Day 10 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

All through this production, I've heard tales of our "seedy motel" location, a place so vile and disgusting, they couldn't even bring themselves to put me up there. (And I've slept in a few pretty questionable places so far)

Today, we film there.



On the way there, the first thing I notice is that the neighborhood seems to be getting nicer the closer we get to the motel. Could it be that they're fucking with me? That it's some elaborate joke? We're driving through Burbank, which is a pretty nice part of Los Angeles, past steak houses and rather upscale shopping places and some trees that were probably imported from somewhere else.

And then, we cross a line. The wrong side of the tracks, minus the tracks. The real estate is maybe 1/10 the value it was 2 blocks ago, maybe less. Pretty quickly after that, we find the motel. It ain't nice. But what's most perplexing is that there's a really expensive Corvette parked next to Paul's car. It doesn't belong to anyone in the production, which means that someone who can afford a sports car is staying here. Maybe it has something to do with the recession.

Maybe it's Frank McCourt.



The motel is bad, don't get me wrong, but I expected worse. From what people were saying, I fully expected to find a dead hooker between the mattresses. This is just…shitty. I've slept in dirtier places. Still, dirty is dirty. Katie and Tiffany replace the sheets.



It's a pretty easy setup. Put a china ball on a gobo arm. Set up the soft lights. Wait.

There's a sexy rendezvous to film, which means a closed set. Then we reset the lights and films some scenes with Blayne and Patrick. Really basic stuff. Let the location do a lot of the work. Paul takes the TV out of the room, which has the dual effect of making the room look shittier and eliminating the reflection issue. A craft move, if you ask me. There's a lot of waiting next door in the staging area. We watch TV. Get some work done. Play a little UNO.





Katie gets all dressed up to be a dead body stand-in, since the actress isn't here. This means she has to lay on the floor, which sucks, but she is allowed to sleep, so that's something.



In the original schedule, day 10 was supposed to be the last day of the shoot. Somewhere along the way that changed (which is really standard) and it become the second-to-last day of the shoot. The problem is that I have another commitment for the new last day, as I'm due at the Film Courage Future of Film Curation panel (and screening of my first feature BLANC DE BLANC). But Paul's got a minuscule crew, so this becomes my schedule for day 10 & 11 of FAVOR:

6am: Wrap.
11am: Drive across town to LA Talk Radio.
Noon: Guest host (basically chime in every so often) and talk to this week's guest M.J. Slide.
2pm: Head over to Hot Pixel Studios to test everything for the panel/screening.
6pm: Screening of BLANC DE BLANC (also available on VOD).
8pm: Panel.
Midnight: Drive back to set.



They're in full swing when I get there. We're shooting exteriors, which are pretty easy at the motel, but still they can use all the help they can get.

We get the shots and get out early. And that is a wrap on FAVOR.


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 9 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

Previously, on FAVOR: Paul Osborne drove us out into the desert with a shovel and told us to dig (what could go wrong?). Well, now we're back at his house for a day of filming (it's a scheduling thing).

The schedule calls for something of a shorter day (even by Paul's standards), and we're mostly shooting exteriors, so many of the lighting issues from the other day persist.

Mainly, when the shots call for action on the porch, it's more or less simple. The soft lights work, as the porch is covered and the light can bounce around rather than vanishing into the Burbank night. Add in the LEDs throwing light in from the flower bed, and the big issues basically revolve around shadows and reflections in the window. Nothing too complicated.



And that would be great, but there's one more point of action--the street. The shot is essentially this: Blayne Weaver drives his car to the front of the house and walks to the front door. Sounds easy, right? During the day it would be. But you can't just send Blayne into the darkness. People will (hopefully) pay good money to watch the movie and will want to see him (audiences…sheesh), so we've got to light it. Paul wants it to be a pretty wide shot, so it's up to us to make that work.



Remember, we have very few lights, and not good ones.

You'd assume the first step here would be to figure out the shot, but it isn't. Well, not exactly. You want to figure out the general camera POV. There's no point locking yourself into a shot until you know what you'll be able to light. In our case, we want the camera to be across the street, which will allow the lights in the house and the streetlight to act as practicals.

