100 films

Day 4 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

2012-02-16T06:12:00.003-05:00

This is Day 4. I've yet to see a call sheet. #AYWR
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) October 29, 2011

There's no call sheet, but call time for day 4 is 9:30am. True to form, that doesn't happen. We leave at 10:12am and head back to Nooner's house to shoot the final day there.

Nooner has no idea we're coming. He thought we were done. So, of course, he's started to put his house back together. Luckily, he's pretty easy-going, so it's no problem to take his house back over.

Just like yesterday, we have to clean the house out completely to shoot the scene, but unlike yesterday, we don't have to re-set it later, other than to put the house back together for Nooner and take our props out completely. Why didn't we shoot the two empty house scenes back-to-back on the last day? I have no idea.

And you know, it'd be easy to go on a rant about this, but I think you see between the lines here.

Instead, let's talk about the crew, because sometimes when the top of the hierarchy isn't ideally organized, that pulls focus from the fantastic work being done by the rest of the crew, and DECORATION has a very good crew.

Today's challenge is to rotate the camera a full 360 degrees on the x-axis as Cheryl Nichols stands on her head. There's gear that does this, of course, but they've got none of it. So, Josh Jones and Stew Yost come up with the idea to try and strap a 5D to a tripod head. This gives them the rotation they need, but takes away access to all the buttons and controls of the camera, so they've got to figure out everything, then set the controls, and then strap it in.

Only, if you don't strap it in correctly, you get a kind of oblong rotation that's less than ideal.

Oh, and they're trying to do it on a tight shot with an actress who's standing on her head, meaning you can't have her sit there for anything longer than a few seconds to line everything up.

Eventually, they come up with a solution that requires a collapsed tripod laying flat on a bed of sandbags (to give it a little bit of height off the ground, thus allowing the rotation). They have Cheryl stand on her head, then make a note of where on the wall that is and where her hands are to establish the base for that shot. Set the frame, then try and repeat the head stand as close as possible to the last one. Then, they have to get a smooth rotation out of it.

It takes a couple of tries, but they get it.

From there, we move down the hill to a semi truck that's been borrowed for a sequence where Rick Dacey climbs on it in a bit of childish wonder. It's a 2 camera shot, one on the ground and one on more of an eye line thanks to a long lens on a hill.

Then it's some car mount driving shots to finish out the day. Only, when we get the camera mounted on the hood, it's moving around way too much for anyone's taste. Enter grip/AC/PA Jimmy, who sticks a empty water bottle under the lens. And you know what? It works. It's the perfect height. A little gaff tape later, and it's set. DP Stew Yost jumps in the bed of the truck to shoot Rick on the other side of the scene, and once they double check to make sure the cameras aren't seeing each other, they're off.

And that's day 4, the second-to-last day of principal photography. All that's left is to shoot the Decoration ceremony. You know, the scene the title comes from.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Amir Motlagh's 35 YEAR OLD MAN

2012-02-14T16:08:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago, I ran a failed screening series. The first film we screened was this great feature called WHALE. Well, the director is back with a short, and it's equally awesome.

35 Year Old Man from Amir Motlagh on Vimeo.

Day 3 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

2012-01-12T13:06:00.001-05:00

We're up for a 9am shoot on a bridge. It's a small scene, meant to exist near the end of the film, so I'm not going to talk about it too much, other than to say we all drove out there and shot a scene near the water. The rest isn't all that important. Nothing complicated. Nothing exciting.

From there, we head back to the cabin we're all staying in for quick turnaround. The word that goes out is "10 minutes". Someone sits down. The TV goes on, and before you know it, we've been watching Skip Bayless talk about Tim Tebow for over an hour.

Skip Bayless really likes Tim Tebow.

I have no idea what the cause of the delay is.

Eventually, we pile in the vehicles and head back to Story and our primary location of Nooner's house. The second unit splits off to shoot some B Unit stuff.

"you can hang back in the van while we block this scene" // "um...ok" #missingthepoint #AYWR
— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) October 28, 2011

As for me? Well, I'm being asked by the director to sit in the van. But, the sun is out and it's kind of warm out, so instead myself and Chris the sound guy find some chairs on the porch and sit there while they block the scene inside. I eat an orange and work on write-ups for other films.

It's not exactly a closed set. The director and actors are in there, of course. As is the DP and the grip and Jimmy, who's a hybrid grip/PA/whatever. Basically, everyone but myself and the sound guy. But whatever. I have work to do.

Eventually, the director comes out and asks if I could take some pictures of the area around the couch for continuity. It's a simple enough thing to do. There's a couch there and a bookshelf with a bunch of books on it. So I take pictures of everything and, as requested, start moving everything out to the porch. I pull the books out in stacks, being careful to keep them in order, the assumption being that we're going to want to reset the scene back to the original configuration. And while a lot of the books and magazines are scattered around the floor and coffee table, they're at least in distinct piles, and those that are on the bookshelf are in a specific order.

It's a little thing, but if you can pull 10 books off a shelf and keep them all together as you move them around, it saves time when you have to put them back. There's no trying to use photos to recreate the order. All you have to know is that this stack goes on the top shelf, over to the left. The rest takes care of itself.

We pull everything, stripping the area completely. But by the time that's finished, the director has gone ahead and done the same with the entire house.

There are no photos for the rest of the house. None.

They film the scene and then we have to reset the house for a night scene. But there's no photos, so when the time comes to see the parts of the house that aren't the general couch area, there's nothing to go by, other than the consensus memory of the cast and crew. Ever tried to remember every little detail about a room? It's not easy. People's memories conflict. Say you've got two framed images of birds. Was the cardinal the one higher up or the bluejay? How sure are you?

And sure it's a small thing, but those things add up. Flip one bird image and whatever. These things happen. But do it over and over again and it starts to pull people from your story. It becomes a drinking game, and when that happens, no one's going to be sober for your emotional third act.

What the production does have is footage from scenes previously shot in the house. But think of how time-consuming that is. You've gotta get out the hard drive and computer, boot it up, and search through all that footage, just to figure out if it was the cardinal or the bluejay on top. And that's a best case scenario. That's if you can find the footage you need, if it's nearby or, say, back in the cabin where everyone's staying.

This is why you get a Script Supervisor, because they'll be damned sure if it was the cardinal or the bluejay. Hell, they'll even tell you if it was hung straight. And it won't take them all night to figure it out.

And if you don't have the budget for the Script Supervisor? Well, then you make sure you get photos of the entire house before you start moving things.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 0 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

2012-01-12T13:04:00.003-05:00

I've never really heard of Marfa, Texas until a couple of weeks ago, but apparently the place is mythical. Everywhere I've been--Wisconsin, Kansas, Arkansas, Dallas, Austin--I keep hearing the same thing: "Oh, you'll love Marfa."

I'm not really sure why.

Marfa is this tiny, tiny town in West Texas. The census bureau has the population at 1,900 people, which seems high. Real cowboy country. They shot THERE WILL BE BLOOD here, as well as NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and the one thing 1st AC Brian Nelligan (who I picked up in Austin) try and figure out as we drive into town is, where the hell did they put everyone? They shot two decently big movies in the same town at the same time and there aren't exactly a bunch of hotels all over the place. Our theory is that Daniel Day Lewis just camped out near set in a tent that he made himself.

The first thing we notice as we drive through town is that the roads don't match up with my GPS, so it takes a bit of driving around to find the house we're looking for. I call the producer, Stacey Storey, but she's not in town yet, after some sort of issue with the grip truck breaking down on the way from LA. Apparently they're still in Arizona. We start shooting tomorrow.

We find some other crew people, and we all head to a bar to find everyone else. Introductions all around. Brea's there, along with AD John-Michael Thomas and DP Michelle Lawler, trying to figure out how to shoot the first day with a grip truck that may or may not show up on time.

Your first thought is that you'll have to cancel the day, or at least part of it, and no one wants to do that. You put yourself in the hole on day 1 and run the risk of spending the entire shoot trying to catch up. On the other hand, if the truck shows up late, you've got some real chaos on your hands, and that's not the best way to start a shoot either.

Eventually, the decision is made to turn day 1 into a prep day, which feels like the right call. The truck shows up with Stacey and gaffer Phil Matarese already exhausted from driving all night. And the prep time is helpful. Things need to be unloaded and sorted. Plus, it gives the various crew members time to get to know each other a little bit before the actual work starts. An opportunity to ease into things, if you will.

After an hour, we've completely taken over the yard and part of the street, which attracts the attention of a neighborhood cat. He starts looking around for food and before anyone realizes it, he's ripped into a bag of bagels and eaten part of one. I didn't even know a cat would eat a bagel.

No one knows where he came from exactly, but he's apparently been inside the house 3 times already.

Before long, he even has a name: Lonestar Bagels Sebastian III.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 2 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

2012-01-04T16:09:00.002-05:00

Call time for my second day on DECORATION is 9:30am. I'm ready to go a little before then, call it 9:20. Call time comes and goes. Nothing happens. And by that I mean nothing. People aren't ready, and why should they be? We aren't moving.

10am comes and goes. People start to emerge. They make breakfast. Get coffee. The director has gone for a walk. It was like this yesterday too, but it being my first day, I chalked it up to an aberration. Now it's looking more like a trend.

When you join a production near the end, there's a period where you try and figure out the pace of things. Every production operates on its own speed (for better or worse) and when you join one mid-stream, there's an adjustment, kind of like merging onto the highway. The more times you do this, the easier it gets, and after a while you can sometimes tell before you even hit the on-ramp.

