Over the years we’ve been lucky enough to travel the world and experience a number of festivals – both as filmmakers and audience members.  We recently had the privilege of premiering our short film The Summer Home at the Festivus Film Festival in Denver, CO.  

When formulating a festival plan, we do a lot of research in selecting which ones to submit to.  Some we choose for marketing, networking and career building; others we choose in order to connect with our truly independent filmmaking compatriots around the world, to find storytellers like us who are doing everything they can to make quality, engaging, art.  Festivus is one of these festivals.

WHAT MAKES FESTIVUS UNIQUE?

No barriers to festival execs

The first e-mail we received from Festivus was from Tim DeMasters – one of the festival founders.  And it wasn’t just a form letter; it was an honest-to-goodness communiqué that originated from his fingertips, which ultimately turned into a lengthy thread with the same man!  This might sound minor, but it made an impression right away.  If you’ve ever worked with a festival in the past, you know this is a special thing; usually emails are foisted upon a volunteer charged with wrangling us eclectic, scattered filmmakers.

This trend didn’t stop once the festival started, either.  All three founders attended most every event; they were incredibly approachable and easy to talk to.  In fact, on several occasions they initiated contact and checked in with us!  This wonderful attitude towards their filmmakers leads us to our next point.

VIP service

Festivus pulls out all the stops when it comes to taking care of their filmmakers.  They claim to be a festival for filmmakers and they’re not kidding around.  From day one you get above and beyond service – including a personal liaison. That’s right.  A person dedicated specifically to you.  A super awesome, cool festival volunteer whose whole job is to make sure you have the best festival experience possible.  This includes a personal pick-up from the airport, recommendations for food/activities around town and someone to hang out with and introduce you to other people at festival events.  

Our liaison, Seneca, was amazing; a warm, inviting, knowledgeable and all around kick-ass person.  She truly made our festival experience unforgettable.

Abundant chances to mix and mingle

Festivus knows how to throw a party and practice clearly makes perfect - they have a party every night of the festival!  Not only do they have amazing sponsors (including Buffalo Trace Bourbon), they booked us in some really cool locations around the city.  And each event was catered to filmmakers mixing and mingling with each other as well as festival-goers.  The way everything was set up, it was virtually impossible not to make meaningful connections.  

Beyond the official parties, each screening venue also had an accompanying lounge just across the street – pre- and post-film discussions, free booze and snacks.  Can’t go wrong.

Filmmaker bowling social

Yes, Festivus organized a filmmaker bowling social.  Want to find the inspiration for your next awkward black comedy?  Put a bunch of sport-challenged, uncoordinated filmmakers together and ask them to figure out ways to throw a weighted ball down a greasy lane in order to knock down the most pins.  Good times for all!

To add some extra fun/complexity, they added “Feats of Strength”: spinning around 10 times before throwing the ball, throwing it between your legs, buddy bowling, etc.  Silly?  Sure.  But by breaking down the barriers of the detached, ironic “cool” we’ve all become so adept at and forcing everyone into the abyss of ridiculousness, they created a perfect recipe for fun and camaraderie.

Not to mention Lindy was the highest scoring girl. Oh, and there was free beer.

Quality programming

Last but not least, and the most important part of any festival, is the quality of programming.  And for a festival in only the fifth year of existence, Festivus has some undeniable chops.  All the films were truly independent and we were shocked by not only the production values, but the storytelling skills many of the filmmakers exhibited.  We also appreciated Festivus pushing the boundaries and programming some truly risky films.  

OUR FAVORITE FILMS

We saw many films while enjoying all this festival had to offer – 43, to be exact.  Here are our Top 11 (because 10 is so last year):

Ghosts of Old Highways (dir. Dan Bush // 16 min): A thematic and structural cousin to the 1962 French short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, this is a magnificently beautiful film, ultimately winning the award for Best Cinematography.  It’s a music video, but one with a very strong (albeit abstract) narrative and great performances.  Only one complaint: the credits felt longer than the actual film.  This is an odd trend we’ve noticed, and it needs to stop.  Believe us, as filmmakers, we know it takes a lot people and a tremendous amount of effort (not to mention blood, sweat and tears) to make a film.  But on short films, the credits should be just that – short.  We’re certainly not advocating for no credits, but if people are genuinely interested in the film’s colophon, let’s be honest, they’ll go to IMDb.

Blunderkind (dir. Zak Mechanic // 20 min): A little bit Rushmore(1998), but with more time travel, beer and video games.  Cheeky, clever and highly entertaining.  A boy-genius and his trusty sidekick build a time machine, but the sidekick gets lost in the future.  It’s only when the prodigy grows up that they meet again; except time itself has not been kind to the one-time wunderkind.   It features a gleefully self-referential and sarcastic voice-over and uses the tropes of time-travel cinema to create an emotionally compelling, bittersweet conclusion.  

The Forgotten Fruit (dir. James Williams // 9 min): A short documentary about gooseberries and the men who love them – specifically, the men who compete to see who can grow the biggest.  While it might sound like a slight story, the beauty of this film lies in its refreshingly non-ironic earnestness.  There are a number of wonderful double entendres peppered throughout, but the bulk of the movie is a simple celebration of life’s small pleasures, of a sense of innocence, and a forgotten era.

