Shoot on Location

The Logistics of Filming on Location, Whatever Your Budget or Experience

Kathy McCurdy, Kathy M. McCurdy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138460447
• eBook ISBN: 9781136040818
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

You have a strong vision for how your movie should look, but how do you find the perfect spot to shoot and how do you organize the complex logistics of such a shoot once you find that perfect location? In this comprehensive guide, industry veteran Kathy M. McCurdy provides everything you need to know to get out on location-from how to break down the script, public relations tips for successful location scouting, negotiating with property owners, permitting on public property, how to handle complaints, and even where to put the very unattractive port-a-potties. It also includes samples of all the different forms and contracts you'll need and breaks down everything from where to park the trucks to when you need police on the set. Filled with real-life examples and actual filming situations, Shoot on Location provides everything you need to know from scouting through the wrap. Delivers the universal step-by-step process for managing location shoots using industry standard guidelines and real-life examples from actual filming situations. Includes samples of all of the legal forms and contract necessary for shooting off the lot and covers everything from script breakdown, negotiation with property owners, and even where to put the porta-potties. Loaded with real tips and how-to's for every level of scouting, shooting, and wrapping-up.

Chapter | one

You Don’t Make Your
Movie in a Bubble!

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Locations Are Characters

The Bubble Effect

What’s the Big Deal?

The Bubble Versus Public Perception

To Understand the Bubble Effect, Remember:

The more I see of our film … the more I realize how much we have been kidding ourselves in feeling that we could get really effective stuff on the back lot that should have been shot on location. … Frankly, I am now terribly sorry we didn’t build Tara on location.

David O. 5elznick Memo, March 9, 1939

Every story takes place somewhere. Characters and their actions occur somewhere in time with a sense of place—that physical space that is the “location.” However, the location always evolves into something so much more dynamic than that alone. Even the great director David O. Selznick realized this back in 1939 as he reminisced over what was lost by filming Gone with the Wind on a fabricated studio back lot. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Hollywood studio system maintained a monopoly on making movies. The major studios owned the sound stages and held the in-demand actors to contracts over long periods of time. Movie making evolved into a more sophisticated business and the studios thrived. Producers experienced the advantages that shooting on a sound stage offered. No changing weather conditions, no sound problems, and no real-world surprises could affect a contained and controlled environment established within four walls. When scenes required a neighborhood street or a Mexican town square, the studio back lot provided whatever the script required—built to order. The back lot sets became permanent fixtures, where any project could benefit from the New York streets to bombed-out Italian villages, or to “Anywhere, USA” neighborhoods. The back lot provided that safe, controlled, private shooting location.

The bulk and weight of the early camera and sound recording systems also encouraged productions to stay on the lot. This was not a mobile business that could easily pack up and move around the country. Everything was on the lot as part of the studio’s infrastructure: crew, props, wardrobe, carpenters, drivers, cranes, wind machines, and so on. Except for Westerns, very few movies left the Hollywood studio to film on location. Why leave the predictability and reliability of the studio lot? Just as we are experiencing new influences today, technological advances back then changed the standard in the industry and the movie making landscape was dramatically altered. As soon as smaller, more portable cameras and sound equipment were developed, the producer could more easily leave the studio stage or back lot and explore new, exotic, remote locations.

The first compact Nagra sound tape recorder usable for film work was engineered in 1962; by 1972, Panavision helped revolutionize filmmaking with the lightweight Panaflex 35mm movie camera. Lighter and more portable broadcast-quality equipment liberated the movie-making process from the confines and limitations of the studios. Though the Hollywood studio system would continue to hold the purse strings, the producer could take his or her film almost anywhere. Producers began to leave the studio back lots for real destinations—cities and states across America and foreign countries that would support and enhance the story’s visual element. Moving “off the lot” and filming “on location” offered a new world to the movie maker. A movie’s producer could now leave the studio, travel to a wealth of location “looks,” and still maintain the highest standards of broadcast-quality picture and sound. Mobility also introduced a new value to what appeared on the big screen.

The accessibility of new locations brought new opportunities for visual enhancement. Shooting off the lot introduced the use of diverse and interesting locations that brought a deep, rich production value to the visuals on the screen. Advances in equipment technology contributed new developments in how a producer or director looks at the locations as they appear in the script. Production value became a new consideration when comparing the cost of shooting on the lot or shooting on location. What would bring the most extraordinary images onto the screen? Why leave the lot and shoot on location?

Shoot on Location.
© 2011 Kathy M. McCurdy. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

LOCATIONS ARE CHARACTERS

What do the serial killer’s suburban garage, the Cape Cod bungalow, and the eerie Southern mansion have in common? Each location brings the importance of visually supporting and enhancing your characters and your story. Locations provide another layer to storylines and character development throughout the entire movie. They are key ingredients in the complex mix of producing a visually stimulating story played out on the screen. Locations are characters in your film. They add magic.