After a week or so, every production becomes what it'll eventually be, which is to say that things don't change all that much beyond a point. Sure, in the first couple of days, stuff gets addressed and things change, but eventually it all settles into a routine. Very little changes past that point. Crews know that. Hell, they're the first ones to figure it out and adjust accordingly. So if you're on a set and the call is 9:30 and no one in the crew is ready to go at 9:30, that probably means that call time is a myth. Grips aren't giving up a hour of sleep if you aren't going to be ready to go on time. They aren't stupid. A good way to see if something is an aberration or the norm is to see how the crew reacts. Or, you ask them. And then a pause is all you need.

So we finally leave at 11:08am (I know because I wrote it down) after a 9:30 call and head to the police station to shoot the other half of the scene we shot yesterday. This requires a car mount on a police car. Then, we wait while they drive around filming a scene. They come back and we re-mount the camera in a different spot on the car. Nothing crazy complicated, just a question of building the safest thing imaginable with what we've got on hand. The car mount is easy enough, because we've got one of those, but putting the camera behind the back seat is a little trickier. DP Stew Yost settles on a tower of apple boxes and sandbags, with the camera wedged in-between the top 2 sandbags and the director sitting next to it to ensure the whole thing doesn't tip over.

From there, we head over to the tiny town of Story, Arkansas where the house location is. In the story, our two main characters (Cheryl Nichols and Rick Dacey) return home from LA when their father dies back in Arkansas. This is his house, a tiny one bedroom structure on a hill. It's a building badly in need of repair, which makes it a perfect location.

We move some stuff around a shoot a couple scenes, nothing all that complicated. It starts raining and things need to be adjusted accordingly, but all in all, we get everything. We wrap around 6pm.

It's Stew's birthday and someone has bought him a pellet gun. The crew spends the evening setting up empty beer bottles. By morning there's a pile of broken glass on the ground.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

And then?

2011-12-31T13:06:00.002-05:00

It feels like 10 years ago, but back when I came up with the idea for A Year Without Rent, I was struggling with some major shifts in my personal life, one of them being that I had no idea where in the country I wanted to live. It's a big country and when you're kind of hard-wired to be somewhat nomadic and already kind of floating around, the thought of just picking a place and getting an apartment and a lease and everything is kind of terrifying.

It also doesn't make a lot of sense.

So the thinking was that a year on the road would solidify a lot of things, all the while giving me a chance to scout out the various parts of the country I'd never really visited outside of maybe a layover in the airport.

Surely by then I'd know where I wanted to live.

Well…

You learn a couple of things on the road: 1) Being on the road is kind of addictive. 2) It's also exhausting. Also, living out of your car is a pain in the ass.

Seriously, it sucks.

But what's amazing about it is all the travel, all the people you meet, and all the real cool places you get to go. Think about it. You spend a year going from place to place, never spending more than a week or two in a location, always seeing something different, always experiencing something different. Then pick a spot where you'll spend several months or even several years. Even the idea of it makes my inner Mowgli revolt.

Still, it'd be nice to have a place to put my shit.

A Year Without Rent ends around the 20th of February where it started, in Purchase, New York on a short film by Mattson Tomlin. After that, I'll need to catch up on the mountain of work that'll surely be left. There's SXSW in March that I'll probably go to. Then a couple of films around the country throughout the year that I might be working on. One's in Montana. I'll probably be directing PAID sometime this summer and there's a couple of other things that I can't really talk about yet.

So…yeah. I don't know.

I'll need to find a source of income. I'll need to find a place to spend the times when I'm not going to be on the road. A home base, if you will. And I've got it narrowed down to something like 10 cities.

So I don't know where I'm going to live or what I'm going to do to pay the rent there. I know that when AYWR ends, my first step is to get drunk and pass out. After that, your guess is as good as mine.

Music for UP COUNTRY

2011-12-22T16:44:00.000-05:00

Above is the first 1:45 (ish) of my film UP COUNTRY, a feature film shot in northern Maine on the 7D for roughly $4,000. That's not a typo.

We thought we had a composer, but that's fallen through. We're looking for a new one. So if you'd like to take a shot at it, pitch us something using the video above to go by.

The film is the story of 3 people who hire a guide to take them fishing in the woods of northern Maine, then find themselves in trouble when the guide leads them out into the middle of nowhere and takes all their stuff.

As you can imagine, that doesn't go very well.

It's a small film, obviously, but it features great performances from Kieran Roberts, Jonny Mars, and Tyler Peck. And you can get an idea of how beautiful Dustin Pearlman's cinematography is from the clip.

If you have any questions, email me (lmcnelly [at] gmail) or ask on Twitter.

Day 1 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

2011-12-16T15:03:00.002-05:00

One of the questions I get the most in regards to A Year Without Rent is how it is I find these projects. I've covered it before (even if I am too tired to go look up the links right now), but it never hurts to repeat it, especially when serving as an introduction to a film.

Really, there's 3 popular ways. The first is the most obvious: I already know about the film. Usually this filmmaker is a friend of mine to some degree. This makes everything easier, as there isn't that awkward, "so what the hell are you doing?" stage. That's not to say it's a perfect system, but it's a simple one. The second is a film that submits information on the webpage. This is not as common as you think and sometimes leads to people submitting things that are, um, weird. Like, "they stumbled across the wrong webpage" weird. The third method is the old referral system. Basically, I work on a film with person A and they then call me up to work on project B. That's even easier than the first method, as they know exactly what to expect, as they've seen AYWR in action already.

If you're scoring at home (and I'm not sure why you would be), DECORATION is option 3. You might remember lead actress Cheryl Nichols from her supporting role in Paul Osborne's FAVOR. Cheryl gets my email from Paul, asks if I'd come to Arkansas. I juggle the dates around other stuff, and here I am in Arkansas. See how this works?

Cheryl's new film goes by the name of DECORATION. It is, to quote film's webpage, a film "formed out of necessity, in order to create the work that will outline our careers; in the spirit of experimentation, the pursuit of honesty and the search for a unique voice."

Practically speaking, what that means is that we're making a film in Story, Arkansas. Population: 89. You read that correctly. 89.

Well that's where they've been filming for the past 10 days or so. Today we're in Mt. Ida, a thriving metropolis of a couple of hundred people or so, to shoot a scene by the courthouse and, later, scenes in and around a grocery store.

We get to the courthouse and nearly all the parking spots nearby are empty. So we park a car, set up the camera, and shoot the front part of the scene where Cheryl gets stopped for drinking behind the wheel of the car. It goes pretty smoothly. But that's only the first half of the scene. The rest involves Cheryl's character being put in a squad car by Robert Baker. Only, the squad car the production is borrowing from the local police isn't anywhere to be found.

So, a handful of people jump in a car and go off to shoot something else. The rest of us hang out at the courthouse and watch the sun part the clouds and turn our previously overcast day into a sunny one.

That's not good. It's a bigger continuity issue than you think, bigger than just blue sky verses gray. Clouds provide a soft light. There's virtually no shadows and the light is pretty even, but sunlight is harsh and unforgiving. The shadows are easy to spot. You can shoot in both, of course, but where it gets tricky is when you try and pass them off as the same thing. It's hard to do well.

Plus, I'm not sure what the status is of the squad car.

An hour later, they come back and the decision is made to push the scene until later.

That leaves the scenes at the grocery store, and for those we need to wait for nightfall. First up is a scene in the parking lot where Key Grip Joshua Jones doubles as a supporting actor. The blocking of the scene is pretty simple, all revolving around the bed of a pickup truck, which in an empty parking lot means there's a lot of room to operate. This allows DP Stewart Yost to set up 3 different DSLR's, which obviously cuts down on the amount of takes we have to do.

It makes sense. Almost every shoot I've been on this year has had a DSLR just sitting around, mostly taking pictures of various things. So when you've got a situation where you can actually use it to, you know, get the movie made, why not do it?

Then, we're around the back to film a different scene. We walk by a dumpster that's got a weird blinking red light in a garbage bag. Twenty minutes later, when there's the need for something in the cab of the truck, suddenly we're tearing open a garbage bag for that very light. (Oh don't act like you wouldn't do it)

Finally that brings us inside. It's a couple of scenes, one on each side of of the store and a walk and talk along the back. The walk and talk is the interesting one. The way a lot of people do this is to put the camera on a dolly of some kind (or go handheld) and just stay in front of them. You don't even need to pay Aaron Sorkin any royalties.

Instead, what Nicolas has decided to do is film the scene as a series of shots from about 10 feet down the aisles as they move aisle by aisle, across the store, the camera locked down for each shot.

Meanwhile, there's a second camera more or less freelancing from where the Sorkin camera would be. My guess is they'll cut to that in-between each aisle shot.

At least, I hope that's what they do.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Houser

2011-12-13T10:51:00.002-05:00

It early morning on the set of THIS IS OURS. Coffee. Eggs. Bacon. Bagels. All in all one of the better micro-budget film breakfast spreads. I'm not really awake when the DP, Jonathan Houser, asks me if I want a code for this iPhone app called Storyboard Composer. It takes me a second before I realize that I already have the app. I bought it long ago, when I first got my iPhone 3G. I remember it being the first app I actually spent money on, and it's still the one I've spent the most on.

It wasn't even that hard of a decision.

Basically what the app does is build storyboards using the camera in your iPhone. You take pictures, import them, and add whatever you need to the image to create the storyboard. Direction, movement, people, whatever. Put it in a Quicktime video with the proper pacing, export it to PDF, and there's your pre-visualization all finished.

The concept isn't all that complicated, one of those "why hasn't anyone else thought of this already?" sort of things. If you watch the DVD extras for AMELIE, you'll see Jean-Pierre Jeunet essentially doing the same thing. This app is a natural extension of that.

But wait, why does Houser have codes for a free copy of it?

Because he created the fucking thing. It's his app.

