Day 3 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

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



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

Skip Bayless really likes Tim Tebow.

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



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

"you can hang back in the van while we block this scene" // "um...ok" #missingthepoint #AYWR

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) October 28, 2011

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

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



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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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




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

Day 0 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

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

I'm not really sure why.

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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



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

Day 2 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

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

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



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

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



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





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

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



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


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

And then?

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

It also doesn't make a lot of sense.

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

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

Well…

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

Seriously, it sucks.

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

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

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

So…yeah. I don't know.

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

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

Music for UP COUNTRY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1 of Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

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



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



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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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





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



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



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



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



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



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

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





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

Houser

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

It wasn't even that hard of a decision.



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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the app for yourself:




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

Ryan Demers' THE HONEY COOLER

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



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



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

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

He's also unreliable.



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

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

Eventually, he shows up. Hooray.



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







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

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

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



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



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





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



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







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




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