Finding Father Christmas

Jonathan Paul Green was Production Designer on Finding Father Christmas, a television movie starring Lenny Rush, James Buckley, Hannah Fry, Greg Davies and Stephen Fry.

The story follows Chris, a young boy determined to convince his father that Father Christmas really exists. His search gradually uncovers a mysterious conspiracy involving British scientists who are attempting to conceal the rather extraordinary truth that Father Christmas is, in fact, real.

From a production design point of view, one of the great pleasures of the project was the opportunity to develop part of Father Christmas’s hidden world. I designed Santa’s office and elements of his magical workshop, creating environments that needed to feel fantastical while still having enough texture, detail and practical reality for the audience to believe that this was somewhere Father Christmas actually lived and worked.

For Santa’s office, I wanted to move away from something that felt simply decorative or traditionally “Christmassy” and instead create a genuine working environment with its own history and personality. Furniture, paperwork, objects, materials and layers of dressing helped suggest a place that had evolved over many years rather than something created purely for Christmas.

The workshop allowed us to push the design further into the magical world, combining familiar ideas associated with Father Christmas with our own visual language. The challenge was finding the balance between wonder, humour and reality — creating something that would appeal to children while containing enough detail and character to make the world equally convincing for adults.

That contrast between the recognisable British world of Chris and his family and the extraordinary world he gradually discovers was central to the design. The more seriously we treated the reality of Father Christmas, his office and his workshop, the more fun we could have with the increasingly unlikely conspiracy surrounding him.

It was a lovely opportunity to design a world in which the magical and the everyday could comfortably exist alongside one another — and, most importantly, to make the idea that Father Christmas really does exist feel entirely plausible.

Explore more of Jonathan Paul Green's work as a UK Production Designer across film, HETV and television.