Really, this shouldn't be all that surprising. Innovation in film processes is always driven by filmmakers who see a need they can fill, something that they possess the skills to make more efficient. This is how grip equipment gets invented. Hell, it's how Kit Boyer ended up putting a plunger on a RED lens earlier in the shoot. It stands to reason that a filmmaker would be behind something like a storyboarding app, but even then you assume it's a filmmaker working for someone like Avid or Apple who came up with idea, someone who makes films on the side. Not a filmmaker who gets steady work in the field.

But here the creator is, sitting in a crowded kitchen in Plain, Washington, working on a micro budget feature. It's kind of weird.

After the shoot, we meet up for drinks in Seattle. Houser tells me some of what they've got planned for future versions of the app--an iPad version, syncing with various other things you use in pre-production--but mostly we talk about how people use it both in pre-production and production. A lot of filmmakers will keep it on their phone and only use it for more complicated scenes. Others will use it for everything. My favorite use that I hadn't considered? Using it in conjunction with your script supervisor. Take a picture of the monitor for every shot of a scene. Load them into the app, then play it back before you move on, if for no other reason than to make sure what you just shot cuts together. It's a hell of a lot easier than going back to that location, or re-setting all those lights. Or worse: getting all your actors back a month after you wrap for re-shoots. It's not even extra gear to carry around.

And then who walks into the bar? Wonder Russell. Sometimes the indie film world is bigger than we think. And sometimes it's a lot smaller.

Check out the app for yourself:

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Ryan Demers' THE HONEY COOLER

2011-12-10T11:41:00.001-05:00

Back when I lived in Pittsburgh, there was a yearly convention of furries. It was always big news, for all the reasons you can imagine, and because not a whole lot happens in Pittsburgh that isn't somehow related to a sporting event. The big convention center in Pittsburgh is downtown, across the river from where I used to live, so it wasn't uncommon to stumble across a furry on the way to Starbucks or on the way out of a bar on a Friday night.

Still, I can't say that really prepared me for the experience of working on a movie that's partly about furries. And it certainly didn't prepare me for making out with a tiger.

Don't judge me. It's partly your fault I'm here.

But before we get to that, let's talk about casting. THE HONEY COOLER is written around this, um, "character" in Denver. He does a bunch of stuff, but mostly he's one of those guys you meet at a bar and say to yourself, "man, I should totally put him in a movie." No doubt he's interesting.

He's also unreliable.

Director Ryan Demers and I have been sitting in Ryan's car for over an hour, waiting for this guy to come downstairs. He's awake. He's just doing whatever. Ryan's not all that surprised, as apparently this has been going on for the whole shoot, only today it's worse because it's the final day and what's he going to do? Fire the guy?

Obviously, it's unacceptable. The guy should be fired. But Ryan's right, he can't reshoot all the guy's scenes. He's fucked. This is why you check references. Because if you're repeating someone else's headache, then you fucked up in pre-production.

Eventually, he shows up. Hooray.

We get to the bar, over an hour late, and I put on my costume. Thing is, when you volunteer to wear an animal costume, that pretty much precludes you from doing much else. You can't really carry all that much, so once we're loaded in, I'm limited to shuffling around in a ridiculous outfit and taking pictures.

I'm playing a panda bear (like in LOST, if LOST took place in a dive bar in Denver) who plays pool with a tiger and then, in the next shot, is making out with said tiger on the pool table.

This is why I turned down the option to join SAG.

The eye holes in the panda head make it really hard to see what the hell is going on, which is great for keeping your focus on the pool table, but makes it really hard to see any cues. Still, I do my best to repeat my actions each take--a shot in the corner, pause, survey the table, line up a shot side pocket. Then, I make out with the tiger, which essentially just involves pushing our costume heads together and rubbing our hands on each other's backs. As far as making out on screen goes, it's either the most or least awkward way to do it.

From there we go downstairs into what, I assume, is the green room for when bands play. There's food variants of band names written on the walls and no one wants to sit on the furniture if they don't have to because God knows what's happened on them.

It's a quick scene, then we wrap the bar and head to the next location, where Ryan explains to me what the fuck just happened.

Then, to a public park, where we've got to film the second half of a scene they already shot. Only now there's a lot of fucking people where they need to shoot a bit of a stunt involving an elephant falling off a bike. We can re-block it, or we can start setting up and hope people get the hint. We do the latter and it actually works. People clear out. We get our stunt.

Really, we spend more time figuring out if we'll be able to get the shot then we actually do filming it. Things go as smoothly as you could imagine, considering that we've got the following: a public park, an elephant that needs to run his bike into some rocks and flip over the handlebar, a girl in a bikini he flies over, the actor who's eternally late chasing him, and the camera on one of those things you can ride behind a bike. Just…yeah. Controlled chaos.

And that's a wrap. I guess. I don't know. I'm so confused.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Brendan Flynn's A WINDOW

2011-12-06T15:08:00.001-05:00

The email from DP Connor Hair says the film is about a mime, kind of a riff on a French style. Fair enough. I'm a big fan of French films. Give me some Renoir, some Truffaut, some Godard, Jeunet, Attal, and I'm a happy guy. And if you're going to do a French thing, a mime is as good a start as any.

So what, in this French movie about a mime are we shooting? Is it a balloon? A scene in the park or on a street corner? Nah, we're shooting a rave scene.

I'm told this is atypical of the larger narrative, but I'm only here for one day. So…I guess we'll see when it comes out.

We're in this place called Underground Seattle. As I understand it, at one point Seattle was built below sea level. Obviously, this is not such a great idea and something they eventually rectified, building the current city more or less on top of the old one. But that old one is still there, kind of a museum to a lost city. Think Atlantis, but with guided tours and t-shirts.

Add to that our rave scene.

If you're going to shoot a rave scene, you need a couple of things, primarily a smoke machine and lights that pulsate and move around. In other words, not your normal Arri kit.

I mean, sure, you use the Arri kit (if you have one), but the special lights are really going to be your money makers. So what have we got?

Well, there's a couple of lights that are controlled by sound. As the beat changes, they change. Perfect for this sort of thing, where it turns what could be a super complicated light gag into something a lot easier. We've got a couple of those, all in different colors. But if you've ever used such lights, you know that they aren't super strong, certainly not strong enough to get picked up by a digital camera in any meaningful way.

Enter the smoke machine.

By pumping in a bunch of smoke and throwing a lot of light into that (kind of like how you'd film cigarette smoke), director of photography Connor Hair is able to get a lot more play out of the flashing lights, thus making them workable.

But when you're filming a rave in an underground city, you can pretty much try every trick in the book, like shining a projector through chicken wire.

Or you can get an interesting effect by playing a projector through a large plastic tube. Of course, that's not as easy as it sounds. First, the tube is far too long and we've got nothing to cut it with, so Rory Emmons does what anyone would do: he attacks the tube with a hammer. It more or less works, but now the tube has a pretty jagged edge on one side. He puts that one at the ceiling, with the flat one on the ground. Then, it's a simple matter of attaching a projector and DVD player to the ceiling, lining it up so that it shines properly through the tube (harder than you think), and filling the tube with smoke via the bottom. The tube holds the smoke decently, but it dissipates faster than you'd like, meaning we have to keep tilting it up to pump in more smoke.

Still, it looks cool.

Meanwhile, up on the street and in the dressing room, people are getting made up in crazy elaborate rave costumes.

Remember, this is a French film about a mime.

Once the room is set, it leads to an interesting visual. The room is pretty much a maze of boxes and fake walls, full of crazy lights and even crazier costumes, every corner containing a surprise. And then, around the final turn is a grip checking Facebook on his phone.

On my phone are several missed calls from unlisted numbers. It's 10pm on a Sunday. On my voicemail is a message from the Seattle police. They're at my car, which has been broken into. I take off running.

When I get back, we're full into the rave scene. Oh, and there's a guy twirling fire. But my car is full of glass. There's a window with a garbage bag secured by gaff tape and a police report to fill out. I stay for another couple of hours, but then, not being all that comfortable with the safety of my car, I figure enough is enough. I bow out early,

The rave is still going full-steam.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 3 of Kris & Lindy Boustedt's THIS IS OURS

2011-12-05T14:11:00.001-05:00

When you show up for the final couple of days of a feature film, you run into one of two situations. Either the production owes 10 pages and is in an absolute state of panic, or they're on schedule and pretty much stuff is just winding down. The former is pretty damned entertaining, but the latter is a lot less stressful.

THIS IS OURS is the latter. Bad for page views. Good for the final product.

Spend enough time on film sets and you can pretty quickly figure out the chaotic ones from the organized. People know where they should be. There's a sense of calm, of serenity (if that's possible), that infuses everything. Everything just sort of clips along at a steady pace.

Today's the final day for THIS IS OURS, and the bulk of it revolves around a scene next to the RV parked in the driveway. Plus, there's a stunt.

The scene is primarily between our two male leads, an argument that turns violent. For obvious reasons, I won't get into specifics, but basically it involves one character getting the shit beat out of him with the cricket bat we used the day before on the golf course. Sure, you can try and use the same cricket bat to hit golf balls and beat up an actor, but actors tend to be fussy about such things, no matter how many times you assure them that Brando totally would have done it. And clearly, you can't hit golf balls very far with a bat soft enough to hit anyone, although considering how far they actual did fly, that probably wasn't something to worry about.

Basically, you have to have two cricket bats--a real one and a foam one. That way you can accomplish both objectives. But where does one even get a cricket bat, much less a foam one? I haven't a clue. I'm guessing the internet? Which is probably why they only sort of match. The foam bat is at least 4 inches longer than the wooden one and the painting isn't the same. But that's kind of one of the great secrets about film props--it won't matter. They're in different scenes. The mind of an audience, having seen a cricket bat established earlier in the film, will pretty much fill in the gaps of any subsequent cricket bat they see later in the film and assume it to be the same one, assuming it's even remotely close. Think of it like a type of optical illusion. The mind, in a lot of ways, sees what it wants to see, assuming you let it. Switch something out mid-scene and you have to be damned close. Do it a couple of scenes later and the audience will make the connection without even realize they're doing it.