Next, the most powerful light we've got (a 1K LED) is going to have to work as a general light. In normal night scene, it'd be the moon. For a day scene it'd mimic the sun, but we want it to look like another streetlight. It goes on the only c-stand and we jack it all the way up. That'll give us a general wash.

We have to run power from the house, which is tricky, as we've got orange extension cords that the camera will see. So we have to hide them. This is pretty simple, as we just have to snake them as far to the side as possible.

Then comes the tricky part: lighting the lawn.



Paul's lawn is on a hill. A pretty steep hill. For obvious reasons you don't want to put a light on a hill. There's a couple of spots that are kind of flat, but most of them would most definitely be in whatever shot we could possibly use. We can put one of them on the far-left side of the lawn, which has two pretty level spots, and throw some light across the grass. This is now the left edge of our frame (and why we don't pick a shot before we look at lighting options). Whatever we do, that's as far left as we can go.

The soft lights are pretty useless here, but they can put more light in the house, which should spill out the windows a tiny bit. And even if they don't, the light will read better in the house.



Since we're going to want to see the car approach from the right (Paul's house is at the end of a dead end street, which is convenient for our purposes), we don't really have a right edge of the frame. That is, we can't exactly mimic what we did on the left.

But…there are some trees. If we put the other 500W LED on the pavement up by the porch, we might be able to hide it behind the tree. Best we can tell, that's our only place to hide a light on that side. So it kind of has to go there.

So far, it doesn't look terrible. It's pretty dark, though, so we take the small battery-powered work light, gel it orange, and hide that on the lawn itself.

By this point, we have a pretty good idea of where the camera is going to have to be, whether Paul wants it there or not. Aspiring directors take note. There will be points in your filming career, especially on low-budget shoots, where the lighting and camera people will tell you that this is the shot. Your first instinct will (rightly so) be to question that. But if they're sure, don't fight it. Chances are this is the only place the shot can be. They're not trying to usurp your directorial genius or vision. It's simply that they know for a fact that this is the only option you have. Have them explain it to you and go with it. You brought them onto the film to do a job. Be smart like Paul Osborne and let them do it.



That covers the lawn and the house. The only thing left is to light where the car will arrive. Sure, the streetlights will do a lot of that, but it could still use some help. We've got one more light: a 1000W work light, the type you'd buy at Home Depot. We used it in the desert and it comes out again here. We set it up and there's a problem: like most work lights, the light has a safety cage on it. Well, the cage is throwing a pretty distinct shadow on the trees. Some diffusion would take care of that, but we don't have any diffusion and I'm not sure we'd even want to diffuse it. We need every bit of light we can get. But the cage is screwed on. Sure there's a big sign on it saying that one should never, ever take the cage off. Out comes the screwdriver.

And we're lit.

But can Bunee Tomlinson, our 18-year-old Production Assistant from Oklahoma, explain to you why we're lit? Let's find out.




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

Day 7 & 8 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

We're combining days here for the first time on A Year Without Rent for one very simple reason: nothing happened on day 7. Well that's not completely true. We filmed part of the movie. It wasn't like day 7 was a day off or anything, even if Paul Osborne said that some of us probably didn't need to show up. The plan was to put Paul, Patrick Day, and [actress] in a car and have them drive around. Basically, just car interiors. Not only did he not need us, but there wasn't exactly anywhere to put us.

But I've been doing this a long time, and I know that no day of filming ever goes according to plan. It's better to be available and not needed than to be needed and not available.

Which is how Joe Pezzula, Katie Schwartz, Tiffany J. Shuttleworth, our new PA Bunee Tomlinson, and I ended up sitting in an RV in a grocery store parking lot for hours upon end, playing UNO.

It's about as exciting as it sounds.



Every couple of hours the picture car would swing back through, but beyond that there wasn't all that much to do. Oh sure, we all brought work to do, but none of it got touched, which is kind of a shame, as it seemed like a pretty good opportunity to get a lot done.

I know what you're thinking: you need an RV for that? And you're right. We don't need an RV for that. A RV for that would be excessive.

Day 8 of FAVOR is a night shoot in the desert with practical effects (more blood!), a generator (ooohhh), and even a second PA. More specifically, we're shooting at Vazquez Rocks. You've seen things filmed there. GALAXY QUEST shot there, as did STAR TREK (both older variations and the lens flare-tastic J.J. Abrams reboot), and it's easy to see why. It's a stunning landscape, punctuated by the signature pointed rock formation.



