Delivering bright, festive cheer for Holiday Harmony

Words by Adrian Pennington

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Christmas holiday movies can be evergreen hits, but that sprinkling of magic can be hard to find. If anyone has unlocked the formula, it is ESX Productions which is behind a number of features this holiday season. The breakout success of A California Christmas and A California Christmas: City Lights for Netflix in 2020 and 2021 landed ESX a deal to deliver three movies for HBO – two for Thanksgiving— Holiday Harmony and A Christmas Mystery – followed by A Hollywood Christmas. 

Producer (writer and actor) and president of ESX is Ali Afshar, assigned the team behind the two California Christmas hits, director Shaun Paul Piccinino and cinematographer Brad Rushing, who also teamed for summer 2022’s acclaimed romantic comedy That’s Amor, another ESX hit for Netflix which rose to the #2 most popular movie on the platform in the U.S. and the world. 

“I’m really proud of the look of this film,” Rushing says. The script blessed me with some amazing locations to create varied and dazzling cinematography. There are nightclubs, restaurants, a school, an auto shop, an Airstream trailer, and more.”  

Holiday Harmony charts the journey of aspiring singer/songwriter Gail (Annelise Cepero), who is invited to perform at the Christmas show on iHeartRadio in Los Angeles. To get there from her Florida home, she has to drive, but as fate would have it, her van breaks down in the small community of Harmony Springs, Oklahoma. In her worst nightmare, her dreams of stardom seem to be slipping away. 

“When you bring in the holidays, a theater and bars, you can have a lot of fun in terms of color and dynamic lighting,” Rushing says. “In contrast to some movies that are limited to more mundane locations like everyday offices, homes and day exteriors, I was happy to have this variety of scenes which gave us an opportunity to showcase some super fun and diverse different looks.” 

Rushing chose to shoot on the RED GEMINI, which he also used on That’s Amor. 

“To me, GEMINI is a great run-and-gun camera. It is so robust, and the dynamic range is extraordinary. There were some night exterior scenes in this show, and in That’s Amor, where we were shooting in practical locations and didn’t have the time or resources to illuminate the deep backgrounds. In instances where the available light was very low, I would just focus on lighting the foreground and the actors, knowing the GEMINI is going to be able to capture the background perfectly at up to 3200 ISO.” 

On That’s Amor, we were shooting in April and for a week we were in a restaurant location with two walls of full floor-to-ceiling windows. I knew at the end of each day we’d be losing the light and I wanted to hedge my bets so that when it looked like we’d have to shut down for the evening that I could pull a rabbit out of the hat and finish the scene. The light was sometimes so low to the eye towards the end of those days that you might think it’s not possible to carry on but looking at the monitor with the GEMINI’s 3200 ISO, it is still daylight in movie land. We would dim our lights to match and keep going! 

“For Holiday Harmony, I knew we’d be shooting more night exteriors and also using natural daylight from windows in practical locations. I wanted to be able to optimally utilize those practical sources and save ourselves time instead of needing to add more lighting units.” 

“GEMINI allows you to do other interesting things like bounce lights in a large space that wouldn’t work so well with a lower ISO, and also easily accommodate when I’m asked if we can shoot at an unplanned high frame rate. I’m a big fan of that ease and versatility.” 

Holiday Harmony was mostly shot in and around Petaluma, California, with some scenes filmed in the actual iHeartRadio studios in LA.  

“Shaun and I discussed starting the story with more of a neutral look and, as Gail warms to the people of Harmony Springs, bringing more color into the palette and also in the saturation and the color grade. When she arrives in Los Angeles, we wanted to reflect her fish-out-of-water circumstance with a different look.” 

Rushing prefers to shoot without a custom LUT. “I’m a big believer in giving myself a margin in post which is why I prefer to shoot with Rec.709 reference. It’s also the reason I like shooting 5K to afford an option for stabilization or reframing. I don’t want to commit myself until I’ve seen how all the pieces come together in the final cut. Sometimes the flow of scenes, and even within scenes, can change radically between shooting and picture lock. GEMINI provides such superior dynamic range that colorist (Keith Roush) can easily deliver an HDR master for HBO.” 

Rushing shot the film on Kowa vintage anamorphic glass to lend the story “a romantic dreamy quality,” he explains. “Sometimes we’d reduce the warp if it felt too extreme in a particular shot, but the lenses have wonderfully hyperreal/unreal characteristics of squeeze, contrast and texture well suited for romantic storytelling.” 

The climactic scenes of Gail’s performance in a local community theatre proved the most challenging to light and photograph, mainly because the theatre did not have any theatrical stage lights. “All I had were my Astera tubes and Nyx bulbs, SkyPanels, two Lekos , a couple of M18 fixtures bounced into the ceiling of the theatre with a little color on them for ambience on the audience. Shaun our director, wanted this scene to feature dynamic illumination with lighting cues and moving lights. Our gaffer Tandy Kyne and best girl electric Mina Stollery used an iPad to control cues for the Asteras and SkyPanels which we used in conjunction with old fashioned manually operated ballyhoos on the Lekos to create distinctive looks for four different scenes.  

He continues, “Because of actor availability I had to reset and then return again to each of those setups several times over a couple of days. That was especially challenging because we had to use the same handful of instruments. In one instance, even the stage changed, so we had to hustle. Many times, I was worried we weren’t going to get it in time and there needed to be some compromise that would haunt me. Fortunately, the film gods were with us, and we were able to pull it off. Those film gods had a lot of help from Tandy, Mina and our lighting team, the versatility and speed of our lighting instruments, our grip team led by Juan Ruiz, and of course the rock star RED Gemini” 

The feature was scripted by Lauren Swickard and Christopher James Harvill, produced by Afshar with Swickard and Daniel Aspromonte, and with a cast that also includes Jeremy Sumpter and Brooke Shields. 

The film is also close to Rushings’ heart since he is also an accomplished singer/songwriter. While this aspect of his career took second place to cinematography, the pandemic opened an opportunity for him to revisit music. A song that he wrote and performs called “Go” is featured in the soundtrack to the movie during the pivotal scene when Gail travels to and arrives in Hollywood.  

Holiday Harmony is streaming now on HBO MAX.