inspire the original story: The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. King used the hotel that inspired him to write the book as the miniseries' location, with some interior shots in stages also in Denver. Garris tried to make the hotel feel as "enclosed" as possible to add a vibe of claustrophobia when in a closed hotel; the crew did this by emphasizing the "darkness" of the hotel, painting some of Stanley's areas that had recently been painted white, brown. The production team began shooting at the Stanley Hotel in March 1996, the date chosen as it was Denver's snowiest month. However, on the day filming began, they realized the hotel as well as most of Estes Park was in a "snow shadow," meaning it garnered the least amount of snow out of all Denver areas. As a result, they spent $100,000 in snowmaking machines sent from Los Angeles while lucking out on "three or four" shooting days with actual snow falling on Estes. Producer Mark Carliner attributed the lucky snowfalls to a Ute shaman doing a ritual at the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. The cast and crew, such as Cynthia Garris, Mick Garris' wife who plays the woman in Room 217; and Dawn Jeffrey-Nelson, Courtland Mead's acting coach claimed paranormal experiences occurring at the hotel during shooting. Some of the cast enjoyed working on The Shining. Mead "wasn't scared" as he had acted previously in horror films like Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996); John Durbin enjoyed the "madness" he got to portray with his character of Horace Derwent; and Stanley Anderson, who accepted the part of Delbert Grady based on his disappointment with the Kubrick version, tried to play the character "real" but with "a sense of distance to [his] view of the other and the world, so it comes out as irony or wryness." However, it was tough for Weber to play his character; because the scenes were not shot in chronological order, it was very difficult to master the character's mental state deterioration, due to it occurring gradually as the story progresses. Effects Steve Johnson and his XFX team were responsible for the effects of The Shining. When it came to the moving topiary animals, both live static and computer-animated versions of them were made. For the more-than-80 dead extra characters in the ballroom, Bill Corso came up with the idea to add black marks on their