Spoilers ahead for Netflix’s Dash & Lily.
As if the delightful holiday series Dash & Lily didn’t get us all cheery and cozy as is, there was a surprise appearance from the Jonas Brothers in the final episode. The boy band performed a magical outdoor concert in New York City amidst the final will-they, won’t-they moments for the main couple. When you watch the sequence, it looks like a blissfully perfect day, but the production had to improvise around a glaring problem behind the scenes .
CinemaBlend spoke to Dash & Lily’s VFX Supervisor Gabriel Regentin of Chicken Bone FX about the team’s work on the Netflix show. Although the show takes place in New York City during the holidays, the show was not filmed during that time of the year. The VFX team had to give the show all its winter embellishments, including in terms of the Jonas Brothers sequence. Here’s what Regentin said about working on the JoBros scene:
That was a crazy scene. It moved around a couple of times in terms of location and they finally found Hudson yard and the Vessel as the place to have this concert. They got hundreds of extras, they booked the Jonas Brothers for one day only – it’s all they could fit into their tour schedule. They picked what they figured would be a sunny day and of course, halfway through the shoot it starts raining.
Yikes! Dash & Lily is the kind of show that lives in a heightened reality that we can escape to in the winter months. Part of its charm is how picture perfect the scenery always looks. But, during the production of the key scene, it started pouring on the only day they had the Jonas Brothers around. Here’s what happened next:
We got them to quickly send us some of the dailies they had just shot, some of it in rain, some of it [in the sun] and in half hour we did snow tests on top of these dailies and sent them back to them as a proof of concept to show this is what we can achieve and they loved it. So, they immediately continued to shoot and finished the day and brought it in house and we kind of transformed the scene. It was amazing that the Jonas Brothers had as much energy in the rain, they totally didn’t look like they were in the rain, but it was pouring. Once we added our snow on top of everything it just transformed that whole scene from being this dour rainy concert into a Christmas magic moment.
You wouldn’t know it by the sequence itself, but thanks to some VFX cinematic magic, snowfall was added to transform the concert into something sugary sweet. Nick Jonas is actually also an executive producer on Dash & Lily with Shawn Levy, who he previously worked with on Night At the Museum 2. (Remember when they cameoed as cherubs? Big throwback!)
As far as how the cameo happened, Shawn Levy shared that while Dash & Lily was being shot he took his daughters to see the Jonas Brothers at the Hollywood Bowl and ended up hanging out with the band afterward. It’s at that point that Nick asked if they could cameo on the show and they then crafted the whole scene together “in 15 minutes over a tequila backstage,” per Collider. It’s a fun scene that rounds out all the Dash & Lily fun, leading up to the couple’s first kiss at the Strand Bookstore where their romance began through a red notebook.
Looking ahead, we still have a lot more questions about Dash & Lily. While the show has yet to be picked up for another season, it are based on a trilogy of books. Check out what’s coming next on Netflix to round out the year on CinemaBlend.
