As for the body of the scenes themselves, Hackford decided with cinematographer Beristain to heighten the contrast between past and present by giving each timeframe a completely different look with two different film stocks. A cold, blue, wintry look for the present would capture the bleak quality of winter in northern Maine and Nova Scotia, as well as the barren nature of the story's central emotional relationship. The flashbacks were shot in summery, pastel tones to evoke happier times for mother and daughter.
Every, flashback and transition was storyboarded, an approach antithetical to the frequently 11th hour, improvisational nature of the highly weather-dependent shoot. The fact that Hackford and his collaborators had all worked together before and understood one another's "shorthand" was a tremendous advantage in combating the elements. After the first week of production, the company had to manage without a proper shooting schedule, forced to deal with one day at a time, sometimes one hour at a time.