So we beat the shit out of Ernie. But even a foam bat has some weight to it. After a couple of takes, he's sufficiently bruised and in a little bit of pain. So for the reverse, Kris steps in to take the punishment. We shoot it, then Mark and Wonder jump in the RV, gun it up the hill and onto the road.

And that's a wrap on THIS IS OURS.

But that's not everything. The cast and crew has been living in this house for two weeks, so the next day, some of us (including a very hung over Marco Scaringi) have the task of cleaning out the house. It's just mountains of garbage, as this house doesn't do garbage pickup. So we empty the AYWR vehicle and use that to ferry garbage from the house to a nearby dumpster. We then clean the house, pack as much gear as humanly possible into the RV, and hit the road back to Seattle.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

With Our Powers Combined!

2011-11-19T14:43:00.001-05:00

Well that was easy.

Well maybe not easy. Let's say it was "less hard".

Call today for BEST FRIENDS FOREVER was 3pm out on the desolate highways of Marfa, TX. Depending on where you're standing in Marfa, you either have 1 bar of cell reception or zero. Data is just as sketchy. Even if you have reception, it might not work. So for the last 10 hours of the "Save AYWR" Kickstarter campaign, I was more or less of a digital black hole.

But I was getting text messages. Lots of them from Wonder Russell, seemingly with every new backer.

Around 4pm, Brea walked over to ask how the campaign was going. I told her it was about $500 away, which was nothing. Last time we we're something like $5k away at the same point.

And then, around 5:30pm we had a company move. The text messages stopped. I couldn't get the Twitter app on my phone to work.

We took the grip truck to the production house to drop off the picture car, where I can usually get service. Nothing. Off to the next location--another desolate road on the other side of Marfa. Nothing.

Then, an hour and a half later, there were suddenly text messages from 12 different people on my phone. That could only mean one thing. Victory!

I put my phone away and went back to work helping set up the 12x8 frame and running stingers back and forth from the generator.

There was still a movie to make.

*****

It's kind of fitting, really, that I would be so absent for the final push. A Year Without Rent was always conceived as a project for the indie film community, the "Film Courage community", as Sean Hackett likes to call it. The thinking was that if it could, in any way, bridge that digital divide between people flung all around the world, we'd all be better for it. I think that in a lot of ways, this campaign shows that we've accomplished a little bit of that.

The campaign stems from a week back a couple months ago where I gave Victoria Westcott a ride from Seattle to LA to speak on a couple of panels on crowdfunding. There's this perception of what AYWR is on the ground, I'm sure. Hell, I had very different ideas about what my day-to-day life would be. Maybe it looks more glamorous on the internet. Working on a Matthew Lillard film! Filming in the desert outside LA! Lunch with David & Karen! Drinks with Wonder Russell! Hobnobbing with KingisaFink!

It's kind of a grind, though.

Maybe it was the 8 hour drive on the first day. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn't eaten in a day and a half when I picked Victoria up. Or maybe it was the 6 different steps it took to save $10 on a hotel room, culminating with sitting outside a McDonald's in a small town in Oregon, stealing their wifi. But somewhere in the first day, she came to the conclusion that it was pretty ridiculous.

So she put this on her back. I gave her a list of people to contact and she did the rest. It took Marty Lang about 5 seconds to get on board. Sean Hackett too. I was there for those parts. And then I went back to work, counting on karma and a film community I'd managed to help as much as I could to make sure I didn't get stranded in Iowa with $3 in my pocket.

Everyone involved did a fantastic job. I'm more or less blown away by the response. I've gotten a few messages from Gregory Bayne commenting on how the campaign is a testament to the impact of AYWR. I think it's a testament to the collective power of a community of people who've decided to take matters into their own hands.

Speaking of which, Mr. Bayne has a Kickstarter campaign running for his newest project. I know he'd really appreciate your support.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 2 of Kris & Lindy Boustedt's THIS IS OURS

2011-11-16T12:18:00.001-05:00

The story of THIS IS OURS (as I understand it, not having read the script) revolves around 2 couples. The first, played by Ernie Joseph and Karie Gonia, are cultured and monied and established. The second, played by Mark Carr and Wonder Russell, are freewheeling in pretty much every way. They live out of an RV.

Today we're filming their introduction.

It's pretty simple. Ernie Joseph's character goes out for a run. He overdoes it, and gets rescued by Mark and Wonder in the RV. Easy. All we've really got to do is find a spot to shoot it on the roads near our home base. And since the woods are the woods, we pretty much have our choice of the back roads around here, which is all of them. Really, there's only 2 considerations: traffic and a place nearby to turn around the RV.

My thought is to send someone (i.e. me) down the road out of frame, to hold up traffic while the camera is rolling. It's the sort of thing you can get away with on a rural road, as you're really only stopping one or two cars at a time, and only for a minute or two. People are generally pretty understanding. We did this, for example, on THE SUMMER HOME and no one got hurt. But apparently, they've already tried it on this shoot and, well, let's just say they can't do it again.

So I guess the lesson there is, you might only get one chance on your shoot to break the law. Use it wisely.

The second issue is a little more practical. You can see from the pictures that these road are somewhat narrow with lots of really big trees on the side. An RV doesn't have a good turning radius. So you can just drive the RV past the frame, then turn around and do it again. Nor can you easily back it up like you could a car. So you need to find a spot where you can turn around easily and quickly in both directions, while still having the proper length of road for the wide shot.

We find it, sort of, and shoot the wide. But traffic is picking up, so we move to a different spot for the remainder of the scene (woods look like woods), which goes off without a hitch.

Then it's back to the cabin to shoot a scene with the RV in Ernie and Karie's driveway. It's not a complicated scene, in terms of blocking, but the light is too harsh. There's really no other place to put this vehicle, and it's kind of white, so the sun is bouncing off it and washing out pretty much everything. So DP Jonathan Houser naturally wants to put up some silks to cut down as much of the light as possible.

Enter Kit Boyer.

Kit stacks two silks in the same gobo head, which solves most of the problem, then throws up some frost. Only, the wind is creating too much noise (a silk is naturally quiet, but the frost make a crinkly sound), so Kit threads two bungee cords through an empty water bottle, which creates enough tension in the frost to cut down nearly all the noise. It works.

If you remember all the way back to yesterday, there was a discussion between Kris and Houser about how to shoot something on the golf course. Here's the scene:

Ernie and Mark are at a tee box, hitting balls. Ernie is dressed in business casual wear, hitting balls off a tee with a driver. You know, like you should. But Mark is dressed like someone about to head to a Phish concert. Oh, and he's hitting the balls with a cricket bat. Yes, a cricket bat.

You'd think that hitting a golf ball with a cricket bat is a pretty inexact science, and you'd be right. Most of the shots are veering very quickly to the right, in the direction of the houses just off the fairway. This begs the obvious question of whether or not we're going to break a window. We can't afford to break a window. We can't stop the scene, nor can we control the shots--at all. It's a short discussion, but it goes something like this: If you live close to a golf course, you have to assume that your window is in danger of being smashed. So, you either have that factored into your cost of living, or (and this seems more likely) you've got windows that can withstand a golf ball traveling at high speeds.

This seems logical.

Nothing breaks, and after a bit Mark starts to get better at sending the ball down the fairway. As the sun starts to go down, I grab the bucket and amble down the fairway to collect all the balls.

In the end, it turns out he never even got close to the houses.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 1 of Kris & Lindy Boustedt's THIS IS OURS

2011-11-07T15:09:00.001-05:00

Early in A Year Without Rent, I was supposed to work on a film in Seattle that ended up falling apart. These things happen. A lot. But out of the ashes of that failure came two more films--THE SUMMER HOME, a short which shot back in April, and THIS IS OURS, a feature.

This rarely happens. Hell, when they talked to me about it way back when, I only half believed them.

But here we are, in Plain, Washington, shooting that feature film Kris and Lindy talked about on the set of THE SUMMER HOME.

THIS IS OURS takes place primarily in a cabin next to a golf course. It serves a dual purpose, as we're all sleeping in the cabin and it's the primary location for the film, which is exactly what we did on THE SUMMER HOME.

I arrive from Seattle an hour or so after call after getting a ride to my car from Brendon Fogle. It's a whole new team from the last film, with the only constants being Kris, Lindy, and Wonder Russell. Oh, and Falcor. I get the tour of the place, which is much bigger than it looks from the road and pretty easily holds everyone. Next to the cabin is a garage that serves as a holding area for gear. And there's a porch that overlooks a golf course. As far as places to make a movie go, it's a pretty nice one.

I'm on set for the last couple of days, so everything's already in full swing, clicking along. There's some rigging in ceiling to hang lights. Everyone's already exhausted. The usual.

There's always an adjustment period for stuff like this, where I come in as the new person. It takes a bit to actually work myself into the work flow. Even more so on this film, as things seem to going pretty smoothly. There's not a whole lot for me to do just yet. So I help carry some heavy stuff and take some pictures.

We film in the living room for a bit, then Kris, DP Jonathan Houser, and I go down to the golf course while they figure out how to shoot something that's on the schedule for later in the week.

Then, we set the living room for a night scene of a party in which, for some reason, Ernie Joseph and Mark Carr are wearing dresses. I'm not really sure why, but there you have that. It's that kind of film, I guess.

It's also, according to pretty much everyone, one of the most DIY shoots they've been on, due in large part to the ingenuity of one Kit Boyer, who when presented with a partial camera package for the RED, got creative. He made an eyebrow for the matte box with some cardboard, gaff tape, and a soda can.

But he also created something he calls "the plunge". It's, well, I'll let him explain it.