Remake (dir. Chris Tomkins // 7 min): A hilarious, inspired burglary-comedy for film nerds.  Two men break into a house, only to discover one of the world’s greatest DVD collections; this promptly starts an argument over, you guessed it, remakes.  Wonderful – and fun! – all the way around.  

A Finger, Two Dots, Then Me (dir. David & Daniel Holecheck // 8 min): On paper, this should be a sappy and downright ridiculous film: spoken word poetry about the cosmic glory of love.  But the way it’s manifested, the way the poem is visualized, the energy of the performer, everything coalesces into a transcendent and affecting experience.  Deserving winner of the Best Editing award.  

16-bit Sunrise (dir. Vinnie Pomp // 20 min): when asked during the Q&A about his inspiration, the director responded: “Well, a funny thing happened.  I was a teenager and went to High School.”  That pretty much sums it up.  It’s an awkward, affectionate and occasionally dark story about an outcast, the girl after whom he pines, and the video games he uses as a safety blanket.

Self-Sabotage (dir. Scott Brignac // 27 min): We don’t use the term lightly when we say: this film is epic.  It’s quite long for a short film, but it’s a sumptuous feast for the senses.  A collaborative project branching out from the music that acts as the score/soundtrack, it “follows” the verses of the Lord’s Prayer.  It’s experimental, oblique and wondrous.  

Kama Sutra King (dir. Ben Jones // 10 min): Using the archetype of the Hot Librarian as a jumping off point, this gratifying, big-hearted film is ultimately about inaction and regret, but with a lovely and happy ending. As a film professor once said, brevity is the soul of the short film; this one is short and sweet.

Searching For Sonny (dir. Andrew Disney // 94 min): The one feature on our list.  A suburban black-comedy/neo-noir, from within the first few minutes, you know that you want to spend time with these characters.  Set during a High School reunion, it’s the mystery of a missing friend.  Some great twists and turns, a lot of laughs and gunshot wounds for everyone!

Bunker'd (dir. Chris Canfield // 15 min): Thoroughly entertaining comedy about two men trapped in a bomb-shelter after nuclear war breaks out in the 1950s.  Well, one man and a dead guy.   And a lot of canned peaches.

Spoiler (dir. Daniel Thron // 18 min): The world doesn’t need is another zombie film; but this one has a unique perspective.  After a zombie outbreak, what do people do?  Adapt and get on with the lives, most likely; assimilate the fear into daily routine, keep calm and carry on.  This movie uses that premise to examine a macro concept in a micro narrative of a father trying to protect his daughter from a zombie-fied mother, while the police zero in and are about to “neutralize” the entire house.  Taught, well-acted and intriguing.  

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT?

These are a couple of areas we feel could use a little improvement; but we only say this out of love, to make an already great festival even better.

More Diverse award categories

For such a small and diverse festival, Festivus had a very limited amount of awards.  While they had some specific awards – Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Short Short, Best Foreign Short, Best Documentary Short, Best Experimental – they didn’t separate the larger categories like drama from comedy.  Now, of course, having too many awards simply dilutes the value, but it’s nearly impossible to compare a film like, say, Remake with Ghost of Old Highways.  Since awards can help make or break an indie film, Festivus could really continue to help filmmakers and expand their award categories slightly.

In our opinion, they could probably remove the more specialized awards (like editing and cinematography; while filmmakers can appreciate these, a general audience likely can’t discern why one film would win over another, especially for editing) and instead just focus on the best films within sections.  Best Feature (they only program a few), Best Short Short, Best Foreign Short, Best Documentary Short, Best Experimental Short, Best Comedy Short, Best Dramatic Short.

Tailoring programming & advertising to an outside audience

After attending the entire festival and experiencing 43 of the films offered, it seemed that the majority of the attending audiences were other filmmakers.  Festivus can boast some incredible growth since their inception five years ago, and they definitely had an advertising presence in Denver (we noticed at least two billboards while driving around town), but perhaps more general-audience outreach can be done.  And yes, we’re fully aware that this is easier said than done.  

But, as an example: package marketing.  Our film, THE SUMMER HOME, was in a package called “Rehab Shorts”.  To an outside audience, it would make sense that all the films in this package would have a rehab theme.  That’s originally what we thought ourselves.  However, the festival labels it “Rehab” because it’s the first screening after one of their blow-out parties: going to it will help you “rehab”.  We admit, this is clever.  However, it’s targeted toward the inside crowd – to the filmmakers and hardcore festival-goers who went to the party – and not necessarily to a more general/casual audience.

Moderated Q&As

Post-film Q&As at Festivus typically begin with the host handing the microphone to the filmmaker and walking off the stage.  In principal, we totally understand the rationale: remove any sense of boundary between audience and filmmaker.  But, a good Q&A needs help from a moderator.  Not someone who takes over the conversation, but someone who helps guide the audience and their questions.  A good moderator is one who has seen the film and, because of their special knowledge of the filmmakers and the stories behind the films, can lead the audience into questions that hit on a deeper and more useful level.  Without moderation, the Q&As can become awkward and consist of the same few questions: What’s your budget?  What did you shoot on?  What was your inspiration?  While these are great questions, audience members usually want to get to the meatier discussion without the unnecessary warm up period.  A moderator can help with that.