Every location serves a practical purpose and an aesthetic purpose. The characters in the story have to live somewhere, just as the action in each scene must take place somewhere in space and time. Location gives a reference point to people and activity throughout the story. Your characters and your actors interact with and within each location. There is a dynamic created between people and their environment that can be seen and felt on the screen. Every writer introduces a location with great thought as to how it relates to his characters and what they must accomplish or experience in each scene. There is the practical reality of each location and the creative contribution each location makes to the end product.

In reality, you have to shoot somewhere. Rare are the stories that take place in one room or any singular location for 100 pages. Though the popular TV show LOST centered on survivors marooned on an unknown island, that island had to have different areas, contrasting looks, and threatening aspects for story development to move forward week after week. You shoot where your script and your story take you. And you take your shoot to the most visually interesting locations. That is the creative side of on-location filming.

Location is one of the strongest visual contributions made within a movie. As location manager Dennis Williams told me, “Locations are an integral part of the artistic setting of your film. If scenes are set in the perfect site it adds to your story-telling ability.” Locations offer everything from the exotic to the mundane and everything in between, each with a very specific purpose. A perfect location can transform the mundane into the exotic and make the ordinary sing on the screen in some unique way. Locations add depth, dimension, and personality to your story. Each location plays a role as significant as each of your characters and can contribute staggering production value. Breathtaking landscapes, rich architectural details, the moody shades of urban life—all can be dramatic additions to the background of a character’s action or help drive a character’s moment of epiphany. Location is the major visual vehicle upon which the entire film glides along.

Locations offer extremes and contrast. Locations allow us to escape to unknown, unexplored worlds. Locations can be a geography lesson, a history lesson, or a projection of what the future will look like in a thousand years. Locations serve as a centering point—a connecting element throughout a story that helps us establish where we are, who’s there, and what’s happening there. Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic is a perfect example of how a location relates to the character, story, and visual esthetic of the film. The three key locations were San Diego, Tijuana/Mexico, and Cincinnati/Washington, D.C. Each city took on a character of its own established through a particular color and tone, as well as Soderbergh’s stylistic camera work. A distinctive color palette was brought to bear in each city to immediately identify where we were in the story of three comparative lives in crisis.

The affluent La Jolla lifestyle of Catherine Zeta-Jones’s character was always bathed in lots of bright natural light. The entire San Diego environment was bright light accented with crisp primary colors. Nothing dark could hide or survive in all that bright light. Monochromatic cold blue tones were used in Cincinnati/Washington scenes to complement the downward spiral of personal and political crisis that smothered Michael Douglas’s character. Life was frozen in this tragic environment reminiscent of a morgue and its cold steel. Distance, death, and deception flourished in this cold, dark place. The streets of Tijuana and elsewhere in Mexico baked in a glaring, grainy, harsh sunlight that offered no relief. This harsh light allowed no escape and added to the oppressive conditions of the people who struggled to survive there. This was a brilliant use of location, characterizing each by its uniquely individual color scheme. This enhanced location look branded each characters’ story and created a strong, symbolic, immediately recognizable transition as the story moved from person to person and from place to place.

Soderbergh Talks About Traffic

“That device [of shooting the film with a different style for each geographical location] is meant to help people orient themselves. As soon as I cut to one of the new stories, the viewers know where they are before they even see a character. I’m asking so much of them—there are so many characters, so much information—I thought: at least if they know where they are, I’m helping them a little bit. Plus those three places felt very different to me. My impressions of Mexico were different from La Jolla, California, and different from Ohio in the winter” (ht­t­p­:/­/ww­w.­sa­lo­n.­co­m/­pe­op­le­/c­on­v­/­200­0/­12­/2­0/­s­od­er­be­rg­h/­).

Your locations deserve your attention. Honor your locations as important characters in your film and you will see amazing things happen on the screen.

THE BUBBLE EFFECT

So you’ve decided to take your film to the next level and leave the safe cocoon of your dorm room, house, office, or studio. For you, “off the lot” means leaving whatever safe environment you’ve shot in before and venturing into the public purview: the real world. For some, it can simply mean leaving the safety of your computer screen and actually making the movie. Whatever led you to this point, you are now ready to take the words off the page and translate them into people and equipment out in the world someplace. Whatever your budget, background, or experience, you will encounter the same challenges when going on location. You are going to bring disruption and unusual activity into someone else’s comfort zone. What you want to do on a sidewalk or in a park or parking lot may conflict with what other people expect to happen normally in those places. When you go out on location, you don’t make your movie in a vacuum. You’re not contained in a safe, protected bubble when you are out in the world. You make your movie in the middle of a whole lot of other people’s everyday lives and activities.

