Location
Sunday/July/2009 05:31 PM
Location
The location is probably the first large challenge to your film. If your film revolves around a bank vault, you might be able to build one inside of a commercial property that a local businessman donated because of the tough economy, so don’t set your entire story in a different location because you don’t know how you are going to get a certain space. We started by searching for a coffee shop that would allow us to film after hours, but ended up a space in a downtown studio that was donated to us through Craigslist. Put out feelers into the community. Look for abandoned business space in your community and bypass the commercial real-estate people and talk directly to the owners. Go to your county seat and get the names and numbers of people who own property if you’re looking for an exterior. You’ll be amazed at how nice people can be if you approach them palms up and welcoming. Don’t send the director to do any of the negotiating. The director is supposed to know all of the details and the conversation can turn into an argument over whether you’ll need access to the bathrooms or not, and how many actors will be on somebody’s lawn on such and such time in the day. These details can lead to an “I’m sorry” very quickly. Send Bob. Bob doesn’t know everything about the production, but he knows that the director is fantastic and the people doing the shoot wouldn’t do a thing that would annoy anyone anywhere or anytime. Bob can call the director to ask specific questions that have to be answered, but he doesn’t have to come up with all of the answers himself. This is important when you’re asking people to go out of their way to help you. They want to like the people who approach them and very few people immediately like a director (no offense). They often like a nice production assistant who is donating his or her time to the production because they feel it is so worthy.
Use every person at that first meeting to find leads for the main location. Send Bob to follow up. You’ll need the location for 34 days if you follow our model. By the end of that long month, you’ll have ninety percent of your filming done and you can start a rough edit. Once you find your location, you can start making schedules for rehearsals and preparing the production script. Really, once you have your primary location, your film can and will be shot with the proper structure and organization applied around the edges. I remember the meeting where the people at Treehouse gave us the keys to the small studio for February. Generally, November and February are great months for low-budget productions because so many of the pros have time to donate during these slow production months and also the rental companies are stocked with rigs that are doing them little good sitting there. We left the building, keys in hand, knowing that it was up to us now.
Buy a gift card with half of the money that you’ve allotted for the production. In our case this was around 5K. Let the director or producer hold on to this, and give it to the people who need to buy things for the production. This will save you from having to pay back a group of people who are already working for you for free. It’s a small comfort, but you’ll need it once the production staff grows to 40 or more.
You’re ready for the next step.
The location is probably the first large challenge to your film. If your film revolves around a bank vault, you might be able to build one inside of a commercial property that a local businessman donated because of the tough economy, so don’t set your entire story in a different location because you don’t know how you are going to get a certain space. We started by searching for a coffee shop that would allow us to film after hours, but ended up a space in a downtown studio that was donated to us through Craigslist. Put out feelers into the community. Look for abandoned business space in your community and bypass the commercial real-estate people and talk directly to the owners. Go to your county seat and get the names and numbers of people who own property if you’re looking for an exterior. You’ll be amazed at how nice people can be if you approach them palms up and welcoming. Don’t send the director to do any of the negotiating. The director is supposed to know all of the details and the conversation can turn into an argument over whether you’ll need access to the bathrooms or not, and how many actors will be on somebody’s lawn on such and such time in the day. These details can lead to an “I’m sorry” very quickly. Send Bob. Bob doesn’t know everything about the production, but he knows that the director is fantastic and the people doing the shoot wouldn’t do a thing that would annoy anyone anywhere or anytime. Bob can call the director to ask specific questions that have to be answered, but he doesn’t have to come up with all of the answers himself. This is important when you’re asking people to go out of their way to help you. They want to like the people who approach them and very few people immediately like a director (no offense). They often like a nice production assistant who is donating his or her time to the production because they feel it is so worthy.
Use every person at that first meeting to find leads for the main location. Send Bob to follow up. You’ll need the location for 34 days if you follow our model. By the end of that long month, you’ll have ninety percent of your filming done and you can start a rough edit. Once you find your location, you can start making schedules for rehearsals and preparing the production script. Really, once you have your primary location, your film can and will be shot with the proper structure and organization applied around the edges. I remember the meeting where the people at Treehouse gave us the keys to the small studio for February. Generally, November and February are great months for low-budget productions because so many of the pros have time to donate during these slow production months and also the rental companies are stocked with rigs that are doing them little good sitting there. We left the building, keys in hand, knowing that it was up to us now.
Buy a gift card with half of the money that you’ve allotted for the production. In our case this was around 5K. Let the director or producer hold on to this, and give it to the people who need to buy things for the production. This will save you from having to pay back a group of people who are already working for you for free. It’s a small comfort, but you’ll need it once the production staff grows to 40 or more.
You’re ready for the next step.