CONCLUSION

All in all the Festivus Film Festival is an amazing festival.  It features fun, engaging, quality programming and focuses on the true artistic spirit and talent brewing in the US and around the world.

Personally, we can’t wait to make another film and (hopefully) attend Festivus again!

You know how some people think that the day changes when the clock strikes midnight? You're walking around with them and at 11:59pm they say Tuesday and at 12:01am they say Wednesday, and even though they're technically right, it's really confusing? When I used to work a graveyard shift, there was a guy who did that every day and it drove everyone nuts.

Well Day 5 of DECORATION started at 12:30am. At least, the story of it did.

I'm on the couch in the living room, winding down to sleep. The lights are off. Nicolas comes into the living room and tells me that they won't need me for tomorrow's shoot. And then he leaves.

Um…ok.

I try to sleep, but that kind of gets your mind racing.

I often say that there's a better version of A Year Without Rent that involves a camera crew following me around because I can only capture a fraction of what happens, but they wouldn't have been able to capture that unless they had set up a camera rig to record absolutely everything. And I don't know that they would have been set up at 6 something in the morning when Nicolas comes back in, this time more combative, to really give me a piece of his mind.

Of course, I'm barely awake. In retrospect I should have discretely turned on the audio recorder on my iPhone, but I don't remember to do a lot of things before I've had any coffee. But here's the basics.

+ Nicolas, who doesn't have a Twitter account, is mad about some tweets I sent from set. He doesn't know what they are, exactly, but he's heard about them from someone else. You've seen some of them if you've read the rest of the DECORATION posts.

+ He "doesn't care what I write", but his concern is that what I'm Tweeting is affecting the morale of the crew. That's a fair concern. In this case, it might be unfounded, since the tweet he seems to be talking about was pretty obviously a joke about how I couldn't believe someone in the crew hadn't seen a certain classic film. Or he had never had a bloody mary. I forget which.

And there was one sent to someone that said the film I was on wasn't going well. That should have been a DM.

+ Not only does he not care what I write, but has, by his own admission, no idea what A Year Without Rent is, and he doesn't care. You'll remember from Day 1 that this isn't a film I approached. They approached me. For the writer, director, and producer of a film of this size to not have any idea who the press person they've asked to come on set is (or what he's doing there), is stunning. This is not a large production, by any stretch of the imagination. And this is not the first production in AYWR. What I do is pretty well-established by this point, both the blog writing (like this) and the tweets from set. Like, for example, Paul Osborne's FAVOR, which Cheryl Nichols worked on.

If you seek me out, ask me to come to the middle of Arkansas (on AYWR's dime), and don't know what I'm going to do on your set, that's 100% your fault. It's not like I happened to be in Arkansas and stopped by on a whim. And it's not like I'm doing anything I didn't do on FAVOR.

+ He's upset that I haven't even bothered to read the script, which is something he requires everyone to do, because everyone needs to be on the same page and have the same passion for the project.

From what I can tell, the script has changed nearly every day.

No one has given me a script. When I point that out, his demeanor changes considerably.

+ It's a long conversation. Really long. Cheryl comes in and expresses her concerns, but it boils down to one thing: I shouldn't be helping this film. The director doesn't want me there, and AYWR functions best when the filmmakers are willing participants, which is something that I assumed would be the case from the initiative they showed in asking me to drive 833 miles to get there.

Thing is, I'm not leaving. They're on the schedule and I'm in the middle of fucking Arkansas. If this was LA or Seattle or New York, that's one thing, but I don't know anyone in Arkansas. So I offer to read the script, and that placates him. Sort of.

And they have some valid points about the nature of AYWR and what value it actually provides, because it varies from film to film. But the process doesn't, and when you approach someone, you need to know what you're getting. Is AYWR a good fit for every film? No. But it's your project. You know what AYWR is and your should know what your project needs and requires. That's your responsibility. Otherwise, you're just wasting everyone's time.

Once the day does actually start (late), we head to a cemetery to shoot the titular Decoration Festival.

I've searched Google a couple of times looking for information about the Decoration Festival, and have found nothing, so I'll have to rely on the film's IndieGoGo page: "the town's sons and daughters return to celebrate the lives of ancestors buried in the cemetery."

Apparently it's a big deal.

We get to the cemetery and it looks like, well, a cemetery. Ten or so locals show up to serve as extras, and a skeleton crew walks around the cemetery with them while the rest of us kill time by attempting to play baseball with an orange wrapped in tape and making a swing out of some rope and a gobo arm. There's not a whole lot else to do. 

So they didn't really need me after all, but I don't think that's the point.

Eventually, they come back.

What's they've found out from this excursion with the locals is that the festival isn't something they're prepared to fake. It's elaborate, with lots of flowers and, well, decorations all over the cemetery. The whole town comes out. To do it like this would look terrible. So the new plan is to push that scene to the actual festival--in the spring.

Keep in mind, the movie is named after this festival. They know what this festival entails.

It's not the first thing they've pushed. I've seen them reschedule a couple of Arkansas interior scenes to shoot in LA, but this is a pretty big shift. It's a hard thing to shoot around, it being kind of important. Not to mention the fact that they're going to have to match fall exteriors with spring exteriors, and the leaves have definitely changed already. They either have to use what little they got today and make it work in post, or they have to come back in the spring, which brings up a whole host of potential problems with continuity.