I can honestly say I've never seen that before. Fellow 1st AC's, the bar has been raised.

A side note: I've timed these posts to coincide with the THIS IS OURS Kickstarter campaign. So if you've got some spare change, consider sending it their way.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Survival, Part II

2011-11-06T13:11:00.002-05:00

Back in the beginning of September, I posted an update on the chances of AYWR surviving the year. It was a rough estimate, but it's actually turned out to be pretty accurate. Above is the exact same chart, but with an arrow indicating where we are now.

As you can see, the odds get a lot worse pretty soon.

Victoria Westcott kind of already knew that, but it became more clear when she rode with me from Seattle to Los Angeles to appear on a couple of panels, which is where her idea of the "Save AYWR" Kickstarter campaign came from.

Look at that chart again. Without some intervention, we probably don't get to 10 months (Dec 18th) and almost definitely don't get to 11 months (Jan 18th). To be honest, I don't know how much farther past the end of the next project we get (Dec 1st). There's a reserve built in where I have just enough money to get back to a safe house if/when the money runs out, mostly so I don't get stranded in Iowa with $3 in my pocket. I can see that point. I can also see the finish line. And, really, the question is which one people want to see me hit first?

When I developed AYWR, I talked to a number of people who know a lot more than I do about getting corporate sponsorship. They all pretty much agreed that it was the sort of project companies would get behind. For whatever reason, they haven't, despite the best efforts of several talented individuals (not me). At first, it was kind of annoying. But then I realized that a project like this wasn't going to get anything handed to it. The original Kickstarter campaign, despite all of its acclaim, has never once been publicly mentioned by Kickstarter. The media doesn't give a fuck about us (outside of our own media, which has so completely embraced the project). And why should they? It's a project built for the independent film community, fueled by that same community, and starring the people that make independent film so exciting. Since when has independent film relied on the kindness of corporations for permission to do something?

Fuck them.

We have a film community that we built with blood, sweat, and gaff tape. No one's going to swoop in and save the day for us. We're going to build up this new model for indie film the same way we build our films, working together despite really fucking steep odds. And, really, I don't know that we'd have it any other way.

If AYWR is going to survive, then it's going to survive the same way it was born, with an outpouring of community support. There's films left to work on. There's festivals left to visit and still some filmmakers to get on camera. It can end in a couple of weeks, or it can end on February 18th, 2012. It's entirely up to us and no one else.

So what if the old guard doesn't pay attention? We don't need them. This is our community, our movement. No one else's. They'd probably just get in the way.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

(in)Equity

2011-11-05T12:25:00.002-04:00

The big news in the crowdfunding world is the U.S. House passing the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act. It was a rather overwhelming vote, which means that somehow Congress has found something Democrats and Republicans agree on. All by itself this is shocking. What the bill effectively does is open crowdfunding up to equity investments. Almost everyone thinks this is a fantastic thing.

Everyone except me.

SEC regulations aren't even remotely my thing, so I'm not going to pretend I fully understand what the bill means. Other people, smarter than me, can do that for you. They can tell you about what the new regulations would do, what extra paperwork it would inevitably involve. They can tell you more about that worrisome part where the individual states get involved. But I do have some idea how the film world works and some idea how crowdfunding works.

Let's assume for a minute that the bill allows you to sell equity stakes in your film via Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. That seems to be what everyone thinks it means. On the surface, this seems like a pretty good deal. As it stands now, people back projects for a variety of reasons, but essentially they do it to support an artist in his or her quest to create something. They don't expect anything in return, other than the promised perks. But imagine if they could make money on it. Wouldn't they be willing to give more? If there was a chance that they could get behind the next PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, logic dictates it would make it much easier to raise those funds. No one doubts that.

And really, that's kind of the problem.

People see dollar signs and their brain just shuts off. People need money to make their films and anything that makes that easier is automatically viewed as a good thing. I understand that. Money is a great motivator. But there's more to it than that.

The relationship between a backer and a creator is a unique one. The backers collectively give an artist the ability to create something on their own terms. The filmmaker then delivers that film and the strength or weakness of it determines whether or not the backers would be willing to support them again. Make a good film and the relationship continues. Make a shitty film and it probably won't. At the end of the day, it's the work that matters.

Contrary to what some people will have you believe, this relationship can theoretically go on forever. If the filmmaker keeps delivering the work and keeps engaging with those backers in a meaningful way, it stands to reason that the backer pool will get deeper over time. Someone with a track record attracts a bigger audience. You could have a director make an entire career's worth of films, all of them crowdfunded, completely free of any studio system or any interference from people concerned with how their film will fare in a marketplace.

That's never before been possible. And now it is. It's the hope that there's an actual future where indie filmmakers can sustain themselves with their work.

That's a really big deal.

Now add a profit motivation to that.

Money changes everything. Tell people they can make money off something and it becomes all they can think of. Instead of giving a filmmaker $50 and then watching from afar as they make the work, people take a more active approach to following the progress. After all, that's their $50, maybe their $100, maybe more. The entire expectation changes. They go from being benefactors to investors. And investors vote with their wallet.

Let's say your film has 500 backers. You now have 500 investors to keep track of. 500 people who, on some level, want your film to turn a profit. 500 people who all have different ideas about how to do that. In short, you're just like a studio filmmaker, only you have to answer to a lot more people and you have a lot less money to work with.

But in good news, it'll be easier to convince the guy you went to grade school with to give you $50. So that's something.

Really, I don't imagine for a second that Congress has any idea what the hell they're doing. And I'm sure the law will be littered with loopholes designed to help the 1% continue fucking us all over. I'm skeptical that this reform isn't more trouble than it's worth, and I don't really see the upside. Seems to me we're just tearing down the best opportunity to create a system for filmmaker sustainability in our lifetime. And for what?

One of the discussions Kieran Roberts and I have every so often about UP COUNTRY is how to best finish the movie. It's a common discussion that every film has. Our approach is simple. Since we have no investors and no one to pay back, we can do whatever we think is best for the film. We have final cut. It's 100% up to us. We have some interesting things in the film that we can do simply because of the creative freedom given by our Kickstarter backers. Or, as I say to Kieran, "if we can't do this on a $4,000 Kickstarter film, we'll never be able to." It's really a liberating feeling. It's not something I want to give up.

And maybe if those 108 backers were investors, that wouldn't change. I'm pretty stubborn, after all. But my gut tells me it would. I know it would muddy up the water quite a bit. I see meetings and large votes on stuff like the font of the title sequence and what festivals (if any) to submit the film to and really a bunch of nonsense that has nothing to do with making films. It's middle management. I used to work in middle management. It's neither fun nor productive.

Filmmakers don't need that sort of group think mentality telling them how to do their jobs. Not when the system in place has so much potential for greatness.

Day 8 of James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO

2011-11-04T12:09:00.001-04:00

Between Day 7 and 8 of THE STAGG DO was a day off. Being filmmakers, we obviously all got drunk the night before the off day, then spent that day hung over. This will surprise no one in the film world.

On the day off, I get up late and the house where we're all staying is mostly empty. Ben comes downstairs after a bit. Neither of us has any clue where people are, but things are clearly gone. There's no note. Nothing.

Huh.

After a bit, Charlotte (our clapper) and Tina (our Art Director Assistant) come back. They seem to think that our former AD Jennifer Hegarty and our Production Designer Jen Saguaro have gone home to Bristol.

Again, there's no note. No email. Nothing.

So if you're scoring at home, our AD quit on Day 5, defected to G&E on Day 6, more or less disappeared at the end of Day 7, and then left town before Day 8.

Like I said, nothing on a film set happens in a vacuum, but…well.

Day 8 starts and still no sign of either of them. Zahra says they told her they weren't coming back, only it's not that simple. Jennifer has defected to G&E, which means that she's under me and Richy. I used to work in middle management. If you didn't show up one day without calling your immediate manager, you were pretty much fired. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but not telling the people you're working for that you aren't coming in, is kind of a bullshit thing to do.

But beyond that, it's really impressive to quit twice on a film shoot that only lasts 8 days. In the corporate world, they'd put you on the list of people to never hire again, which I'm guessing is where she is now for several people in the greater Newcastle area.

For Day 8, we're filming the wedding scene that the stagg do leads up to. Everyone's dressed up and the lighting is much, much easier. For one thing, we're inside, so essentially we're shining our big moon 2K (which is now a sun) through a window and using a kino bank to light the rest of the room. It's a tiny scene, just a couple of lines, then we move outside where it's overcast and threatening to rain (big surprise).

We've got the 2K going, mostly just to throw a little more light into the shadows, but that's pretty much it. The great thing about overcast skies is they provide a soft box that's ideal for filming. You can literally point the camera at something and be lit. It makes our jobs a lot easier.

It's a wide shot, with lots of moving parts. Since we look like shit from being in the woods, we aren't usable as extras, so other than running a few cables through windows, we don't have a whole lot to do other than just stay out of the way.

And so we do what any crew members do during down time: we work on a practical joke. Charlotte Bagshaw is easily the most innocent person on the crew. She's a student, working on her first film, and she's really too sweet of a person to be working in film. Like any crew member, she's been drafted into the cast, playing a bridesmaid. She's never acted before, obviously. So when this happened around Day 5 or so, Ben and I started talking about that one scene in an earlier draft where Pob has sex with a bridesmaid during the wedding. Tina picked up on it right away, as did Richy. The scene doesn't exist, but Charlotte doesn't know that. Around Day 7, I pull Pob and James aside and tell them about the joke.

On Day 8, Pob starts winking at Charlotte, says something about the big scene. Then James walks through the holding area and I ask him when they're going to film that. He pulls it off with a perfect deadpan and a wave of horror washes over her face.

"Guys, I'm only 18."

"That's kind of the point."