Naturally, as soon as we show up, every single member of the cast and crew starts climbing up on the rocks because, let's face it, deep down we're all just little kids.



We have that same lighting setup, of course, only here we really need the extra power from the work lights. The first thought is to set up some 3 point lighting, but it becomes clear rather quickly that the desert is just going to swallow the lights up. But, if we cluster most of them in the same spot and use one of the 500W LEDs to throw in some fill, it more or less works. Add a battery powered light we've gelled to match the others and we've got something.



The generator, of course, is our source of electricity. The production has spent the extra rental money on the silent model. It's anything but. We wrap what we can find around it, but it barely makes a dent. Finally, we have to get a little creative in re-routing our cables until we can put the generator far enough away with enough things in-between it and us to muffle the sound enough. Then, since a generator won't last forever, we're on the clock.



It takes exactly no time for the dust and sand to get everywhere. Our lights are just powerful enough to light the scene, but they're really hot on the bumper of the picture car. We tweak, but it doesn't do all that much. Eventually, Paul just figures out a camera angle that'll frame out most of the issue. More often than not, if you've got a lighting issue that just isn't working, the best solution often involves re-thinking your set-ups. Maybe the camera can move 3 feet to the left and still accomplish exactly the same thing.



One of our scenes involves the actors digging in some dirt in order to [REDACTED]. Only, the people in charge of the desert do not allow you to dig in their dirt. You have to bring in your own dirt, and it has to be a specific type of dirt too (because a desert doesn't have enough dirt). You can imagine how annoying this is. We need maybe 3 wheelbarrows full of dirt--tops--but the smallest amount we can order ends up being enough to fit in the back of a pickup truck. That's a lot of extra dirt. We have one shovel (which is actually a prop) and no wheelbarrow (but we do have a plastic bin). This is why you always want a few extra people on set. The 2 PA's do most of the shoveling, but we all chip in a little here and there while doing other things. This is one of the big differences in scale of films. On a bigger film, there'd be a department doing this, but on a small indie everyone works on it, from a PA to the director. It has to get done.



Shooting in the desert proves to be a little more difficult, so Paul shoots slower than he has other days, but he's still on schedule. The guy's a machine. Part of me is impressed and part of me is terrified that we're going to end up not having nearly enough good footage. But, Paul's happy with what he's getting, and if he's happy than you have to trust he's getting what he wants. It's just, I can't remember a shoot where we wrapped early every single day. It's madness.

He does it again in the desert, and just as he calls "wrap", the lights flicker, then go out. The generator is out of fuel.

Maybe Paul isn't so crazy after all.


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.

Stand-in

Often on a film shoot, I'll stand in for actors. And sometimes, if they're having trouble running the scene, the stand-ins will run it for them.



And then the actors got all jealous and decided to do their own version.




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 6 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

The one big issue with using soft lights as your primary lighting source is that they don't do a whole lot when you take them outside. They're kind of by definition a blunt sword, and they don't put off a lot of light, so taking them outside pretty much just turns them into a practical light, and who has one of those paper IKEA lamps outside? So, to shoot outside, we have to turn to our other lights, 3 LED lights with stands (a 1k and 2 500's) that we can pretty much gel orange. We have no diffusion that I can find. We do, however, have some work lights.

You don't want to use work lights unless you absolutely have to.



Our goal with the LEDs is pretty much just to try and make them look like streetlights as best we can. Really, we just want some motivated light to make sure people can see what the hell is going on in the scene.

Luckily, our first scene is in the garage, so we can use the existing light (replacing a bulb here and there). And the garage itself is one of those garages that you can only get by having someone live there for a long time who loves to tinker with multiple projects and isn't such a fan of throwing things away. Not a hoarder, just a pack rat. There's even an old car in there somewhere. A really old car. It might have even been new when they parked it in the garage.

It's kind of perfect for Patrick's character. I can't even imagine how you would create a room like this from scratch.



From there we move outside, which really tests our lights. The 1k, as high as it will go and as close to the frame as we can get it, helps. But it ain't great. This is where you really want to direct light, to pull out some flags and some black wrap and really create some shadows. Kind of like this:



But that's not an option on a mass scale, and it doesn't fit well with the look of the film's interiors, so we do the best we can with the lights at hand.