I can't imagine they'll ask me to join them in the spring.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

 
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.

 
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.

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.  

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.

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: 

When Zahra Zomorrodian first proposed the idea of flying me over to the UK to work on THE STAGG DO, part of the hope was that she'd be able to find other European productions for me to work on, kind of a tour through the old continent. None came forward. Well, not exactly.  

There were, of course, the Germans. 

One thing people always find surprising is that a sizable chunk of the "Film Courage Community" (as we've started calling it) is in Germany. There's Movie Angel, of course, and Spoxx. But it's even bigger than that. I think for the original A Year Without Rent Kickstarter campaign, Germany had the 3rd most backers, behind the U.S. and the U.K. (maybe Canada was 3rd, but whatever). 

In fact, without Spoxx we never hit that goal.  

So it's not surprising that when the Germans heard that AYWR would be crossing the Atlantic, they found a way to get something for me to do. 

That's how I ended up on the doorstep of a person I've never met before in my life, either in person or online, with my suitcase and duffel bag, ready to stay at his apartment for a couple of days.  

This is unusual, even for me. 

I should back up. 

Spoxx picked me up at the airport. We saw the Statue of Liberty (no, really), and the memorial spot for the Berlin Wall. And then we walked over to the apartment of the person I've never talked to.  

Gerold Marks is a German film blogger who specializes in 3D movies and my host for my stay in Berlin. Five minutes later, Gerold, Spoxx, and I are walking around Berlin as Gerold gives us a tour of the city. And not a short, "oh, here are some places a couple of blocks away" tour, but a full-on tour. I want to say we walked miles around the city.  We saw the museums (well, the outside of them), statues, and probably 4 different parts of the Berlin Wall. I learned how to tell if I was in East or West Berlin (you have to look at the traffic lights). I saw monuments the Soviets built to themselves and ones that survived their reign.  

It was undeniably cool. 

The idea for my visit was to have me give the "keynote" speech for a crowdfunding event organized by Wolfgang Gumpelmaier followed, the next day, by a matinee screening of my first feature BLANC DE BLANC (which you can watch via VOD at the previous link) 

The working title for my speech: "No One Gives a Fuck About Your Project". 

(I'm at around the 2:45 mark) 

It'll be fun to watch these emerging markets catch up. 

But all this is a precursor to the real reason I came to Berlin: for the beer. Ah the beer. Thing is, people are ordering for me in German, so all I know is that I'm getting German beer. And that it's good stuff.  

It's 4am when I get back to where I'm staying, and later that morning, I have to be back across the city for the screening of BLANC DE BLANC.  

For days I've been trying to get my computer to burn a PAL version of the film, but it keeps crapping out on me. Still, Spoxx had his computer hooked up to the projector yesterday, so it seems like we'd be able to use that. Except when we get there, we realize the audio won't work. Oh, and the theater could absolutely play a NTSC DVD, if I had one, which I do. It's just in my car, which is in Seattle.  

And since it's Sunday, nothing is open. We can't burn a NTSC DVD because there isn't a blank DVD for miles around. So we start digging for solutions, finally settling on hooking the video up to the projector and then running the audio through some detachable computer speakers we found behind the cash register. Is it a perfect solution? No. Hell, it isn't even a good solution. But it's a solution. And it's better than people not seeing the movie at all.  

The exception maybe being if one of them thinks you ended the movie wrong, like this guy: 

Maybe we did. Maybe we didn't. See for yourself. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Few things in micro budget indie film are easier than being the gaffer when shooting a field far away from electricity. There's really no way you can possibly be expected to get electricity that far, if for no other reason than the production probably hasn't rented a generator. And without a generator, no electricity. No electricity means no lights. If you're far enough out there, in a remote enough location, you can't even block the light. Basically, you can bounce it around a bit, but 99% of the time, that's it. You're limited to what you can carry and the whims of the "Great Gaffer in the Sky".

But other than looking thoughtfully at the sky, there's not a whole lot you can do. You stay near the DP, just in case he needs something, but mostly you just stay out of the way and every so often offer some encouragement when needed.  

Even that isn't so easy. There's a common plant in the UK called the nettle. It's apparently all over the place. Hell, it's even listed on the call sheet. I've never heard of it, even though Wikipedia seems to think it's all over North America. I grew up in the woods of Maine, and I've never heard of it. People will tell you to look out for them, and for good reason. They fucking hurt. And I don't mean like bee sting hurts. I mean 6 hours later you can still feel it.  

I'm told you can boil them into a tea, but I'm not sure why you'd want to. Although, this is the UK.  
The scenes in the field are pretty simple, transitional dialogue scenes. A minimum number of set ups and then we're done. So we trek out to the field to find a good spot, with the expectation that the cast is right behind us.  

But we have a few things we can do. We're still waiting for one of the camera guys, but then he shows up and still no sign of the cast. Ten minutes go by. Twenty minutes. People are sitting down in the grass. Eventually they make their way out to the location, but they're unrehearsed. Add to that the fact that it turns into a moving shot, with a handheld camera going backward on some uneven ground and you've got a scene that takes a lot longer than scheduled.  

