Director: David E. Talbert

Production Designer: Gavin Bocquet

Studio: Netflix

Starring: Forest Whitaker, Keegan-Michael Key & Madalen Mills

Locations: London & UK

Location Brief: Period Dickensian England with a magical fairytale feel

Location Scouting for Netflix’s Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey was a wonderfully unusual location brief — a Netflix Christmas musical set in a magical Afro-Victorian world, with the feel of period Dickensian England transformed into a colourful fairytale.

Working with Production Designer Gavin Bocquet and Director David E. Talbert, the challenge was to find locations across London and the UK that could form the foundations of the film’s richly imagined world.

This wasn’t about finding a straightforward Victorian street or traditional period location. The locations needed character, scale and period detail, but also enough visual personality for Gavin and the design team to transform them into the world of Jingle Jangle.

Finding a Dickensian Fairytale in the UK

The UK has an extraordinary range of period architecture, but every production looks at it differently.

For Jingle Jangle, we were searching for locations that could sit somewhere between Dickensian England and a storybook musical. Streets, courtyards, buildings and landscapes all needed to have the right bones, while leaving room for production design, dressing and VFX to take them somewhere much more magical.

That’s often the interesting part of location scouting. The finished location doesn’t always exist when you first photograph it.

You’re looking at the shape of a street, the scale of a building or the view through an archway and imagining what it could become in the hands of the production designer.

Working with Gavin Bocquet and David E. Talbert

It was great working with Production Designer Gavin Bocquet, whose credits include Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Sleepy Hollow.

Gavin’s design for Jingle Jangle was incredibly detailed and colourful, creating a distinctive Afro-Victorian world that felt both period and completely original.

Director David E. Talbert brought a huge amount of energy and imagination to the film. As a large-scale Netflix musical, with original music, choreography and elaborate production design, the locations had to work as part of a much bigger visual world rather than simply as backgrounds.

Jingle Jangle Filming Locations

Filmed in the UK for Netflix, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey was exactly the sort of location brief I enjoy — taking a familiar idea like Dickensian England and looking for locations that could help turn it into a colourful, magical Christmas musical.

Below is a selection of my original location scout photographs for Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey.