It’s just like life goes: When you don’t want snow on your photography you will get it. And when you Want itYou won’t get it.
That was exactly what happened to “1923” Samproduction designers Cary White and Lisa Ward for Taylor Sheridan show. On Season 1, they were almost driven out of Montana by the snowfall near the end of the product – and they did not try to add any hint for winter weather on the screen. Season 2 would have all their Montana-Set scenes in the most released, snowy, brutal winter, and … yes, you probably see where this goes.
“We prayed for snow,” said White, who, along with Ward, supervisor Seaan Ryan Jennings and put the decorator Carla Curry, received a 2025 Emmy nomination for unique production design for a narrative period or fantasy program. “And we have it, but the last shooting day. It was the only real snow we had.”
You would never know that most of the snow you see in season 2 actually did not fall from heaven: during its second season, “1923“Became one of the rare things that Western fans particularly love – A winter vest. “Winter was such an important character in this piece, and it really fought Duttons throughout the season,” Ward said. How the production team created it shows alive in the video below. Snow may have been difficult to come up with, but partly it is because it was almost too cold For it to snow. “We had one of the hardest winters on the record, I think, in Montana,” Curry said.
“We knew what it would look like on the screen properly, and we would make these documents that were basically phases of winter because we wanted to touch on different appearance and different feelings of winter,” Ward said. “And so we saw a look that was the cold white heavens where the clay is frozen and tire tracks are frozen and the pools around the roads are frozen, but there is no deep snow everywhere.”
“And then we had days that were just the deepest snow after Blizzard where the sun comes out in the morning, and you get that glitter on top of everything, and everything is shapeless and strange and snowy,” Ward said. “So we really had a kind of spectrum of appearance that correlated with the different moments in the scripts and the various beats and how the winter environment interacted with actors and vice versa.”
The special effect team received a workout.
“There was a lot of paper used on this show because they come out with these blasts and blast -white mulch paper everywhere,” said White. “It’s a combination. All snow is a combination of visual effects and special effects, with the exception of the last day when it really made snow.”

“The real snow actually complicated things because it prevented special effects of snow from being laid,” added Ward. “And then you get through two hours of shooting, and what you been been shooting has melted. So that becoms a huge continuity isu. And there were times when we could be used Paper snow. to be interacting with it and their hooves slip on the display snow, we needed to incorporate salt, which is also used.
Much is done about Sheridan’s extraordinary production settings in Texas, but almost all the outer shots in Montana are actually pushed in Montana. However, it is the little added details that really sell that feeling of cold. “I really want to say how incredible our scenic painters were,” Ward said. “We noticed so much what the frost should look like on the windows and how the frost should appear on car windows.”

White and Ward are really a team, although they are at very different stages of their career. White is an industry veteran from decades, with one of his earliest production designs for 1989 miniseries “Lonesome Dove”, one of the most acclaimed by all WesternWhether on a large screen or small. HE’S WORKED ON 23 WESTESS IN TOTAL AND HAS WRITTEN A COFFEE TABLE Photo Book On The Western Genre Due Out In The Fall of 2027. (His Filmography is Extraordinarily Miscellaneous, Though, Such as Also Serving as Production Designer on the original “Mean Girls. Fascinating in Its Own Right: SHE Collaborated with White on “Yellowstone” and “1883” But Also Worked as Art Director on “First Cow” and “Showing Up” – Yes, she can switch without a problem between Kelly Reichard Indies and Sprawling Sheridan Productions.
And on season 2 of “1923” White and Ward was a real team. Although the action took place in many different places, they never separated to ensure continuity in vision. “Cary has set such a strong aesthetics that really starts with ‘Yellowstone’ and moved through ‘1883’ and ‘1923’, Ward said.” It’s a world we both understand really deep. And I think we wanted to catch it and continue it through this season, even though we were in so many different places this season. “
If Montana was always Montana on the screen, the cities they represented must be a little more creative. San Antonio is in charge of the wintry New York City streets Julia Schlaepfers Alexandra explores once coming from Ellis Island. On a sound scene, the interior of the 1920s of Grand Central Station – down to light fixtures from the period that no longer recreated at the Grand Central Station and was recreated by Steve Joyner and his manufacturing studio in Austin.
These lamps are spotted just a moment in season 2. But it is the small details that make the world of “1923” alive and its story to have the impact it makes. “World Building” is a term that is usually applied more to imagination or sci-fi properties, but in all respects it is what White and Ward have achieved in this spreading western epic.

Nevertheless, Western fans have especially loved the winter Western Aspects of “1923” season 2. Simply because there are not so many winter vast. “The Great Silence”, “The Hateful Eight”, “Day of the Outlaw”, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is among the few snow-formed Westerners out there. They are all very different visually from the genre’s typical tumbleweed and sagebrushestics. “The Searchers” offers us a glimpse of Monument Valley in snow, but only short – in no small part because handling of snow and winter always means defining many different grades.
“We thought a lot about winter phases,” Ward said. “Kind of moving from the deep winter and deep snow, crystal on the trees and branches through a more moderately cold, muddy, snowy, icy into what feels, in Montana, as possible on the spring. Where you suddenly look at stains of snow and ice rather than deep drives and swirls, and only shades of all that.”
Assignments completed. When you look at “1923” you want to reach a warm blanket.