There's a truism in construction that once the crew stops working, it's difficult to get them started again. At least, that's what they say whenever I watch FLIP THIS HOUSE. Same thing applies on a film set. Once they've taken a break, it's hard to get them going again. It's just human nature. So time spent on rehearsal after the shot is ready is usually time wasted, plus the time wasted trying to get things back up to speed.  

We finish in the field, then it's back to the farm, where a new problem has emerged.

Loyal readers of A Year Without Rent will recall how on Sean Gillane's CXL, we had to figure out how to rig a green screen on the windy sidewalks of San Francisco. It's the sort of thing that rarely comes up, but thank goodness it did because now I'm able to use the tricks we figured out on Sean's shoot and put them to use here, only on a much bigger scale. Oh, and we have about a quarter of the gear we need to do it.  

But someone says to ask Jerry if he's got anything in his van. Jerry is the sound guy who shows up in a panel van full of gear. Sure enough, he's got a couple of light stands with a T-bar attachment that we can affix the top part of the green screen to. The bottom needs to be stretched down to the ground and held in place, but we don't really have anything to hold it tight uniformly all the way around the car. So we start looking around the farm for heavy stuff. We find some metal bars to help weigh it down and some very heavy grey things that are about 4 feet long and used in a parking lot to stop a car from going any farther. I have no idea what they're called. We have 3 of those and since we're really low on sandbags, they go on the c-stands.  

We still need more sand.  

The whole green screen is stuff like that. One of the more DIY things I've ever done.  

The final piece of the day is a dream sequence where a scantily clad girl pours drinks down our actor's throats. Smartly, it's the last thing we shoot. Almost like a carrot on a stick to keep people moving.  

In the original planning for A Year Without Rent, I wasn't supposed to leave the country. It just wasn't in the budget. And sure, there were jokes about A Year Without Rent 2: Europe, especially when it became clear that a lot of our Kickstarter backers were overseas, but I didn't think anything would come of it. A pipe dream, if you will.

So when Zahra Zomorrodian (@fnafilms) asked if I'd consider coming to the UK if a production flew me over, the answer was obvious.

There's two things that you're going to want to know about this before we proceed: 1) the gaffer is the person on a set who, among other things, is in charge of electricity; and 2) Electricity in the UK is different than in the US. I know absolutely nothing about the British electricity system. I even forgot to get an adapter so I could plug things in.

But first, an introduction to James DeMarco's THE STAGG DO. Despite the fact that he lives in Newcastle (which British Customs didn't believe for a second I was going to for holiday), James is actually a Masshole, born and raised in Massachusetts. He moved to Newcastle after meeting Zahra when both of them lived in LA. THE STAGG DO is something of a spin-off from their long-gestating project PISSHEADS, which is about these people in the Northeast UK called Geordies (holy shit, my spell check recognized that) who speak in an accent that's virtually impossible to understand. This one actor, Pob, I can understand maybe 10% of what he says. Maybe. In this spin-off, basically it's "Pissheads go camping", which involves a quest to find a strip club. Only, most of it takes place in the woods.   

There's nothing like not being sure how to plug something in to assure the rest of the crew that you know what you're doing, but that's exactly what happen, oh, 5 minutes after we get to the first location, a bar. Luckily, everything else goes smoothly, and we're in and out pretty quickly.

But hey, it works. We get the shade we need. And it only falls once. And the sound guy is just fine, thanks for asking.  

It occurred to me recently that A Year Without Rent was missing an opportunity by not letting the filmmakers we profile speak for themselves. So, we're in the process of reaching out to our alumni and giving them a chance to talk about their productions, un-edited. Think of it as a point/counter-point, if you want.

For every film I work on, there's usually a Twitter hashtag or account dedicated to the film (What if there's no hashtag or account? That's a red flag.) where people will post stuff that's going on. Some films it's just me posting and on some films (like FAVOR), the Twitter feed is pretty active. You'd think the Twitter activity on a film wouldn't have any correlation at all to the quality of the production, but it does. Maybe that's because you'd be a damned fool to be a filmmaker without a Twitter account, but there's something to it. FAT KID RULES THE WORLD is pretty active. There's @FatKidMovie, of course, and Matthew Lillard (@lillardmatthew), but also lead actor Jacob Wysocki (@JacobWysocki) and his movie dad Billy Campbell (@WOCampbell) have been tweeting regularly about the film.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Who doesn't love a good mystery?  

I think this is the future of production. Instead of being a rarity, people like Patrick are going to be the norm. You'll have a crew full of people sharing photos and thoughts from your production. They'll all bring their own built-in audiences along with them and it'll be the production's job to maximize that contribution. Some productions will clamp down and try to control it in the same way that corporations try and get their employees to toe a line, but the smart ones will give them free reign. Sure, they'll give parameters like "don't reveal the killer", but it won't be much more than that. And the productions will be better for it. They'll have an easier time of finding their audiences because the audience will come from the processes that get the film made in the first place.

And it's not as simple as requiring people to post stuff on social media sites, like a lot of productions are doing now. That's a band-aid, and not a very good one. There's no really incentive to engage with people, which is the key benefit. The posts come off a perfunctory and they accomplish almost nothing other than looking desperate. You're better off having them do nothing.

There's a day off in the FAT KID RULES THE WORLD schedule, and the last day before the day off wraps at 5am. By the time I make it back to where I'm staying, it's closer to 5:30am. The next day is Sunday, and since I'm free, I take the opportunity to wake up at noon to listen to Film Courage on LA Talk Radio with guest Wonder Russell calling in from Denver. I'm listening to it in Wonder's living room. In Seattle.  

Welcome to the weirdness that is my life.  

Near the end of the show, my phone rings. Phil Seneker (who keeps showing up on this trip) is working on a film and wants to know if I feel like swinging by. So then I'm in the car, driving to Woodinville, WA to help out on Brendon Fogle's debut short SYNC. 

They're in the last day of shooting. Actually, the last half day of shooting. They don't need my help. They've got a small crew in a small room with a somewhat minimal kit and they're on schedule. No drama. No chaos. 

But Phil's a backer. His son Ethan is the film's lead. Brendon is a backer. The least I can do is show up and shoot some behind the scenes photos and hang out.  

SYNC is shooting in a small, alternative high school where Brendon teaches. They've built a full set in their big common room, complete with moveable walls and all that fun stuff, but today they're filming in a classroom they've turned into the bedroom of Ethan's character.  

It really kind of makes me wish I could have shown up for the set construction, because I imagine that would have been compelling.  

So it goes. 

I'm there for a couple of hours. I take a few pictures. Eat some of the extra craft services food. I spot a picture John Trigonis on the wall--apparently he sent them a picture of himself to use on an album cover (the indie community at its most elegant and cooperative). 

And that's it. I'm not even sure what the film is about. I know there's Ethan and a girl laying on a bed (go Ethan) and some vinyl records. I've asked Brendon to write something on the production, so we can get a proper feel for it. But, for now, enjoy some pictures from my "day off".

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. 

It's 1am and I'm sitting by myself on the sidewalk at the corner of 3rd Avenue & Seneca, 4 blocks from set. The battery on my phone died an hour ago, I really could use a jacket, and I think someone was supposed to bring me lunch at some point.  

I've been here almost 3 hours.  

Why? Because there's a light here--a 9 bank pointing straight up at the building across the street--and you can't exactly leave expensive stuff unattended on the corner of 3rd Avenue & Seneca while drunk assholes and trannys and drunk trannys mill about. Not if you want it to be there when you get back.  

Someone has to babysit it. And right now, that someone is me.  

And let's be honest: it's a shitty job. It's boring and you're far, far away from the action (unless you count the activity on the street). It's easy to start thinking what a bullshit deal this is, because no one wants to do it and there's not much else to do except think about how bored you are. 

But then you realize what an egotistic way of thinking that is. You aren't that important. You're there to help in any way possible, be an extra set of hands for a production wherever needed. Sometimes that involves using a rope to help pull a light up the side of a building. And sometimes that involves sitting on a sandbag and freezing your ass off. Neither of those things is inherently more helpful than the other, but one of them is cool. And so what if it's keeping you from doing other, more fun things? That would just mean that one of the regular G&E guys would have to be doing this and couldn't be doing something more important.  

So you bite your tongue and suck it up like a motherfucking adult. It's only for 3 hours and then Art comes back and you can get some food and charge your phone and put on a jacket.   

And it's not like you've had such a terrible day. The film is shooting all day in a parking garage and you've been on roof duty all day. That involves helping the grips every so often, and helping set up craft services and making sure people don't park on the roof, since we've only got clearance to block off a couple of levels of the garage.  

There's something strange about being on the roof of a parking garage, listening on the walkie talkies to the commotion below. There's extra wrangling, which means there's never enough extras and keeping track of them is kind of like herding cats, especially when there's scenes down on the street. There's PA's blocking off street corners to pedestrian traffic and from the roof it sounds like absolute chaos. People are yelling things like "I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT 2ND AVENUE!!", but then when you go over to 2nd Avenue and look down, it looks totally calm and serene, which kills the entertainment value, so fuck that. 

In reality, they're probably just yelling because the traffic noise is really loud, but what fun is that? From the roof, it's like listening to a great old time radio show. Down there, it probably isn't nearly as cool. 

As the sun goes down, the production starts to move up the parking garage, until finally we're on the roof for the big scene that's kind of spoiler-ish. But it's a cool scene with dozens of extras and lots of vehicles and moving parts. There's a lot going on. 

Which is why it sucks to be 4 blocks away, sitting on a sandbag. 

By the time I get back to set, things are in full swing. It's really dark and everyone is running around, which gives me ample opportunity to take photos. I find Billy Campbell sitting in a car among all this, reading a copy of AMERICAN GODS. There's a lot going on. Like, a lot. You help out where you can, but it's hard to even figure out what needs to be done. It's dark and a lot of people and things are in silhouette and often you don't even realize that the person you're looking for is 5 feet away. 

I take a lot of pictures. 

We shoot the big finale of the scene, which looks big and epic in person. On a monitor, over Matthew Lillard's shoulder, you can see that it'll be more so on screen.  

You can see the buildings we lit, so none of that time on the street corner is wasted, which is always a good feeling.  

Near the end of the shoot, I spot Matt sitting against a wall, looking over his shot list. It's a nice photo, so I try and sneak over to get a good shot. He holds the shot list so it catches more of the light.  

"I see you, Lucas," he says, not moving his head.

