Day 3 of Kris & Lindy Boustedt's THIS IS OURS

When you show up for the final couple of days of a feature film, you run into one of two situations. Either the production owes 10 pages and is in an absolute state of panic, or they're on schedule and pretty much stuff is just winding down. The former is pretty damned entertaining, but the latter is a lot less stressful.



THIS IS OURS is the latter. Bad for page views. Good for the final product.



Spend enough time on film sets and you can pretty quickly figure out the chaotic ones from the organized. People know where they should be. There's a sense of calm, of serenity (if that's possible), that infuses everything. Everything just sort of clips along at a steady pace.

Today's the final day for THIS IS OURS, and the bulk of it revolves around a scene next to the RV parked in the driveway. Plus, there's a stunt.



The scene is primarily between our two male leads, an argument that turns violent. For obvious reasons, I won't get into specifics, but basically it involves one character getting the shit beat out of him with the cricket bat we used the day before on the golf course. Sure, you can try and use the same cricket bat to hit golf balls and beat up an actor, but actors tend to be fussy about such things, no matter how many times you assure them that Brando totally would have done it. And clearly, you can't hit golf balls very far with a bat soft enough to hit anyone, although considering how far they actual did fly, that probably wasn't something to worry about.



Basically, you have to have two cricket bats--a real one and a foam one. That way you can accomplish both objectives. But where does one even get a cricket bat, much less a foam one? I haven't a clue. I'm guessing the internet? Which is probably why they only sort of match. The foam bat is at least 4 inches longer than the wooden one and the painting isn't the same. But that's kind of one of the great secrets about film props--it won't matter. They're in different scenes. The mind of an audience, having seen a cricket bat established earlier in the film, will pretty much fill in the gaps of any subsequent cricket bat they see later in the film and assume it to be the same one, assuming it's even remotely close. Think of it like a type of optical illusion. The mind, in a lot of ways, sees what it wants to see, assuming you let it. Switch something out mid-scene and you have to be damned close. Do it a couple of scenes later and the audience will make the connection without even realize they're doing it.



So we beat the shit out of Ernie. But even a foam bat has some weight to it. After a couple of takes, he's sufficiently bruised and in a little bit of pain. So for the reverse, Kris steps in to take the punishment. We shoot it, then Mark and Wonder jump in the RV, gun it up the hill and onto the road.



And that's a wrap on THIS IS OURS.



But that's not everything. The cast and crew has been living in this house for two weeks, so the next day, some of us (including a very hung over Marco Scaringi) have the task of cleaning out the house. It's just mountains of garbage, as this house doesn't do garbage pickup. So we empty the AYWR vehicle and use that to ferry garbage from the house to a nearby dumpster. We then clean the house, pack as much gear as humanly possible into the RV, and hit the road back to Seattle.







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.

Day 2 of Kris & Lindy Boustedt's THIS IS OURS

The story of THIS IS OURS (as I understand it, not having read the script) revolves around 2 couples. The first, played by Ernie Joseph and Karie Gonia, are cultured and monied and established. The second, played by Mark Carr and Wonder Russell, are freewheeling in pretty much every way. They live out of an RV.

Today we're filming their introduction.



It's pretty simple. Ernie Joseph's character goes out for a run. He overdoes it, and gets rescued by Mark and Wonder in the RV. Easy. All we've really got to do is find a spot to shoot it on the roads near our home base. And since the woods are the woods, we pretty much have our choice of the back roads around here, which is all of them. Really, there's only 2 considerations: traffic and a place nearby to turn around the RV.

My thought is to send someone (i.e. me) down the road out of frame, to hold up traffic while the camera is rolling. It's the sort of thing you can get away with on a rural road, as you're really only stopping one or two cars at a time, and only for a minute or two. People are generally pretty understanding. We did this, for example, on THE SUMMER HOME and no one got hurt. But apparently, they've already tried it on this shoot and, well, let's just say they can't do it again.

So I guess the lesson there is, you might only get one chance on your shoot to break the law. Use it wisely.





The second issue is a little more practical. You can see from the pictures that these road are somewhat narrow with lots of really big trees on the side. An RV doesn't have a good turning radius. So you can just drive the RV past the frame, then turn around and do it again. Nor can you easily back it up like you could a car. So you need to find a spot where you can turn around easily and quickly in both directions, while still having the proper length of road for the wide shot.



We find it, sort of, and shoot the wide. But traffic is picking up, so we move to a different spot for the remainder of the scene (woods look like woods), which goes off without a hitch.