We also made her watch TRAINSPOTTING, so I'm sure we've scarred her for life. Proof: she's really excited to work on more films.

At some point during the day, I get an email from Jennifer that's intended as a "proper goodbye". I'm not going to run any of it here, as it's a private correspondence, but she'll have an opportunity to publish a counterpoint if she wants.

The wedding ends and we film a scene of Dawn, our host and trained opera singer, singing the musical portion of the ceremony, then a few cutaways of the cake made by fellow filmmaker Richard Purves and that's a wrap on THE STAGG DO (well, at least this portion of it).

Like any good Brits, we retire to the pub.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 7 of James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO

2011-11-03T16:12:00.003-04:00

There's a lot of things you can do wrong as a film production, and if you've been paying attention to our coverage of THE STAGG DO, you'll notice that they've pretty much ticked off all the boxes, save one: we've had good turnarounds.

Generally, the rule in film is "12 on, 12 off". What that means is that a day's shoot shouldn't go over 12 hours and the crew should have 12 hours off before starting up again. The first one gets broken all the time in indie film, so much so that it's always a bit of a shock when a film goes the entire production without going over 12 hours. The turnaround, however, is a little better protected. Crewing on a film is a grind and people get exhausted pretty quickly, so the 12 hours to re-charge is pretty vital. It helps that usually the director and producers are just as tired as everyone else. There are reasons you can push the 12 hours. A big company move is one. Sunrise or sunset is another. But even then, 10 hours is a minimum before people start to get more than just annoyed.

Today's turnaround: 6 hours. Six hours is insane. It's flat-out dumb. The only excuse, really, is if you've got a location that's giving you a very small window to shoot, thus tying your hands.

A location like, I dunno, a strip club.

If you're going to make your crew shoot outside at night in the rain for days upon days until there's a near mutiny and then shoot the 7th day in a row on a 6 hour turnaround, a strip club is probably one of the only places you could justify shooting. Crews are mostly made up of straight guys and straight guys like scantily clad women. It makes them forget a lot of other things, like how exhausted they are. The concept isn't very complicated. And I know, it's horribly chauvinistic and blah blah blah, but these are people who've been put through the wringer, physically and emotionally. Plus, it's in the script.

Just the simple act of being inside is a nice change of pace. All the gear has a layer of dried mud on it (as do we) and smells a little like a wet dog (as do we). Whether or not this is an improvement over the usual smell of the place is up for debate.

We have a hard out, which means we're getting kicked out at 4pm whether we're done or not, so the first thing Richy Reay and I do is a walkthrough of the location, to gauge what gear we actually need. The rest can stay in the van, thus saving the time of loading it in and out. We settle on the kino banks and some of the redheads, and that's essentially it. But when we get back upstairs, the entire van has been loaded into the club. Everything. Stuff we don't need. Stuff that we couldn't even use if we wanted to.

Maybe it's because I haven't slept. Maybe it's because I've been wearing wet shoes for 4 days. Or maybe it's because I'm tired of people doing things without listening (or thinking), but I'm kind of pissed. I don't yell. Yet.

I look at Richy. "I swear. Sometimes I think Simon is the only one listening."

"Well, that's not fair," Richy says. "He's got professional help."

I haven't mentioned this yet, partly because the story of THE STAGG DO has been one of escalating tensions and failures and he doesn't factor into all of that, but Simon is deaf. Legally deaf. He's also one of our camera people. I've never been on a set with a deaf person before. Film sets involve a lot of talking without looking at people, so I kind of figured it'd be a challenge, but he's easily been one of the most attentive, competent people on the shoot.

How it works is he can read lips, but he's also got an interpreter to sign for him. This is kind of essential in dark, or when you're trying to talk and adjust a light at the same time, the sort of things where your natural actions don't lend themselves well to eye contact and lip reading. Think of being on a set. How much to talk to people without looking at them? Or without even being able to see them. A lot, right?

But Simon works his ass off. He puts himself in position to "hear" as much as possible, even volunteering to do help in other departments.

Which is all to say that when the deaf guy is the only person listening, that can't be a good thing.

It goes relatively smoothly, sort of. Well, compared to the stuff in the woods. Maybe it's just because everything is contained, instead of being flung across all creation. It's at least a little easier to find things. Of course, it's all in the wrong place, but it's easier to track down. There's not a lot to the scenes. A couple of nearly naked models. Some easy setups and we move across town to a house where 2 more scantily clad women appear, only they haven't been cast yet.

Enter Nick the runner, who goes around town during the strip club scene, literally trying to pick up women. And the crazy thing is he finds two, one of whom is an aspiring underwear model.

The scene is only a couple of shots, and we're done while it's still light out. Tomorrow's a day off, so the crew heads to a bar, where James buys drinks for all.

Spirits are finally picking up. Is that because there's beer and cleavage? Probably.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

About that Kickstarter campaign

2011-10-31T15:57:00.002-04:00

My Twitter feed exploded today, which must mean that Victoria Westcott and Marty Lang's somewhat secret project that I wasn't supposed to really know about must be live.

As I understand it, the original plan was to keep this a secret from me, to somehow do it while I wasn't paying attention, but I think they figured out that would be pretty much impossible. Over/under on how long it would take before I heard about it would be 10 minutes.

Plus, they kind of needed my digital rolodex to contact all these people.

So here's my involvement in the whole thing:

1. Victoria, who came up with the idea, ran it by me to make sure it had my blessing. It does, of course. Otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it.

The fact that AYWR faces long odds of survival has been well-documented. Anyone with half a brain knows that $12,000 isn't a lot of money to travel the ~~country~~ world. I'm grateful for all the help I can get.

2. I then gave her contact information and made some introductions with filmmakers she doesn't know.

3. I answered a couple of questions about AYWR, stuff like number of projects, miles travelled. Things like that. Also, I provided that graphic on the front, because I guess it's easier to just get it from me than re-create it.

Which is to say that if you have questions about the campaign, I probably don't know the answer. In fact, I probably know just as much as you do. That doesn't mean I'm not insanely thankful that people have taken up this initiative. The idea that people would do this pretty much blows my mind. I'll be obsessively refreshing the Kickstarter page, as I know there's almost no chance that I'll be able to resist.

It's kind of bizarre, to be sweating a Kickstarter campaign that's effectively yours, but at the same time isn't. There's this detached feeling to it.

My fingers are so motherfucking crossed, and I'm more thankful than you can imagine.

Day 6 of James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO

2011-10-16T20:14:00.003-04:00

It's easy to think of quitting as a singular action, a "fuck you" to whomever you feel has wronged you. After all, no one quits because they're slightly annoyed. There's a ramp-up where anger and resentment and frustration builds and builds and builds until the person just can't take it anymore. And then they throw in the towel.

I've done it on corporate jobs. It's fun.

But it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Sure, if you're a PA on a $20 million film, no one's going to care if you quit. Hell, they won't even notice. But if you're the AD on a micro? People will notice.

There's kind of sliding scale on these things, but the higher up you are on a film and/or the smaller the crew, the more of an asshole you are for quitting. Because no matter what may or may not have happened and who wronged who, quitting has a ripple effect on everyone else in the cast and crew.

Your job now has to be done by someone else (or a combination of people) who are already pretty busy doing their own jobs. So the workload of those people increases, but then they likely can't keep up with all the tasks required of them, so other people have to pick up their slack.

Chances are, those aren't the people you're mad at. It's kind of like shooting a rocket launcher into a hostage situation. Sure you'll hurt the bag guy, but there's a lot of innocent people in there too.

Not to mention the chaos surrounding the actual act of quitting.

But if you're the AD, who are you even mad at?

When I direct and produce a film, my motto is that everything that goes wrong, short of an Act of God, is ultimately my fault. Because, really it is. Almost everything that happens on a set stems from someone not doing their homework (or pre-production) and as the man in charge, that falls on me. The camera guy is a klutz and breaks a lens? Well, I'm the guy who hired him, so that's on me. The owner of the location gets mad and kicks us out? I didn't properly make sure someone was attending to his needs. It's overly simplistic, but it works. Thing is, that rolls downhill. If you're the AD on a film that's 24 pages behind schedule, that's your fault. Actors are late showing up? Your fault. The director isn't ready to shoot when the schedule calls for it? Your fault. It's really easy to bitch and moan about what's going wrong. It's a lot harder to take some responsibility for it, roll up your sleeves, and fix the fucking problem. All quitting does is pass the work on to other people.

We'll come back to this later.

As you've probably guessed, we had a defection on Day 5. Our AD has now joined the G&E team. It's a gesture, for sure, and there's always a need for more people to wrap wires and break down light stands, but it's still not what you want the AD doing.

But it's a short day with an even shorter turnaround, so that's really what's on everyone's mind. We're in the woods canopy where I previously tore down part of a tree. We've got to film a scene where the actors find a tree that looks like a cock and balls. The production had one made by a local person who makes props (not our man Eliot, who's done a fantastic job) and, well, it looks terrible. Really, really terrible. Even in a comedy, where it's supposed to be ridiculous, it's too much.

The decision is made that instead of a tree that looks like male genitalia, which could be hard to find, why not work with the trees God gave us? It doesn't take long before we find a tree with a hole in it that everyone agrees looks like a "fanny".

Apparently, in the UK, this has an entirely different meaning. You can imagine my confusion.

The light plan isn't hard, even if it does involve stomping through some pretty dense brush, but the issue is with the entrance. We've been in and out of here enough, and it's rained enough, that it's turned into pure mud. It's not safe. Neither Ben or I really want to start carrying heavy lights in through there. So we run cables while they put down some pallets and rubber mats to provide traction.

Once that's done, it's pretty easy. Producer Zahra Zomorrodian picks up the AD reigns and the day seems to run pretty smoothly. But it's a short day, and those kind of have their own rules about them. We're done and out of there while it's still dark.