Here’s where the challenge begins. Filmmakers live in a different world. You are forced to create your own sphere of influence to accomplish your task and make your movie. I call it “the Bubble.” It is the untouchable environment you create to house and protect your filming process from any and all things outside. You create your own vacuum or your own void in which only movie making exists. The Bubble is a powerful control factor, allowing you and all the cast and crew to completely lose yourselves in the world you’re creating. It is necessary to a certain extent but dangerous in the extreme. The Bubble is at its best when on private property, onstage, or on a back lot, but it requires your sensitive awareness once you go out into the real world. The Bubble effect can hamper you when you go on location and your Bubble bumps up against the rest of the world that exists all around you. The most important awareness you can bring to on-location filming is that you must find a way to coexist with the rest of the world around you. And believe it: the rest of the world is definitely going to react to what you’re doing.

It doesn’t take much to intrude upon someone’s routine. Any small disruption in normal activities or expectations can really set people off. The mail delivery gets briefly delayed or a detour forces a resident to drive extra blocks to get to where they’re going. When people’s everyday routines are disrupted or changed in even the slightest way, they react. That reaction can often lead to negativity and confrontation. If you stay inside the Bubble, you will experience one challenging situation after another, pressing harder and harder up against your reality. There is a delicate balance to be maintained between what you need in order to shoot and what other people need to do in their normal, daily lives. Be respectful and take into consideration the impact you are going to make on what may seem to you to be small or insignificant elements in someone else’s life. The Bubble provides the sense of detachment and control you need to accomplish your work. But you must temper your isolation with awareness of your surroundings and sensitivity to other people in their normal activities.

The Bubble acts as an imaginary zone of protection around your location, cast, and crew. Though a vacuum is an empty space, it is actually a closed system; nothing passes in or out. In the production process, a lot goes on inside the Bubble. It is a fragile shield that keeps the rest of the world out—or so you hope. Different from the vacuum, the Bubble must allow for an exchange of elements from inside and outside. Outside reality can intrude upon your structured, internalized, movie making environment. But most often the Bubble effect can create a false mindset of invulnerability. In the mind of the movie maker, the Bubble becomes impenetrable! There is an unspoken pervasive sense of being untouchable and in authority in a world where the only reality is: “We’re making a movie!” Nothing else exists. This attitude has become a stigma in the industry, leading outsiders to automatically label movie makers as demanding, rude, and obnoxious. The cast and crew become immersed in a false security that they can make anything happen and no person and no thing will stop the process. Perhaps this is to be expected to some degree. Making a movie is a direct manifestation of something that is not real—a fantasy that plays out. But you are shooting your movie in the real world, which changes everything. There will always be something outside of your control.

I first learned about the Bubble while working as a location manager on several TV movies. Ed Milkovich was the down-to-earth, realistic producer on those movies who acknowledged the value of our long days of hard work. He brought the proper understanding and appreciation of the job we all did on and off the set. He kept the balance. He would often say, “This isn’t brain surgery,” while recognizing that we were doing real work that deserved our commitment and integrity. One of Ed’s profound observations was to comment on what he called the phenomenon of “cinematic immunity”—a direct result of the Bubble effect. I don’t know if he coined the term, but I will forever credit him with teaching me a new awareness of what happens on a shooting set. Ed’s concept meant that cast and crew people can easily become oblivious to the mere existence of the outside world when out on location. It’s comparable to a mob mentality in which the one, the individual, gets lost in the whole of the organism. When working under the influence of “cinematic immunity,” crew people step out into the street not checking for traffic. Or if a truck is approaching, they honestly don’t think they will get hit. The world stops for anyone making a movie. Being oblivious to real danger is only one of the risks. Crew people take ownership and that leads to taking advantage. Trash ends up on the ground, tree limbs get trimmed to clear the frame, equipment stacks up in a traffic lane on the street, and crew people block sidewalks, streets, and alleyways while working fully inside the Bubble. Garbage truck drivers are told to leave and come back another day, production trucks block drive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 You Don't Make Your Movie in a Bubble!
• Chapter 2 The Business of Show Biz
• Chapter 3 The Breakdown: Analyzing the Script
• Chapter 4 Before You Scout
• Chapter 5 Your Kodak Moments
• Chapter 6 I'm Not Lost: I'm Location Scouting
• Chapter 7 Before You Shoot
• Chapter 8 Shoot and Wrap
• Chapter 9 Film Commissions and Location Incentives
• Chapter 10 Student Filmmaker's "411"
• Index