The other issues at hand involve [REDACTED] being [REDACTED] and the inherent problem of attempting to do that without either actress actually being there.

Remember the old trick when you were a kid and you'd put pillows underneath your blankets so your parents would think you were in bed? You know how it never, ever worked, even though it worked so perfectly for Ferris Bueller? Yeah, it doesn't really work when you're trying to do it on a film set either. It looks fake. And that, of course, just won't do.

That's how we ended up taping Paul's teenage daughter inside a sheet and shutting her in the trunk of a car. The big issue being how do we hide the fact that Paul's daughter has a completely different hair color than the actress without it looking like we're hiding it for the sake of hiding it. Or how we had a 10 minute debate about just how much mud we should put on UPM Katie Schwartz's feet and how best to show it.

I can't even imagine what sort of porn film the neighbors thought we were filming.




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

Day 5 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

Joe is back!

When a crew is as small as the crew on FAVOR, you really notice when people are gone. Mostly because they film so many damned roles. Take Joe for example. Joe is primarily the boom operator. But he's also running power all over the place and setting up lights. And those are just his primary responsibilities. There are no extra hands. So when Joe's gone, there's a pretty massive hole in the crew. But now he's back.



One of the running themes of FAVOR has been the various injuries that have started to accumulate. A couple of days ago, director Paul Osborne slipped on some wet grass and twisted his angle. Seeing as he's the camera operator and we're mostly shooting handheld, a twisted ankle isn't so helpful. We've offered to help him run the camera, but Paul is resolute, gritting his teeth for the length of a take, then hobbling the rest of the way.



And today, as a result of yesterday's stunts, Patrick Day has a brand new accessory--a broken finger. Also, his back hurts. Pretty much everyone is starting to get a little injured on this film.



Today (well, tonight) we're shooting one of the final scenes from the film. Obviously, we can't talk about that much. So let's talk about where we're filming. The location is a house in the Valley, in an area called Chatsworth. Now if you're like me and you don't really know much about the various parts of Los Angeles, then you should probably know that Chatsworth is pretty much the epicenter of the porn industry. Go ahead, scroll down the Wikipedia link. It's a little factoid that has absolutely no bearing on the production, but I think it's good to give a little context of where exactly we are. It might also give some context into what the neighbors assume we're doing at 3am.



But what we can talk about is the value of a good art director. Ours isn't great. My first day on the project was the art director's last. Let's just leave it at that. Anyway, he put together some fake beer bottle labels for the production (even though they could have very easily used Brainerd Lakes Beer for this exact reason). The labels look nice enough. They have that micro-brew vibe about them and everything. The only problem is they have some rather well-drawn images on them. But where did they come from? Keep in mind that in the 20 minutes I talked to this guy, I explained the term "greek" to him twice. (Greeking, if you don't know, is when you do something to cover up a logo that'll appear on camera.) It's too late to try and get him on the phone. Do we shoot it and take our chances? We could, but pretty quickly the consensus becomes to greek the labels made by our Art Director. It just simply isn't worth the risk.



I'm pretty sure the other productions in the neighborhood didn't have that come up during filming. *rimshot*


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

Day 4 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

There will be blood. Maybe. Or maybe not.

We're doing a practical effect where a character gets [REDACTED], thus leading to a lot of blood. Like, a lot of blood. What the special effects people have decided to do is wrap a pad around the actor's torso where the [REDACTED] happens. Then, you know, blood. As I understand it, there's a couple of ways you can do this. You can put a packet of fake blood in the spot and figure out a way to break the bag open at impact. You can cut around it so that the impact is off-camera and you add the blood later. Or you can feed the blood in from somewhere else, usually via a tube. We're doing the tube method.



All of the methods have their own strengths and weaknesses. For the tube method, for example, the challenge comes in trying to get the blood to show up at the right time. Think about it. You've got a tube that starts in an actor's clothes, which means it has to snake in from somewhere off-camera. That tube then runs to a spot that's safely out of the frame, where it's being held by someone who's feeding blood into it. That's a pretty long way for blood to travel on a schedule.

