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.