How to Find Locations For Your Film

In our last post we hashed out why locations are important and why it’s important to think about them early on. Today, let’s talk about how you can find some cool locations near you!

Before we go any further, I will note that Arcadia Bay takes places mostly outdoors, so I may have a little more info on outdoor locations than indoor. Alright, let’s jump into it!

ONLINE RESOURCES

With the rise of so many photo sharing service you have an opportunity like never before to find locations near you. Here’s a few ideas:

• FLICKR https://www.flickr.com/map You can either search Flickr for your state or city, or you can use the map tool to find photos taken right in your  town!
• INSTAGRAM You can start again by searching by your state or what you’re looking for (forest, coast, cabin, church, etc.), but also learn what hashtags are popular in your area. For example, out here in the Pacific Northwest #pnw and #northwestisbest are pretty popular for nature photos.
• GOOGLE This sounds obvious, but if you are looking for a specific thing, let’s say a barn, then there might actually be a website dedicated to the thing you are looking for! (hey look! an Oregon Barn website!). In my case, this site was very, very helpful in helping me explore the Oregon coast virtually! http://www.beachconnection.net/
• YOUR STATE’S FILM OFFICE WEBSITE Pssst, Oregonians. Look. Not only do most of these websites have a gallery or database with locations, many of them point out major motion pictures that were filmed in your state. If these locations were good enough for Hollywood, they’re probably good enough for you! One of the locations that will be in our film was featured in the film “The Road”. That little speck in the middle of the first screencap is the Peter Iredale shipwreck.
  

Same location, MUCH different feeling!

• GOOGLE MAPS Now this one mostly just helps you out with things outside near roads, but it can still be very helpful. Save the gas money and go for a virtual drive! For one of the crucial locations in my film I needed to find a dead end road. So I hopped on Google maps and low and behold there it was…literally across the street from my house, but in an area I never would have thought to check out.
• APPS There are also a few apps out there that are meant to help you discover things in your area (although this includes everything, like food). They didn’t help me for this project, but that doesn’t mean they won’t help you! Check out the Foursquare & Circle apps.

OFFLINE

• GO FOR A WALK How well do you know your neighborhood? Sometimes there’s cool stuff right in your backyard, but you may only discover it on foot. Last night I decided to go for a walk and found an awesome little nature park just a few blocks away!

PEOPLE

So far this has been geared mostly towards finding outdoor type locations (by the way, don’t trespass). But what about houses & other indoor type locations. Time to make some connections.

• YOUR CURRENT CONNECTIONS What do you already have available to you? Good friends and family will probably be willing to let you film at their place! Do your friends or family have a connection to someone that could help you (time to send some Facebook messages).
• YOUR TEAM’S CONNECTIONS This is where I encourage you not to be a one man show.  Bring people on board to help you with pre-production. For my last film, I basically did all the pre-production myself and it sucked. I recently asked our now Producer/Assistant Director Abby, to come on board, and you have no idea how much more stuff is getting done already. She’s had great ideas I never would have thought of. But to end this rant and tie it back into locations, think about how many more connections you gain by bringing other people on board!
• ASKING PLACES I’m an introvert. I’m awful at making small talk with strangers and asking them for things. For my last film I needed to film a robbery scene at a gas station. I dreaded asking the gas stations. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and ask (or appoint a team member who likes to talk). I had to ask a few stations, but eventually I found one. . The worst that can happen is they turn you down. When you ask, be sure that you are at least offering something to them as well. Tell them you will give their business a special thanks in the credits and you will get them a copy of the film. My advice is, the more local the place, the better. The chances of you getting to shoot at a Starbucks is way, way, way lower than the chances of getting to shoot at a locally owned coffee shop (and it probably has a lot more character!). Local places are less likely to be so concerned about insurance and they might think what you are doing is actually pretty cool (because it is!). You will probably have a better chance of success in smaller towns where filming doesn’t occur as often and isn’t seen as a common nuisance to the locals.
• VACATION RENTALS This one may seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but I’m actually using a vacation rental for a few scenes in my film. I really wanted to shoot at a scenic ocean or bay front type house. We have a connection to a condo that’s pretty close to the ocean, but I was really hoping for a house. Now, we could have made the condo work, but I had another idea. We needed to find a place to rent out for the cast & crew to stay for our coastal shoot days anyways, so what if we could shoot at the place we stayed at? I searched vacation rental sites, looked for affordable rentals, and messaged owners. It took me a little while to make a hit, but I found someone who gave us permission to shoot at their house and the location was awesome! The site I was successful with and recommend is VRBO. I recommend this site because it is by owner, so there’s a much better chance of you getting permission to shoot. Now obviously this method is going to cost you money, but if you’re going to have to pay for lodging anyways, why not make your money go further?!

WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN CHOOSING LOCATIONS

I want to finish with a few practical things to keep in mind when you are choosing locations.

• LIGHTING If you need external power for your shoot, do you have outlets available? If you are hoping to make an indoor scene look natural, do you have windows you can shoot light through? If you are shooting outside, do you know where the sun will be at that time? Will you be shooting in the shade or direct sunlight? If direct sunlight, consider what time of day you are shooting, what direction your actors need to face in the scene, and what equipment you have available to control the sunlight. Shooting at noon outdoors with sun directly overhead looks pretty ugly unless you’ve got some equipment to help you out.
• SPACE How much space do you have to work with? With DSLRs we’ve thankfully got a little bit smaller setup, but you will still need a little room. Where can you put lights and still keep them out of the shoot? Are their available light sources in the scene you can use instead? Where can the sound guy hold the boom? Do you have a wide angle lens to shoot in this small space?
• SOUND Even if a location is absolutely stunning it can have some of the ugliest sound due to traffic or other sources. For our film I already know we will have a bit of a situation with this as we have several scenes that take place right next to the ocean (wooosh). Let your actors know ahead of time if there is going to be some ADR needed for the film. Now, I do have an idea that we may try out, just to see if we can get around ADR. I’ve never tried it, but just recently heard of something called “wild takes.” Basically you have the actors move to a nearby, but better sounding location right after you finish filming the scene, and then have them go through the scene again, this time just recording audio. The idea is that they will still have the momentum to do a similar performance from the scene and it will sound good. This may work out better than having them try to recreate their performance weeks or months later when you do ADR. Who knows if we will get audio that will actually line up with our video, but for an extra 10-15 minutes of time, it’s worth a shot to me.

You’ve got the resources and you know what to look for. Get out there (physically or virtually) and find your locations!

HAPPY LOCATING!

Why I Had Locations in Mind When I Wrote My Script

I don’t know if my last two films have had heavy outdoor and natural type settings because I love nature, or because I can find free, awesome looking locations. Probably both. Either way it works.

Today we’re going to look at why  it may be a good idea to have some of your locations in mind before you write them.

Now you might be thinking, “Isn’t it kind of limiting my creativity to write locations that you already know?”  Yes, in some cases it could be. I’m not saying you have to wait until you know all of your locations before you can write scenes. That would definitely kill some of your creativity, and may take you forever to get started!  But there are several advantages to already having locations in mind, before you do too many revisions of the script.

Places Can Inspire Your Script

I was falling in love with the Oregon coast at the same time as I was forming this story, so location scouting (via the internet) & writing very much went hand-in-hand. I based most of my outdoor scenes around locations that I was discovering and so it worked out very well for me to know exactly the places I was writing.

Places I visit (or plan to visit) often inspire scenes or stories for me. The place below absolutely inspired a scene for my film.

There was another scene that I actually added into my script after a few revisions because I found it when I finally visited the location above for the first time. I loved it and  really wanted to shoot there. That may seem like a lame reason to add a scene in to the script, like I am putting the location above the story. But I look at the script now and I think that scene adds an important moment of character development and a nice respite before the story hits a big turning point. It’s something I probably would have never have thought to add  if I hadn’t discovered that place. Keep your eyes open for these sort of things.

Story-Integrated Settings

If most of your scenes take place in bedrooms, the local park, front yards, inside cars, just sort of general places, then yeah, I probably wouldn’t worry  about figuring out most locations ahead of time.

But if you’re writing scenes that take place at say, a mansion, then it’s probably pretty important for you to find a mansion you can shoot at before you start writing scenes where your characters are out playing polo on the lawn.

Think about how specific of a location you are writing and whether your characters need to interact with the environment of the scene. Don’t set yourself up for failure by writing a place that is both very important to the plot and impossible to find locally. If you’re going the route where you are digitally creating the environment via matte paintings and/or green screening, consider doing previsualization tests to make sure you can pull it off the look.

The title of my film is the setting of my film, Arcadia Bay. It’s a quaint coastal town, and that’s where the story takes place. So in my  it’s pretty important for the story to be integrated with the setting.

Think of the Setting as a Character

There are many factors that give a film a great “cinematic look”. There’s more to it than using a nice camera and having good color grading skills. Imagine if the Lord of the Rings was shot entirely in Nebraska! (I’m a native Nebraskan, I can poke fun at it). The film wouldn’t be the at all would it (except maybe the scene Farmer Maggots corn field)! Now that was a big budget example, so let’s get more practically. Let’s say you’re making a quirky, little film. Wouldn’t it be more awesome if your main character lived in a cute and quirky sort of place, rather than a cookie cutter house in suburbia? Couldn’t that add a sort of life to the story?

