“The houses served as our holding areas. We tried to keep the actors cool in there.”

Also in the Finch house was the board that operated the LEDs on the Hall house. All the interiors, save for the master bedroom, were shot on a soundstage nearby.

BECAUSE the film deals with Christmas lights, nighttime shooting was imperative. The problem was that evenings are short in Vancouver during the summer. “There was only six hours of dark,” Whitesell said.

Brzeski discovered a solution: a Sprung tent that was so big it covered not only the homes, but the entire block.

“It is 280 feet long by 130 feet wide and 60 feet tall,” Whitesell said. “The Army uses it when they drop into certain places. It’s like a portable stage. It’s white on the outside to reflect and black on the inside. We just pumped as much air condition as we could into it and then we shot for 12 days inside the tent.”

The problems with the Christmas lights didn’t end with finding enough of them.

“What we realized early on is that you can cover an entire object with lights, like a house, but if they don’t do anything, it becomes pretty boring,” Whitesell said. “We realized that the [lights] needed to be choreographed and animated to music or they don’t get you anywhere.”

So they brought in Jason McKinnon, a lighting designer with a background in rock music. The house was covered in LED panels, and then lights were put on top of that.

“It gave us something nobody else had ever seen,” Whitesell said. “You have never seen lights project video, which we did onto the house. We would record the video and play it through like it was a TV. The only visual effect in the light show is the beam that goes up at the very end.”

All in all, 12 different lighting designs were created for the Hall house.

“They had to go on and off depending on the schedule of where we were going to shoot that day,” Brzeski said. “We had these huge crews with these little maps ... and the LED lights had little plugs. In a matter of four or five hours we could go to lights to no lights to just level one. One hundred yards from the set there was a warehouse where the lights could [be stored]. It was amazing when all the lights where on the house.”

And if any blew out? There were several crew members whose full-time job it was to track down problems with the lights and solve them. “It would become this huge scramble,” lighting technician Jay Yowler said.