And thank God for that. We have to be back on set in 6 hours.

That's not a misprint.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 5 of James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO

2011-10-13T14:03:00.001-04:00

On Day 5, it stopped raining.

For the length of the production, the out-of-town chunk of the production (myself, Ben Moseley, AD Jennifer Hegarty, Production Designer Jen Saguraro, Tina Frank from the Art Department, Sound guy Xander McGrouther (replacing Paul Quirk, who was only available for part of the shoot), and 2nd AC in training Charlotte Bagshaw) are all staying at the house of filmmaker Dawn Furness. There's about a half a bar of Wifi there, if you stand by the window and hold your computer at an angle, and according to that it isn't supposed to rain on Day 5. It's even sunny out all afternoon and on the way up to the location.

And then we get there and it pours for about 10 minutes, which is just long enough to make everything wet, especially the tall grass in the field where Ben and I will be setting up the 2K. So much for dry clothes.

Today's challenge is to light a tree fort (yes, a tree fort) on the other side of the river, about 100 yards downstream from where we lit on Day 3. Downstream means closer to the barns, which is theoretically a good thing.

It also means we have to get the 2K across the river via a walking bridge the Runners have built out of pallets and other random wooden things they've found laying around. It's safe, but when you mix in the rain and the mud, it's not the ideal thing to carry a heavy light across. It needs to go down the hill to get to that, then up a hill and through a gate so that we can get it to the only place where it'll be able to hit the tree fort, and even then you're looking at a moon that's at best on the same axis as the actors.

Augmenting the moon is our usual assortment of Redheads, 2 on each side of the river, gelled green and pointing up at the canopy of trees all around the tree fort, the idea being that if you've got nothing but blackness behind actors in a scene like this, it looks pretty dull. But, some indication of foliage in the distance, blurry and out of focus but definitely there, adds perspective to the scene. If nothing else, it helps sell the illusion that we are in fact in the woods, which we actually are.

Think of it this way: there's no point in going to all the trouble of filming in the fucking woods if it looks like we might have shot the damn thing on a soundstage.

By this point, we've got this pretty well down to a science. It's not all that complicated. It's just a question of execution. The only hitch in the system is that today they want to put a practical in the tree fort, and even that is pretty simple. The hardest part is catching the extension cord as it's being thrown up fifteen or so feet.

We don't even have to flip the lights. Suddenly I've got a pretty easy assignment.

The problem is, there's not a whole lot to take pictures of. All the light is focused on the tree fort, and it isn't strong enough or big enough to hold extra people. Down below, at the base of the tree, is pretty dark.

Of course, that's only a small part of what's going on. While it's still light out and we're setting lights, it's obvious that something bad is about to happen. No one is happy, even more so than yesterday.

"Have you ever been on a film where the crew mutinied?" I ask Ben.
"No, you?"
"Almost."

It's to the point where it isn't a question of if things are going to fall apart, but when.

It's strange, because our G&E team is mostly out of the picture for all of this. We run around, setting lights and stringing cables while there's all this bickering and anger going on. We see it--you'd be blind not to--but it doesn't affect us all that much, really. It does, but it doesn't.

All through the shoot, the director has had to spend a lot more time than normal working with actors before the camera even rolls. They don't know their lines, for the most part and to call the working relationship between the actors, the director, and the production unprofessional is kind. It's the single biggest drag on the schedule. I can tell that no matter where I am in the woods, matter how far I am from the action.

On Day 5 they add a new actor to the mix. James has never met him. No one in the production has. They rehearse him, which by all accounts goes well, but when the camera starts rolling, he freezes. Completely. The production comes crashing to a halt.

He cannot function on camera. This is why you do your research before you bring someone on. It's easy to chalk an actor freezing up as something out of your control, but is it? If this person has acted before, then you should rather easily be able to learn about his stage fright with a quick phone call. And if he isn't, then why are you hiring a non-actor without at least meeting with him? Why are you hiring anyone without doing at least a cursory reference check?

And then the AD quits.

Jennifer Hegarty has been unhappy pretty much from Day 1. That's been obvious to everyone, but as the production fell further and further behind, she became more and more vocal in her displeasure, telling anyone who will listen how badly things are going, and even confiding to me things you shouldn't tell the embedded reporter on your set.

I don't want to get into the why because I honestly don't know. Nothing on a film set happens in a vacuum. Anyone who tries to tell you that the problems on a set are all one person's (or several persons) fault is either lying to themselves or trying to sell you on their own innocence. I do know that a very unhappy Assistant Director quit the film, and that spun everything into a panic. Suddenly people are doing damage control left and right. Richy Reay (the DP) asks me to take over for him as he and James go and "take care of some things", and suddenly Ben and I are in charge as we've got to figure out a scene that was supposed to take place in the tree fort, and now happens and the base of the tree, where it's completely dark. It strikes me that the best approach is to slide the moon over, throwing it at the tree trunk, and staging the scene in a way that the new actor is in silhouette, thus making his dialogue much less important (and really easy to replace in post, as needed).

So we go to work re-lighting the scene. The Runners start knocking down bushes and nettles in the way, Ben moves the 2K and I start re-lighting the canopy, basically trying to figure out how Richy would want this lit. By the time we're ready, Richy is back. He tweaks a few things and we set some branches between the actors and the lights to give some dapple. Then James come back and we shoot the scene.

I have no idea what transpired in that time frame. And I don't really care. As a journalist, I know my job is to cover the story, but I'm a filmmaker first. Priority one is getting the shots in the can. The rest is just things to write about.

When I get back to the barn, Jen asks if there's anything she can do to help out G&E. I put her to work organizing the gels. Fittingly, they've exploded into a giant mess.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 4 of James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO

2011-10-11T16:19:00.002-04:00

One good thing about a justified bit of yelling is that sometimes things get fixed. Gone are yesterday's flimsy garbage bags. Today we've got new, sturdier, blue ones. They won't fit over a light, but you can put the cable reels in them. And today we're a little more prepared for the rain, which is good because there's more of it. Also, the blue bags are much easier to see in the dark than black ones.

The new plan is similar but a lot simpler. One thing we discovered yesterday was that while the garbage bags with gaff tape certainly kept the reels dry, if you needed to get into them quickly, you were kind of fucked. You had to rip it open and re-bag it with a new bag, which isn't exactly the greenest way to do things. But as Ben Moseley points out, he's got reusable cable ties in his kit, which will work a whole lot better. So that becomes our new method. We can get in and out of the bags quickly and easily, which enables us to re-run cabling faster.

Also, there's more glow sticks.

The idea is that since it's dark out and everyone is running around, the glow sticks are a good way to mark things you don't want anyone running into. Every department gets their own color, but G&E (which is just me and Ben) have multiple colors because, well, we need a lot more glow sticks than everyone else does.

It's kind of tricky to judge the progress of a production like THE STAGG DO when you're the Gaffer. Most of my day involves walking around the periphery of the production, ducking in and out of the shadows, setting up lights, running cables, and mapping out the next location so that we can flip the set up as quickly as possible. In the middle of that is the production. I catch bits and pieces, mostly when I'm in the barn to get more gear or at craft services to grab some food and Red Bull.

But I know it isn't going well.

Tensions are high all around. The production is, depending on who you ask, anywhere from 10 to 24 pages behind. That's a lot. The AD is bitching about the Producers. The Producers are bitching about the AD. The crew is bitching about the cast. The cast is bitching about the Production. Everyone's bitching about the runners.

No one's bitching about the G&E team of Ben Moseley and myself, for a couple reasons. 1) We own our shit. We're organized and we're ahead of schedule. Part of that is because it's easy to get ahead when everyone else is behind. All you have to do is hold steady. But Ben and I are pretty much on the same page. We talk to the DP and we both pretty much know instantly what we've got to do. We've figured out our power limitations and we have a good handle on what resources we're going to need. It's just a matter of execution. But, 2) Being the guy who writes for Filmmaker Magazine changes how people approach you on set. Everyone wants to look good in print, so they're very cognizant of how they look in your eyes.

Or, as AD Jennifer Hegarty says, "I don't know why they'd invite you and your spotlight to this production."

And to be fair, this is a curious production. Before I even got on the plane, I knew we had a very truncated pre-production. But I didn't realize how much trouble we were in until I got there and James DeMarco mentioned that because of schedules, they hadn't been able to do any rehearsals with the cast, half of whom are non-actors. Obviously, that's bad. And it shows.

More on that later in the series.

As for the actual production part of Day 4, the little changed. It rained a lot and it was dark. Again.

The night starts in the field again, revolving around the tent that serves as our primarily location for the woods. We've moved the 2k all the way to the nearest part of the field to the barn (and spun the tent), which makes running electricity easier, but creates a slight safety hazard, as it's right on the edge of the walkway. But with a rope line strung with glow sticks, it's about as safe as you could expect.

After that, we've got to flip to a section of the woods to the left, nearer the second barn. It's a small little section of woods. There's some footpaths and a pretty heavy canopy. It's also under some power lines.

We've got to get the 2K in there, which isn't the easiest thing in the world, then jack it up to create a moon. But a 2K is pretty hot, and you don't want it pushing against trees because, even with all the rain, it could very easily catch some leaves on fire and then you're fucked. Also, the power lines are pretty low and neither Richy, Ben, or I are all that comfortable getting it directly under that, as bad things could happen if it gets too close. Like, really bad things. So before the sun goes down, we scout the area, looking for a place to put the lights. We mark those with glow sticks and while they're shooting the scenes around the tent, Ben and I work to pre-set the woods as much as possible.

Our goal: to turn it around faster than James is ready to shoot it.

