Sophisticated handicrafts, talents handed down for centuries, were in evidence all over Nova Scotia -- in one of the towns neighboring Lunenburg, there was even an association of rugmakers known as "The Happy Hookers."
During the climactic moments of a solar eclipse, Dolores and her husband Joe act out the final scenes of their stormy passion play. Since no film documentation exists which adequately conveys the hair-raisingly aberrant and magical quality of the experience of a total solar eclipse, the use of stock footage was clearly out of the question.
Each frame of this technically complicated sequence would necessitate the marriage of four distinct elements, each of which had its own elaborate production requirements. The foreground action between the two characters had to be shot in a completely controlled environment on a 360-degree "blue- screen" set constructed inside the vast Acadia University Hockey Arena located in the town of Wolfville in the Annapolis Valley, overlooking the Bay of Fundy. The Acadia Arena was the only structure in Nova Scotia that could provide the unobstructed 100 by 200 foot interior site needed to reproduce the facade of Dolores' two-story house, the porch with its view of Blue Rocks Cove and the entire front yard filled with hundreds of flowers and shrubs to match every single piece of vegetation on the actual site at Blue Rocks.
Two players on Bruno Rubeo's team were responsible for constructing and maintaining this spectacular interior set: construction supervisor Art Baxter, who directed the work of 200 carpenters, and greensperson Stephanie Waldron, who imported fifteen truckloads of soil and greenery, and kept the plants thriving, full-bloom, until the eclipse sequence could be worked into the erratic shooting schedule. Boosted by 1.5 million watts of electricity (enough to light 100 homes with appliances going full blast), coursing through 20 miles of cable, the eclipse set rivaled the natural phenomenon it was created to replicate.
In addition to the foreground dramatic action shot on the Acadia Arena stage, the distant background of boats and water would also have to be added to the eclipse sequence. The distant background activity, with its complicated water choreography involving scores of boats, was shot on the actual location two hours away at Blue Rocks Cove, under the supervision of assistant director Josh McLaglen.
Then, the dramatically changing sky leading up to and out of the total eclipse would also have to be laid in. The Computer Film Company (CFC) using myriad photographic plates of spectacular Nova Scotia cloud formations, animated the cloud sequences under the supervision of Yannick Sirrs and Rob Hodgson.
Finally, all four elements were put together by means of CFC's state-of-the-art digital animation to create the remarkable phenomenon of a total eclipse, from bright daylight through eerie half-light to totality, to reinforce dramatically the foreground death struggle unfolding between Dolores and Joe.
Inside a curling rink in a town adjacent to Wolfville, the actual interior of Vera Donovan's luxurious home emerged. Its exterior was an estate overlooking the Chester bay, in which Captain Kidd is alleged to have stashed his loot back in the 1700's. When Vera came to Little Tall Island in the 1970s, she maintained a "summer-house" of Sheraton furniture and light, minimal decorations. When she moved to the island permanently after her husband's death, she brought with her the heavy, Regency furnishings of their home in Baltimore. The two time-periods necessitated more than $1 million in antiques hired from agents in Toronto or private collectors in Nova Scotia. Vera's house was filled with oil paintings -- one could never quite tell if they were the work of old masters, dupe artists from New Jersey or Bruno Robotti's exceptional trompe l'oeil experts.
