Art Direction — by Susannah Anderson

My participation in Little Red Riding Hood began reluctantly in a French cafe. Fighting a tendency to say yes to projects, which I ought to dismiss, I listened to SJ's pitch with a furrowed brow and more than a bit of suspicion. Not that I doubted her directorial prowess (we had worked together at Annex Theatre), but I was hesitant to become deeply involved in a never-ending project suspecting at the time that I might be pregnant. An ill-advised glass or two of wine later, and after looking at SJ's storyboards, I was won over. There is a quality to the imagery in those pages that convinced me that SJ had the imagination and vision to bring this idea to fruition. A few months later she and I could be found wandering my favorite woodland locations at Golden Gardens and the park behind Cooper Elementary in West Seattle (I was familiar with each park for having our dog Connor for walks in them). I have heard a rumor that the wonderful split tree which served as the wolf's den has since yielded to gravity...The short Cut sign was verbally designed by SJ, I just got to make it. There was a particular drawing of SJ's, as Little Red Riding Hood enters the woods, in which there seemed to be a magical quality to the trees she had drawn. We talked for a little while about super-imposing some of that imagery onto the woods in the film, but ultimately SJ was able to create the other-worldly, story-book quality without needing to resort to complex special effects. When we were talking about the interior of the grandmother's house we tried to come up with a few locations, but ultimately the dojo at WKA was our choice. It underwent a dramatic (and temporary) makeover - we used a lightweight landscaping cloth that had had a faint paint treatment taped to the walls. The reflectiveness of its glossy wood floors adds a wonderful quality to the Wolf's defeat.

Little Red Riding Hood's mother's house is at a seasonal nursery, and we were able to get in and use it after the Christmas trees were gone and just before the spring plants were brought in. The colors of the house were red and green, which I was afraid would not read distinctly on black and white film, so we got permission to paint parts of it white. A few days after the shoot, Farayi and I restored it to its original colors on one of the coldest days ever! That's one dedicated executive producer!

The exterior of the grandmother's house was one of our biggest dilemmas. SJ and I both felt strongly that there needed to be some disconnect between the interior and exterior of the house in order to push into that imaginary realm deeply buried in people's heads. We had a few leads on some tiny strange houses, but they fell through. We took each other on drive-by tours of regular houses in Seattle that we thought we could maybe force to work with some creative editing. But our guts would not allow us to compromise the vision we had. At the time, I was on a personal mission to find a house for myself, and was spending a great deal of time at on-line real-estate sites. While procrastinating one day on Marlow Harris's site, I clicked on the unusual homes for sale link and came across the dream location: a true fairy tale house, with, as a play house or shed (I didn't go to the location), the most amazing house in a tree stump complete with water wheel! It was tiny and perfect, but far away. SJ fell in love with it, too, and was soon on the phone sorting out the most complicated details to get the shot; but that's a whole other story, the details of which are still too crazy for me to cement in my head...Oh and the sheep! I think SJ set all that up, I just got to sit in a rocking chair in the sun on a stunning spring day (in late February?) under a fantastic tree covered in white blossoms. The sheep were lovely and very well behaved. A week or so later my baby, Tobey was born!