Hey Guys! Kristine here, I am going to fill you in on the craziness of finding our major location for the production of our film. Our script calls for two locations; a house where our main character, Jess, and then another house where here parents live. Jess’s house was where we filmed the majority of our story. Now, it should be easy to find a house to film in, right? WRONG… you need to understand that when you need a location to film a movie at, you are going to need it for at least blocks of hours at a time. In our case, we needed to use the house for the whole week of filming. To film also requires a lot of equipment and people and a lot of equipment and people means that you need a lot of space. So, we were looking at using a house for a week and occupying most of it. We quickly ran into another conflict while searching for our location: we needed a house that would also let us paint the walls of one of the bedrooms, blue (this was an important story element in our film). Needless to say, a lot of people we asked to use their house turned us down as soon as the words, “blue paint” came out (I of course don’t blame them).
Time continued to tick by and we were having no luck. It was three weeks till our scheduled shooting date, and a location needed to be found soon so we could have a decent amount of prep time with the location. Looking at using a foreclosed home owned by a bank was our next option. So, one day I put on my business suit and headed out to pitch our movie idea and situation to the local banks. Most of the banks were very interested in our project, but couldn’t help us out more then a simple, “Good luck with everything and sorry we couldn’t help”. A couple banks gave us some hope, but over time, liability issues made it a no.
Now desperation sets in. We continued to pray to God about our situation and for our project. We knew that God had already helped us find a story, and thus helping us find a location was not a task too big for Him. And sure enough, exactly a week before our first day of production, two location options opened up, both empty houses that were willing to let us paint. We chose the best possible location that would fit the needs of our film, and thus the intense week of preparation began. Shot lists were being created, which mapped out how we wanted to shoot our film, and with which angles and lenses. A few of us spent painting the room we were going to use (we had to paint it white because it was originally a tan color and we needed a white wall to paint our blue color in the film). Then we gathered furnishing for the home and made an empty house looked lived in. Finally, the very next day, we started shooting.
All I can say is that timing for our location was perfect!
The best part is, with our amazing location, we were allowed to keep our equipment set up at the location all week as well as sleep there to watch over everything. This allowed us to just come to set and start shooting. Not having to load, transport and unload all of our equipment literally saved the day and allowed us to stay on-schedule. What a week of “camping out” on our set Tanya, Heather, and I had!
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