So you time it as best you can and you do everything you can to give yourself more time and more chances to get it right. You schedule lots of time around it, and it's generally a good idea to have as many copies of the article of clothing that's going to get bloody as possible. In our case, we've dressed the actor in a plain white t-shirt, the type you can easily get in bulk. We have, I think, 6 of them. That should be enough.

It isn't.



The blood comes early. The blood comes late. It comes in the wrong spot. It comes before we even start the scene, like an over-eager teenager. Before we know it, we've gone through all 6 shirts. So, like any good production, they call lunch. Then, laundry.



Today we're a bit shorthanded as well. Katie Schwartz our UPM is in Michigan at her sister's wedding and Joe Pezzula is at a different wedding. That means that I'm the sum total of the sound and lighting departments for the day (well, night). Cut to a couple of hours later and I'm holding a light in an angle our stands can't achieve with one hand and holding the boom mic with the other one. It's a little tricky. Actually it's a lot tricky.

Tomorrow Joe comes back. Thank God.


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

Day 3 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

All through Day 2, one of the chief topics of conversation was how to shoot a scene with prop glass.

Let me explain. In the scene, an actor has to throw a wine bottle against a door, thereby breaking it into a gazillion little pieces. Generally speaking, actors don't like it if you ask them to deal with real broken glass, what with it's ability to draw blood and everything. So, you have to deal with prop glass--the sort of stuff they use in the scenes where the stuntman jumps through a window. We have one molded in the shape of a wine bottle.

But only one.



We're also (naturally) shooting in a one camera setup. Do the math and we've got exactly one chance to get everything perfect. One. You never want only one shot at getting something on film.

So what do you do?



You rehearse the hell out of it. You make sure all of the actors know exactly what's going to happen. You make sure the crew knows their moves in detail. You leave as little to chance as humanly possible. And even then, you're skating on some thin ice. Remember that even after doing a perfect take, very often a director will opt for a safety, just in case something goes wrong that no one spotted.

One take is scary. One take where the key prop is going to be destroyed is even worse.



If you're smart, you start looking around for contingency plans. Newell, our stills photographer, is using a 7D, and while that isn't really the same as the AF100 Paul is using, it's not that different in the great scheme of things. Close enough that should something happen to the footage on the AF100 (a very remote possibility), the footage on the 7D could work in a pinch. So, we set Newell up next to camera to record it as Option B.

Me, I'm recording it on my camera in case something goes wrong so we'll have footage of the fuck up.



Of course, it goes off without a hitch. Nothing ever goes wrong when you're prepared for it to go wrong. It's always when the camera is in the other room or something.

But it's the preparation that's key.



The other big event is that we're being visited by one of the FAVOR Kickstarter backers. Sort of. One of the backer rewards was that the backer got to do a 1 hour Skype session during filming. What that means in reality is that a backer is live on Skype via Paul's iPad as we film. Remember Bruno, the garbage man who would carry Oscar the Grouch around? Being in charge of the iPad is kind of like that. He gets passed around, and while I can't speak for him, it seems like a pretty sweet perk. He watches the takes, and while lights are being tweaked, the actors talk to him about life, the project, and what drew him to back it.



This is the sort of thing that we should all be doing. It's a personal touch. People love it. Provided your equipment and location make such a thing possible (it might, for example, have been tricky on UP COUNTRY, but when your primary location is a house with wifi? It's a no-brainer.

At least it should be. As common sense as getting out that second camera, just in case the first one fails at a critical time.


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 Paul Osborne's FAVOR

You know how I said it's generally a bad idea to film where you live? Well…here we go again. We're filming at Paul Osborne's house in Burbank, and while it's generally not a good idea, the house has one advantage that may be helping things along: it's at the end of a dead end street, which means that sound is only coming from one direction and traffic is scant.

Never under-estimate the power of good sound in a location.

In the narrative, Paul's house functions as the residence of our lead, Blayne Weaver, and the word is that we'll be at the location for a couple of days. Makes sense.



Fitting in with Paul's minimalist, DIY approach to FAVOR, the interior lighting kit is pretty simple. We've got some LED's that we can gel to whatever we need, but primarily, he's lighting the interiors with soft lights. That means that we're using those china balls and upright lights you buy at IKEA, only with better bulbs inside. It's one of those approaches that either works really well or not at all. They're super easy to set up and move around, but you can't really put a lot of direction into the light source. It's a trade-off. Also, actors like soft lights because they even our skin issues and blemishes.