Then it's back to the cabin to shoot a scene with the RV in Ernie and Karie's driveway. It's not a complicated scene, in terms of blocking, but the light is too harsh. There's really no other place to put this vehicle, and it's kind of white, so the sun is bouncing off it and washing out pretty much everything. So DP Jonathan Houser naturally wants to put up some silks to cut down as much of the light as possible.

Enter Kit Boyer.

Kit stacks two silks in the same gobo head, which solves most of the problem, then throws up some frost. Only, the wind is creating too much noise (a silk is naturally quiet, but the frost make a crinkly sound), so Kit threads two bungee cords through an empty water bottle, which creates enough tension in the frost to cut down nearly all the noise. It works.



If you remember all the way back to yesterday, there was a discussion between Kris and Houser about how to shoot something on the golf course. Here's the scene:



Ernie and Mark are at a tee box, hitting balls. Ernie is dressed in business casual wear, hitting balls off a tee with a driver. You know, like you should. But Mark is dressed like someone about to head to a Phish concert. Oh, and he's hitting the balls with a cricket bat. Yes, a cricket bat.



You'd think that hitting a golf ball with a cricket bat is a pretty inexact science, and you'd be right. Most of the shots are veering very quickly to the right, in the direction of the houses just off the fairway. This begs the obvious question of whether or not we're going to break a window. We can't afford to break a window. We can't stop the scene, nor can we control the shots--at all. It's a short discussion, but it goes something like this: If you live close to a golf course, you have to assume that your window is in danger of being smashed. So, you either have that factored into your cost of living, or (and this seems more likely) you've got windows that can withstand a golf ball traveling at high speeds.



This seems logical.

Nothing breaks, and after a bit Mark starts to get better at sending the ball down the fairway. As the sun starts to go down, I grab the bucket and amble down the fairway to collect all the balls.

In the end, it turns out he never even got close to the houses.






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 Kris & Lindy Boustedt's THIS IS OURS

Early in A Year Without Rent, I was supposed to work on a film in Seattle that ended up falling apart. These things happen. A lot. But out of the ashes of that failure came two more films--THE SUMMER HOME, a short which shot back in April, and THIS IS OURS, a feature.

This rarely happens. Hell, when they talked to me about it way back when, I only half believed them.



But here we are, in Plain, Washington, shooting that feature film Kris and Lindy talked about on the set of THE SUMMER HOME.

THIS IS OURS takes place primarily in a cabin next to a golf course. It serves a dual purpose, as we're all sleeping in the cabin and it's the primary location for the film, which is exactly what we did on THE SUMMER HOME.



I arrive from Seattle an hour or so after call after getting a ride to my car from Brendon Fogle. It's a whole new team from the last film, with the only constants being Kris, Lindy, and Wonder Russell. Oh, and Falcor. I get the tour of the place, which is much bigger than it looks from the road and pretty easily holds everyone. Next to the cabin is a garage that serves as a holding area for gear. And there's a porch that overlooks a golf course. As far as places to make a movie go, it's a pretty nice one.

I'm on set for the last couple of days, so everything's already in full swing, clicking along. There's some rigging in ceiling to hang lights. Everyone's already exhausted. The usual.



There's always an adjustment period for stuff like this, where I come in as the new person. It takes a bit to actually work myself into the work flow. Even more so on this film, as things seem to going pretty smoothly. There's not a whole lot for me to do just yet. So I help carry some heavy stuff and take some pictures.







We film in the living room for a bit, then Kris, DP Jonathan Houser, and I go down to the golf course while they figure out how to shoot something that's on the schedule for later in the week.



Then, we set the living room for a night scene of a party in which, for some reason, Ernie Joseph and Mark Carr are wearing dresses. I'm not really sure why, but there you have that. It's that kind of film, I guess.



It's also, according to pretty much everyone, one of the most DIY shoots they've been on, due in large part to the ingenuity of one Kit Boyer, who when presented with a partial camera package for the RED, got creative. He made an eyebrow for the matte box with some cardboard, gaff tape, and a soda can.



But he also created something he calls "the plunge". It's, well, I'll let him explain it.



I can honestly say I've never seen that before. Fellow 1st AC's, the bar has been raised.




A side note: I've timed these posts to coincide with the THIS IS OURS Kickstarter campaign. So if you've got some spare change, consider sending it their way.




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.

The Plunge

Sometimes the rental house doesn't send you the right gear. You can bitch and moan, or if you're like THIS IS OURS' 1st AC Kit Boyer, you start looking around for ways to fix thing.

Enter: the plunger from the bathroom.





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

THIS IS OURS (photos)

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.