"And yet you hold still. A pro."

He motions to the shot list. "I see you. And yet I'm giving you fill." 

Then Art calls on the walkie. There's some shady characters milling around. So I head back down to be a criminal deterrent. Sunrise is fast approaching, so we wait for a half hour or so and then start breaking everything down.  

Back at the garage, everyone is breaking down the equipment. Jeremy helps out for a few minutes. Matt pitches in, grabbing what the grips will let him handle and getting it in the truck before someone drags him away. 

He's excited. It's a big set piece of the film out of the way. And it looks like they got what they needed. He wants to do everything he can to get his film made. And I love that. It's that same spirit and enthusiasm that drives someone to make a tiny little DIY film with a crew of three, just here writ large. Because dammit, that's what got most of us excited about making films in the first place. 

You hope it never goes away.

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.

Yesterday, there was a car parked on the street near craft services. In and of itself, this is not unusual. Craft services is on the sidewalk and we're shooting in a neighborhood. Still, we have "No Parking" signs and all of the cars on the street are supposed to belong to the production.  

But this one…well…this one stands out. 

It's not in anything approaching good shape. The trunk is totally gone. The seats are nearly gone, and it's been painted God knows how many times. Also, I think there's stuff glued to it. It probably shouldn't be parked there. 

Except it's in the movie.  

It's an Art Car, which means exactly what you think it does. And where does one find an Art Car? At church (where else?).  

The story (if I'm remembering it correctly) is that our Production Supervisor Jim Charleston spotted the car in a church parking lot and knowing the film needed a picture car for some punk rock characters, tracked down the owner. Simple as that. Sometimes the Art Department and Props go to great lengths to create something unique and sometimes you find it in the parking lot of a church. You never know with these things.  

In the story the car belongs to Michael Freiburger and Ian Lesage, two punk rock non-actors who show up to pick up Jacob Wysocki and Matt O'Leary's characters. Where the production found them, I have no idea, but they're pretty much perfect. They show up in their own clothes (which are better than whatever we would have given them), ready to go. And they've brought their own chess set to play in-between takes. Why a chess set? Because fuck you and your stereotypes, that's why a chess set. 

I'm projecting that last part, but the chess set is real. 

But they're still non-actors, and non-actors carry with them a lot more risk than actors do. The reasons are often obvious, a non-actor can be flat-out terrible or just become really aware of where the camera is, taking a person that looked authentic in pre-production and turning them into something completely different on camera. That's where it really helps to have an actor-turned-director at the helm. A director like Matthew Lillard will have a better idea of how to pull a performance out of a non-actor than, say, someone who started as a writer. They have a more intimate knowledge of the process and, therefore, a better idea of what's going through that person's head.  

So it's interesting to watch how Matt's approach changes. Like most good directors, his approach changes from actor to actor. The way he talks to Jacob Wysocki is different from how he talks to Billy Campbell. But there's a shift with Michael and Ian. He spends less time trying to get in their heads and more time trying to make them comfortable. After all, you want them to be natural. There's no point in overcomplicating things.  

All week we've drawn interest from the neighborhood, but now we're filming outside with big lights on at night. Out come the lawn chairs. Out come the kids. Someone gives them a quick primer on the importance of being quiet while the camera is rolling and Matt takes time between takes to run over, sign autographs and take pictures.  

Jim Charleston says it best (I'm paraphrasing): "We want to be good neighbors" and he's absolutely right. Basically we live here for X number of days and everything a production can reasonably do to keep their neighbors happy will pay dividends. And even if it doesn't, it's good karma. It's the right thing to do.  

It's our final day at the location and except for the fact that whoever's driving the Art Car isn't so great at driving a stick and a couple of us have to push the car for every take, it goes smoothly. At hour 10 of production (around 11pm), the producers make a Starbucks run. Honestly, there are few things better on a film production than a coffee run at 11pm when you've been shooting outside for 10 hours.  

Except, of course, for wrap beers. Nothing beats a wrap beer. 

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.

I come from a basketball family. My Uncle Dale was a 3rd team Parade All-American and once beat Bill Russell at HORSE. My younger brother coaches at Medomak Valley High School and started for a team that lost one game in two years. I was a 4-time all-star guard. Or, to put it more cleanly: the men in my extended family have produced more state titles than children.  

But first, there's a bit of filming to do in the apartment. And for that I'm helping our old friend Dan load up a pickup truck with enough gear to cover whatever we might need--sandbags, c-stands, 12x12s, and so on. For a day exterior you aren't so much going to create light as you're going to control the existing light provided by "the Great Gaffer in the Sky". Either you're going to be bouncing it to fill in shadows or you're going to be keeping it from creating shadows. Direct sunlight is harsh and unforgiving. Cloud cover is better. But if you can't have clouds, you have to figure out ways to diffuse the light, and the sun can be a lot of light to diffuse.  

Today is kind of sunny and kind of cloudy, which is a pain in the ass because you have to bring everything.  

The truck loaded, we head over to the school where we'll be shooting, but we're early so we have to circle the block a couple of times (something about children being in the way). It turns out we're really early--too early, in fact--and can't set up anything for another twenty minutes. Out comes a soccer ball to kill time.  

