MOVIE MAGIC IN CT
FILM PRODUCTION COMPANY TURNS HARTFORD INTO HARLEM
The roster of films that have brought their sets to Connecticut over the past six months also brought with them actors like Justin Hartley, Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Chastain and Maria Menounos. While the cast of each film varied just as much as the network or streaming service it was created for, there’s a pretty good chance that a Connecticut production company helped bring them to life.
This is the case with “Christmas in Harlem,” the latest Hallmark Christmas movie filmed in Hartford in production with Rocky Hill-based Synthetic Cinema International. The film and production company has worked on projects like “The Noel Diary,” “Sand Dollar Cove,” “Call Jane” and “Taking the Reins,” all of which were filmed at least in part in Connecticut for the likes of Netflix and Hallmark.
For producer and owner Andrew Gernhard, transforming his home state into other locations for a film is simple. For “Christmas in Harlem” — a name he said will likely change prior to its release — it was a matter of finding similarities between the two locations.
“We shot basically all of it in the Hartford area,” he said. “We obviously looked at a lot of research, and we were able to find little bits of Hartford and East Hartford sections that match up with Harlem, and we recreated all that in Connecticut.”
Filming Hallmark’s Christmas films in the summer adds an extra layer of movie magic necessary to produce wintry effects in unseasonable weather.
“What we do is we’ll shoot a wide shot of a store, and we’ll put fake snow there and our actors will interact there, but we’ll shoot really wide and then we’ll digitally take the tree down or we’ll add snow to the roof,” he said. “It’s just a matter of choosing your shots and how to frame them and how to use computer graphics to make it feel like winter.”
According to Gernhard, it’s possible to “shoot anything in Connecticut — except for a tropical island.” Even some of the most drastic locales can be recreated with some creativity in location and filming.
“We’ve even done a desert here,” he said. “We had to do a zombie movie in 2011, I believe, and the zombies rose from a desert, and we actually shot it in one of the mineral deposits [in Clinton]…We just angled the camera off the sand and rocks and had the zombies come out of that and it looks like the deserts of Nevada.”
Gernhard’s Synthetic Cinema International has shot films all over the state, from Hartford to New Haven, Old Saybrook to Stonington. Gernhard estimates they typically work on three to five movies each year, but 2021 has 21 projects on Synthetic Cinema’s lineup, something he attributes to a demand for entertainment.
“I feel like it’s a matter of timing and reputation,” he said. “It’s funny: years and years ago, when I first heard that people would be watching TV shows and movies on their phones, I was like, “No way.’ I was the most wrong about that…That’s what it is, there’s just an explosion of content.”
With much of that “explosion of content” using Connecticut as its backdrop, Gernhard can think of two potential reasons for why film projects are attracted to Connecticut.
“The number one reason is the tax credit — the networks love the tax credit,” he said. “The number two reason is the locations. We have a movie premiering this Saturday called ‘Taking the Reins,’ it’s a horse movie for Hallmark — it stars Nikki DeLoach and Scott Porter — that we shot in Marlborough Connecticut at the Meadowbrook Farm…and they just did this live [stream] on Facebook with the two stars, and they had glowing reviews of Connecticut.”
“Stars love being in Connecticut because it’s almost like a vacation, especially if they’re not from New England.”
Gernhard believes that this most recent string of movies filming in the state won’t be ending any time soon.
“There are some bigger projects coming up this year that are going to be quite amazing that we’re going to start helping with that are going to be kind of fun for Connecticut,” he said. “I just think Connecticut looks great on camera.”