We get the 2K in there and it needs to go higher than we planned, which means it starts to approach trees. There's not a whole lot of room to work with and our options are pretty limited in where we can put our moon, so I figure it's just easier to get rid of the branches. I jump up, grab a decently sized branch, and let the force of my weight plus gravity tear it off.

I dub this "The George W. Bush lighting technique". Or: "This is how we do things in America." It isn't, really, but I find it hard to pass up an opportunity to play the "America, Fuck Yeah!" card, even though I'm probably the least patriotic person you could ever meet.

But it works, which is the most important thing. We strike the green-gelled redheads we've pre-set and we get it turned before James is able to finish rehearsing the cast.

And that's it for Day 4. More time in the periphery. More darkness. More rain. More tension. My shoes are soaked and smell terrible. And we're farther behind than we were yesterday.

But there's still wrap beers. A beer at sunrise makes everything seem better. Or, at least less terrible.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Day 3 of James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO

2011-10-10T12:00:00.002-04:00

For the first time in A Year Without Rent, I took zero pictures. Yes, zero. You'll see 2 pictures in this post. Someone else took them.

But why? One word: rain. Well, that and darkness.

For the 3rd day of THE STAGG DO, we move to night shoots, and naturally we don't have nearly enough lights for what we need to do. Basically we've got to light the woods and a field with a 2k and 6 redheads, which are 800W each. Add to that the fact that we've got a limited number of extension cords, and basically that means that my day involves trying to figure out just how to maximize our lines so that we can power lights wherever DP Richy Reay needs them.

The extension cords are in drums that have power strips in the middle with either three or four plugs. So those kind of operate as hubs from which we can branch off of. So Ben Moseley and I have a multi-pronged approach where we try and get a hub as far out in the field as possible from the barns, which are roughly 50 meters away from the nearest place we'd put a light.

Each barn has its own circuit, only I have no idea how much power each of them can handle. They're older buildings, so the suspicion is that there's only one circuit per barn (there's two barns close enough). And there's the math. You want to divide the lights more or less evenly between the two barns.

Then, just when we get them all set up, it starts to rain. First it's just a drizzle, but it's enough to be worrisome.

Was it supposed to rain? I don't know. I can't use my cell phone in the UK.

The one thing I know about British electricity is that it runs at 240V, as opposed to the U.S., where it's 120V. That's a lot. You don't want to run into that if you don't have to, and we've got it running pretty much all over the place. And it's raining. I don't need to tell you how dangerous that is.

This is why we have Runners and PAs.

We've got garbage bags and we've got tape, so I give it to the runners and 1st AC James Grieves (on load from Richy) and have them cover all of our connections. Keep them dry. Keep them safe. Simple, right?

Five minutes later, I'm about to grab the barrel connectors on the 2k when I notice that the garbage bag isn't covering the barrels--at all. It's sort of taped above the barrels, sort of, in a half-assed attempt to look like it should work. Richy is standing a few feet away, so I call him over.

He curses and rolls his eyes as I yell for Jonathan, the runner who yesterday came up so clutch with the burlap sandbags. This won't work, I tell him. At all. We need to be able to keep the connections dry, so no water will get in there. None. Zero. I tell him I'll fix this one and then I'm going to start checking the other connections. If they aren't safe, then I'm going to start cursing at him like he's never been cursed at before. He's going to learn some new words. Go. Now.

Then Richy and I give them some extra time. Later in the evening, we're going to have to move a couple of lights and cables across a small stream and the biggest question of the day is how to do that safely and as quickly as possible. I've got a chart I made out the day before and we take a few minutes to talk about how we're going to do that and where exactly he wants the lights.

[That's my actual chart, sketched on the back of a call sheet. Yet another reason why you want to give your crew a physical call sheet whenever possible.]

Our AD Jennifer Hegarty is pretty concerned about the move across water. We've been talking about it for most of the shoot. My goal is to not only do it safely, but turn it around fast enough that it doesn't cost the already way behind production any time.

Easier said than done as 5 of our 7 lights are already working and we're using all of out stingers.

The conversation takes maybe 5 minutes, which I figure gives the runners enough time to have fixed the safety issue, or at least the safety issue at the spot closest to where I'm standing (because, really, that's the fair place to start looking). Richy and I walk over. What they've essentially done is taken some plastic, placed it over the face of one of these, and secured it with gaff tape in the shape of an "X".

Not exactly what we were looking for.

Richy calls over James, the director. He takes one look at it and, well, expresses his displeasure and pretty much gives me carte blanche to yell at them.

"You know, it's not even worth doing the film if people are going to get hurt," he says.

I yell for Jonathan. By now everyone has an idea of what's going on. And I let him have it with a string of profanities surrounded by the question, "are you trying to get someone killed?" He tries to make a joke out of it, which is a really bad idea, so I yell some more.

He's not happy. He shouldn't be.

Am I being unreasonable? Maybe. But the thing is that no matter how collaborative a film project is, there's a chain of command that operates much like the military. When the Gaffer tells a Runner or Production Assistant to do something (twice), then that damn well should be done better than you think it needs to be, especially when it's been made clear that the question isn't of quality but of safety. A film set can be a dangerous place. There's a lot of ways someone can get hurt. Even so, if you're a Production Assistant on a film, it doesn't even matter why someone is telling you to do something. You do it. If you think it's a dumb request, by all means ask for the reasoning and if the person isn't a total asshole (or isn't completely swamped), they'll tell you why.

Our reasoning here is pretty simple: IT'S FUCKING RAINING.

It's 240V of electricity. I have no insurance and I'm in Europe. I really don't want to get electrocuted.

The final solution is to place the drums inside a garbage bag and seal that up with gaff tape, which is a pretty obvious call, really. And maybe I should have suggested that from the beginning, but I thought the task at hand wasn't very difficult to figure out, so I'll take some blame for that. But not all of it.

Once we've got everything safe, Ben Moseley and I start working on setting the lights for the turnaround across the river. The river is probably 20 feet or so down a pretty steep banking behind the 2k. It's really small and, let's face it, not big enough to fish, but that's what the script calls for, so that's what we'll do. We have 2 lights not in play and a couple of gels, but not green ones like we need, so we go back to our grade school color lessons and start mixing and matching what blues and yellows we have to create shades of green.

Having done that, we set the lights. One goes across the river in the woods, more or less directly behind the 2k. It's about 30 meters in a straight shot, but we can't do it in a straight shot. We want to keep the wires out of the water (obviously), so we've set up a c-stand at the edge of the banking. Earlier in the evening, I put a glow stick on a tree branch across the river, and another one where the light would go. The theory is to string a rope from the c-stand to the tree branch and affix the wires to that, thus keeping it well above the water (and also high enough that no one accidentally runs into it in the dark). The other light goes on the side of the river we're currently on, but is down an even steeper banking where you have to hold onto tree branches to keep from falling. That's much easier and as soon as Richy let's us kill a light in the scene they're currently shooting, we'll grab that cable and run it down the banking.

The 2k is gelled blue and operates as our moon, so ideally all we'll need to do is spin it around. During lunch I've added a power strip to the barrel connectors by the 2k, so that we can more easily run power off it without overloading it. Earlier in the evening, we tripped the power, thus realizing that our circuits could handle 3000W each.

They finish the scene in the field well behind schedule. Knowing that James is going to have to rehearse the actors, I make a point of telling him that we'll be set up before he's ready. So, like, don't send them away.

I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe me. I probably wouldn't believe me either.

The second they're done, Ben and I kill the light, rip open the bags around the drums and run over to the river. It doesn't go as smoothly as we'd like when the rope gets all tangled up and we have to improv but we get it across the river. We're all ready to go when the bulb goes out in the redhead we just lit.

Besides that, we get it turned around in under 5 minutes. James has briefly sent the actors away, but brings them back to rehearse as Ben changes out the bulb. And it's a good thing because they finish the scene as the sun comes up.

As for the Electric Company? Well the powers that be decide they should probably wrap up everything. Ben and I bring in the lights and then share wrap beers with Richy while they collect all the cables and trash in the field.

They aren't too happy with that either. I don't blame them.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

Folding

2011-10-06T15:27:00.002-04:00

There's a point in every project where you have to either have to push all your chips in the middle or save them for a later hand. You can this at any point, but the quicker it becomes clear, the better everyone will be. You don't want to get all the way to the end and find yourself drawing dead or holding a pair of Jacks against a flush.

So I'm pulling the plug on UNTITLED LUCAS MCNELLY PROJECT.

Sort of.

After a long phone call with Marty Lang, it became evident that we can do this same film, in the context of A Year Without Rent, and do it so much better.

More on that later.

It's one thing to make a film in two weeks when you live in the city and have a team in place. It's something else entirely when you don't know the city at all. Can it be done? Of course. I have no doubt that we could have gotten this film made. Would it have been any good? Maybe.

But when people started dropping out due to scheduling, it became clear that we were going to be making it with a pretty rag-tag team of people. But even that isn't all of it.

I simply don't have the energy to get this film off the ground this quickly. I'm too fucking tired. AYWR is a grind. It's one thing to be part of a crew, but to compress an entire pre-production into this short of a time frame just isn't something I felt the fire to do right now. And more than anyone, I know what this sort of thing involves. And I just didn't want to do it.

That was probably it more than anything.

Apologies to everyone in Denver who put in work in these early days. Hopefully it wasn't wasted effort. If nothing else, I got to meet some really cool people in a town where I knew almost no one.

But all is not lost. Marty's still working on the script. We're going to bring the film back in a bigger, better, and more interesting way. It'll still be cool, and it'll still be fun, and maybe we can get some of those people back we lost. With a little more lead time, we can probably even get more of a wish list together.

The current theory: why do this now when we could do it at the end of AYWR as the last film in the project?

The whole point was to prove it could be done. And last night I realized I just didn't care. I've already proven it could be done. So let's prove we can do something else instead.