Even apart from the company move, it's a hectic day. We've got visitors. Kristin Kreuk from SMALLVILLE is here (one of our producers, Rick Rosenthal, directed several SMALLVILLE episodes). And then, for reasons I never did catch, Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from LOST) is on set.  

The scene involves the 3 of them shooting around, with some intentional misses in the script. After the first take several of us realize that we're probably running the risk of the camera being hit by a stray ball, so 2nd Assistant Camera Coty James stands on one side of the camera and I stand on the other for the express purpose of grabbing the ball before it does any damage to a pretty expensive piece of equipment.  

As the scene progresses, I stay nearby, either grabbing rebounds to speed up the filming or guarding the camera. I even end up jamming my thumb, which brings back all sorts of high school basketball memories.  

The clouds go away half-way through the day, so we bring over the 12x12 on a couple of these things to negate the sun. It's on wheels and, like anything on wheels, it can kind of get away from you once it picks up some momentum. I look up and I'm heading right for Elizabeth Mitchell, but thankfully she scampers out of the way when I yell "Points!".  

In the world of micro budget indie film, the term "G&E Department" is a bit misleading. The only time you can make a distinction between G & E is when the two people in the department have names like Gary and Ethan. The Grips work Electric and vice versa. Hell, a lot of people (myself included) will just say "Grips" as a catch-all for everyone in G&E. It's easier that way, especially when there's only 3 people total in the whole department and one of them is probably in the camera department anyway (or sound).

Much like Dan the other day, Kevin shows me the ropes, taking me through each thing as we do it--stuff like the proper and most efficient way to set up a Kino bank so that it's a versatile as possible when actually in use. At every opportunity, we take time to keep things organized, simple things like separating the stingers into piles of 25 feet verses 50 feet, keeping the gels from erupting all over the hallway, stuff like that. It's simple stuff, the sort of thing that isn't all that much fun in and of itself, but it's easy to see the mentality behind it.

A successful production relies on a lot of things, but the key problem is trying to get X number of pages done in a certain day. It's a simple concept, but every minute that the camera isn't running, whether it's because the actors have wandered off or a P.A. is busy flirting or the crew is trying to set up lights, is a minute that goes against that goal. The extra 30 seconds it takes to find a long enough stinger doesn't seem like a lot, but all that adds up. It's why crews are reluctant to break down a light unless they have to and why having a clear idea of what the day is going to entail gives a production a better chance to make the day. There's always downtime. Your crew can either spend that downtime drinking coffee or they can spend it getting ready for the next thing you need. A good crew member like Dan or Kevin will do both. Having those gels organized doesn't seem like a lot until you can't find that fucking gel when you need it.

In a perfect world, you'd never have to wait for the crew to turn around the lighting for the next scene because it'd already be done. That's not an option in a location as small as this one, there just isn't the room to maneuver, but that makes Kevin's prep work all the more important.

It kind of reminds me of when I used to work kitchen prep at a diner. It was one thing to prep the food when the cooks asked for it. That was the bare minimum of the job. What really made you good was knowing what the cooks needed before they did, kind of like Radar in M*A*S*H.

I like to say that I believe in 2 things: God and the Auteur Theory, which is really just one thing.  

For the third day of FAT KID RULES THE WORLD I'm back inside the apartment, which gives me an opportunity to be a fly on the wall for the inner workings of the production.  

Maybe fly on the wall isn't the best analogy. This reminds me more of a beehive--a hug the wall, find a corner, try not to get hurt beehive. Put a film production in an apartment and you're always going to have some cramped corners, but FAT KID is a larger production than most, in a smaller apartment than most. The hallway of the entire building serves as a staging area and that's crowded, but inside is even more hectic. Multiple departments are trying to do multiple things at the same time, in the same space. It feels like the house in FIGHT CLUB when Project Mayhem is in full swing.  

It's the sign of a crew that's been working together for a couple of days. There's a certain rhythm to it, and stepping into that cold is kind of similar to trying to hop onto a busy freeway. Basically, there's two things you can do. You can either wait in the hall or you can find a corner in the living room and volunteer for window duty, which basically just involves shutting the windows while camera is rolling and opening them back up when it isn't.

Window duty provides the best vantage point for watching the production. You're in the same room as the monitor, which is obviously an advantageous place to be. FAT KID doesn't have a video village. Instead, it's one monitor at the director's eye level. It's from here that Matthew Lillard runs the show. He points out details in the image--lens flares, hot spots, and rogue cables that everyone has missed, showing stuff to gaffer Jeremy Mackie, who then relays the information over the walkie to the crew. They'll run rehearsal, then Matt will run into the other room to talk to the actors. During takes he grips the monitor like a steering wheel, intent on every detail in the frame.  

What becomes obvious after about 5 minutes of watching is that the director is taking this seriously. He's done his homework and shown up to work. He knows what he wants, both from the actors and the crew, and more often than not gets it.  

It's great to see. Because, let's face it, I'd be lying if I wasn't saying I was a little worried. This is the first project in A Year Without Rent where the director didn't have a single directing credit on IMDb. It's a movie star best known for being in SCREAM and SCOOBY DOO going behind the camera. What's the expectation? Will he coast through it?

Not at all. Matthew Lillard is a director who's passion for the material fills the room. The end product may be fantastic. It may be terrible. But it will be his film.

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.