The downside of these lights can be scary. You sometimes can't control them very well, especially if you want to do something specific (although there are ways around it). But the thing is, Paul knows this. He's shooting the film himself. So, above all else, this is what he wants his film to look like. And that's the most important thing.



I may not be the best grip in the world. Part of the reason I decided to do A Year Without Rent was that I wanted to learn more about how various departments and jobs on a film set functioned. You know, the ones that aren't "director" or "producer". I'm a firm believer that the more you know about what everyone on your set is doing, the better director you'll be. It's common sense, right?

Point being, this is a lighting kit that's well within my range. I know how to use all of these lights. There's no learning curve. And as small as this crew is, this is immediately beneficial. And by small, I mean really small. Joe Pezzula, the sound guy, also seems to be the lighting guy (along with Paul). This is the sort of set where it's clear that "an extra set of hands" might be a bit of an understatement.



We shoot in the living room, which is a little tricky because Blayne Weaver is drinking real wine instead of juice, and after a bit, that tends to add up. Then, some bedroom scenes where the LED lights prove to be a little tricky. We're trying to put enough light in the hall, but it keeps spilling into the door frame, which is too hot. The space is tight, with barely enough room to fit the stand before it ends up in the shot. Not enough room to flag off the excess light. It takes a bit, but we figure it out.



It's indie film. We always figure it out.


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

Day 1 of Paul Osborne's FAVOR

I'm not entirely sure where the rumor originated that I wouldn't take A Year Without Rent to Los Angeles. Sure, one of the project's primary goals is to see indie film outside of the major hot spots, but who's to say that you can't be outside of a major hot spot, but right in their neighborhood? It seems obvious to me that some really interesting indie filmmakers would exist in Los Angeles. It'd be pretty impossible for them not to.

Also, I know a lot of people in LA. And the weather is nice.



So that's kind of how I ended up at a place called Chili John's in Burbank to work on Paul Osborne's second narrative feature FAVOR. I qualify it with "narrative" because you probably know Paul from his documentary work, the seminal indie film documentary OFFICIAL REJECTION, which chronicles the festival experience for his film TEN 'TIL NOON.

I have not seen it, but a lot of people think I'll really like it. Probably because one of my pet peeves is the festival system.

I kind of imagined that Paul, being an indie film celebrity, would have this massive crew of people working on his next project, essentially just to be there. But when I arrive on set, it's pretty clear that Paul's going a different direction and has a skeleton crew. The light kit is equally small. It's surprising at first, but makes sense when you think about it. FAVOR, a film about a guy who accidentally ends up with a dead body he needs help moving, is very much in the noir camp, which allows for a bit of "dirtiness".



Paul is operating the camera himself, which is our second film in a row to do this, and the word from the production is that the film is moving fast. Sound guy (and all-around right-hand man) Joe Pezzula tells me that on a couple of days Paul has added shots and still finished the day early.

I can't remember the last shoot I was on where the day finished on time.



Chili John's is a cool little diner in Burbank, a very old school picturesque place where you'd imagine regulars have been coming every day for years. Naturally, we have to greek a bunch of stuff. The art guy has brought these generic label stickers, which are helpful up to a point, but they haven't been sized to cover what we have to cover, so we end up resorting to the standard indie techniques of just hiding stuff with other stuff.



Part of Paul's motto to move fast involves recording sound directly into the camera (Panasonic AF100), which is something I haven't seen in a long time. It eliminates the need for a slate, and it definitely speeds things up, not just in production but in post as well.

We shoot our inside stuff, then move outside (but not without eating some fantastic chili first), where we're using gelled LED lights in a variant of a 3 point lighting setup.



This being a night shoot, it becomes quickly obvious that in Los Angeles it gets cold at night. I wasn't prepared for this. I lived in Tennessee for a year or so and the nights were pretty much as stifling hot as the days. Here I'm really rather cold. Not as cold as the shoot in San Francisco, but cold nonetheless.

And sure enough, Paul wraps the day early. Go figure.


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.