When you create a story, you create a story world. No matter how much a film looks and sounds like our world, it’s not our world, it’s the world of the film. So make it unique! Treat the world a bit like one of your characters. What does this character “wear”? What consistencies can be found in the locations of the film that will make it seem unified? Or on the other hand, you can purposely create contrast to show two different sort of worlds that these characters live in.

Don’t Forget Your Director’s Cap

If you are writing a blockbuster film that’s going to get a bajillion dollar budget thrown at it, then you can probably ignore this one (also, why are you reading this blog?). But if you are actually planning on turning the script that you just wrote into a film, then don’t forget to wear your director’s cap on top of your writer’s cap (even though it looks lame wearing two hats at once). Don’t write something you know is going to just be unfilmable. As amazing as that film script you just wrote might be, don’t forget that it is a FILM script. People are going to judge the film, not your script. You know how people tend to be disappointed in film adaptations of books? That’s partly because they already visualized the whole story in their head, and what they are seeing is someone else’s vision. Don’t set yourself up to be disappointed in your film adaptation of your own script!

Having important locations already in mind will help insure that the vision that you have for the film inside your head matches the actual finished film. And it’s much easier to write good details when you have the details of a real place in your mind.

Give thought to your locations and it will show. And think about your budget! If you can find a location that look awesome, it can be a lot more affordable and more time efficient than having to build a set or do visual effects work. Don’t forget that locations make you feel, which is why they can be so inspirational! Even if you know you can find locations ahead of time, start looking for these spots early so that won’t just “work”, but that will look great!

Now, I’ll admit I didn’t find all my locations for the film before I wrote it. But I did find the ones I knew I would need to. I currently have one location left to find, and I don’t think it should be too hard to locate.

In an upcoming post, I’ll have some practical tips and resources that will hopefully help you find some great locations near you!

Happy Locating!

Casting With Craigslist & Finding Your Audition Space

Casting is 65 percent of directing.
– John Frankenheimer

Casting with Craigslist sure sounds sketchy, but if you do it right there’s a lot of talent to be found in there (at least out here in the Portland area)!
I’ll give you one lesson I learned now: If they don’t have any acting experience, don’t and invite them to auditions, not on Craigslist. I rolled the dice thinking this would be one of those situations where I would discover the next big name. It ended up being the opposite of that situation. It just wastes everyone’s time and makes for awkwardness.

In today’s video I discuss how I went about gathering interested actors for auditions, how I found an audition space, and how I held auditions.

Happy Casting!

Learning How You Write Best

I steal from every movie ever made.

– Quentin Tarantino

In this video today we’ll discuss:

• COMING UP WITH IDEAS!

• FINDING YOUR PRODUCTIVE PLACE!

• WRITING YOUR FIRST DRAFT!

• RE-WRITING!

• RE-WRITING!

• RE-WRITING!

---

 

Here’s the great “Everything is a Remix” series I mention in the video:

 http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

 

And here are my friends over at Filmpunch, a great community of young, friendly filmmakers:

http://filmpunch.org/

 

HAPPY WRITING!

How to Storyboard When You Suck at Drawing

Storyboards. They say it’s the cheapest way to visualize your film. And yet, I don’t envision my film looking much like this:

I sure hope it doesn’t look like that!

Now for some of you, these little stick-men storyboards may work for you. Storyboards from my first film Make Your Paths Straight basically looked like this.

But if you really need to collaborate with your DP these probably won’t help him or her catch your vision fort the film. Plus, if the people you need to show these to aren’t your close friends, it just ends up being kind of embarrassing.

So we’ve established that I suck at drawing, but we haven’t come up with the solution.

I’ll sum it up in one word: “Tracing.”

 

I use a combination of Photoshop, DAZ Studio (Free 3D Character Model Program), and real photos. First we get our background/environment photo and bring it into Photoshop, then we use DAZ Studio to pose a character into the position we want, then we rotate in 3D space so that he’s at the right perspective in the scene (because drawing perspective is my biggest issue!), and then we trace those things!  It might sound complicated, but it’s pretty easy.

I first ran across the technique in this helpful video on Vimeo:

The video is great, but it’s about 45 minutes long and still requires you to be able to imagine & draw the backgrounds yourself (which I still don’t have enough drawing ability to do).

So instead I’ve made my own short tutorial (under 6 minutes) that will get you started storyboarding! Now like I said the catch is that you will need real photos if you can’t draw backgrounds, which is fine if you know where you’re shooting and have photos (or can search for them or use Google Maps). If you haven’t found your locations yet, you can always Google images of what you’re looking for and then just trace those images.

Also, if you don’t have Photoshop, you should totally still be able to accomplish this! I do use a variety of tools in Photoshop to make the process a little faster, but all you really need is the paint brush and paint bucket. Pretty sure you could pull easily pull this off in Microsoft Paint or another free program like Gimp!

So without further ado, here is the tutorial!

Happy Storyboarding!