And then?

It feels like 10 years ago, but back when I came up with the idea for A Year Without Rent, I was struggling with some major shifts in my personal life, one of them being that I had no idea where in the country I wanted to live. It's a big country and when you're kind of hard-wired to be somewhat nomadic and already kind of floating around, the thought of just picking a place and getting an apartment and a lease and everything is kind of terrifying.

It also doesn't make a lot of sense.

So the thinking was that a year on the road would solidify a lot of things, all the while giving me a chance to scout out the various parts of the country I'd never really visited outside of maybe a layover in the airport.

Surely by then I'd know where I wanted to live.

Well…

You learn a couple of things on the road: 1) Being on the road is kind of addictive. 2) It's also exhausting. Also, living out of your car is a pain in the ass.

Seriously, it sucks.

But what's amazing about it is all the travel, all the people you meet, and all the real cool places you get to go. Think about it. You spend a year going from place to place, never spending more than a week or two in a location, always seeing something different, always experiencing something different. Then pick a spot where you'll spend several months or even several years. Even the idea of it makes my inner Mowgli revolt.

Still, it'd be nice to have a place to put my shit.

A Year Without Rent ends around the 20th of February where it started, in Purchase, New York on a short film by Mattson Tomlin. After that, I'll need to catch up on the mountain of work that'll surely be left. There's SXSW in March that I'll probably go to. Then a couple of films around the country throughout the year that I might be working on. One's in Montana. I'll probably be directing PAID sometime this summer and there's a couple of other things that I can't really talk about yet.

So…yeah. I don't know.

I'll need to find a source of income. I'll need to find a place to spend the times when I'm not going to be on the road. A home base, if you will. And I've got it narrowed down to something like 10 cities.

So I don't know where I'm going to live or what I'm going to do to pay the rent there. I know that when AYWR ends, my first step is to get drunk and pass out. After that, your guess is as good as mine.





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.

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER (photos)

All the photos, in one place. Enjoy!




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 Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

Call time for my second day on DECORATION is 9:30am. I'm ready to go a little before then, call it 9:20. Call time comes and goes. Nothing happens. And by that I mean nothing. People aren't ready, and why should they be? We aren't moving.

10am comes and goes. People start to emerge. They make breakfast. Get coffee. The director has gone for a walk. It was like this yesterday too, but it being my first day, I chalked it up to an aberration. Now it's looking more like a trend.



When you join a production near the end, there's a period where you try and figure out the pace of things. Every production operates on its own speed (for better or worse) and when you join one mid-stream, there's an adjustment, kind of like merging onto the highway. The more times you do this, the easier it gets, and after a while you can sometimes tell before you even hit the on-ramp.

After a week or so, every production becomes what it'll eventually be, which is to say that things don't change all that much beyond a point. Sure, in the first couple of days, stuff gets addressed and things change, but eventually it all settles into a routine. Very little changes past that point. Crews know that. Hell, they're the first ones to figure it out and adjust accordingly. So if you're on a set and the call is 9:30 and no one in the crew is ready to go at 9:30, that probably means that call time is a myth. Grips aren't giving up a hour of sleep if you aren't going to be ready to go on time. They aren't stupid. A good way to see if something is an aberration or the norm is to see how the crew reacts. Or, you ask them. And then a pause is all you need.



So we finally leave at 11:08am (I know because I wrote it down) after a 9:30 call and head to the police station to shoot the other half of the scene we shot yesterday. This requires a car mount on a police car. Then, we wait while they drive around filming a scene. They come back and we re-mount the camera in a different spot on the car. Nothing crazy complicated, just a question of building the safest thing imaginable with what we've got on hand. The car mount is easy enough, because we've got one of those, but putting the camera behind the back seat is a little trickier. DP Stew Yost settles on a tower of apple boxes and sandbags, with the camera wedged in-between the top 2 sandbags and the director sitting next to it to ensure the whole thing doesn't tip over.





From there, we head over to the tiny town of Story, Arkansas where the house location is. In the story, our two main characters (Cheryl Nichols and Rick Dacey) return home from LA when their father dies back in Arkansas. This is his house, a tiny one bedroom structure on a hill. It's a building badly in need of repair, which makes it a perfect location.

We move some stuff around a shoot a couple scenes, nothing all that complicated. It starts raining and things need to be adjusted accordingly, but all in all, we get everything. We wrap around 6pm.



It's Stew's birthday and someone has bought him a pellet gun. The crew spends the evening setting up empty beer bottles. By morning there's a pile of broken glass on the ground.



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 Nicolas Citton's DECORATION

One of the questions I get the most in regards to A Year Without Rent is how it is I find these projects. I've covered it before (even if I am too tired to go look up the links right now), but it never hurts to repeat it, especially when serving as an introduction to a film.



Really, there's 3 popular ways. The first is the most obvious: I already know about the film. Usually this filmmaker is a friend of mine to some degree. This makes everything easier, as there isn't that awkward, "so what the hell are you doing?" stage. That's not to say it's a perfect system, but it's a simple one. The second is a film that submits information on the webpage. This is not as common as you think and sometimes leads to people submitting things that are, um, weird. Like, "they stumbled across the wrong webpage" weird. The third method is the old referral system. Basically, I work on a film with person A and they then call me up to work on project B. That's even easier than the first method, as they know exactly what to expect, as they've seen AYWR in action already.



If you're scoring at home (and I'm not sure why you would be), DECORATION is option 3. You might remember lead actress Cheryl Nichols from her supporting role in Paul Osborne's FAVOR. Cheryl gets my email from Paul, asks if I'd come to Arkansas. I juggle the dates around other stuff, and here I am in Arkansas. See how this works?



Cheryl's new film goes by the name of DECORATION. It is, to quote film's webpage, a film "formed out of necessity, in order to create the work that will outline our careers; in the spirit of experimentation, the pursuit of honesty and the search for a unique voice."

Practically speaking, what that means is that we're making a film in Story, Arkansas. Population: 89. You read that correctly. 89.



Well that's where they've been filming for the past 10 days or so. Today we're in Mt. Ida, a thriving metropolis of a couple of hundred people or so, to shoot a scene by the courthouse and, later, scenes in and around a grocery store.

We get to the courthouse and nearly all the parking spots nearby are empty. So we park a car, set up the camera, and shoot the front part of the scene where Cheryl gets stopped for drinking behind the wheel of the car. It goes pretty smoothly. But that's only the first half of the scene. The rest involves Cheryl's character being put in a squad car by Robert Baker. Only, the squad car the production is borrowing from the local police isn't anywhere to be found.



So, a handful of people jump in a car and go off to shoot something else. The rest of us hang out at the courthouse and watch the sun part the clouds and turn our previously overcast day into a sunny one.

That's not good. It's a bigger continuity issue than you think, bigger than just blue sky verses gray. Clouds provide a soft light. There's virtually no shadows and the light is pretty even, but sunlight is harsh and unforgiving. The shadows are easy to spot. You can shoot in both, of course, but where it gets tricky is when you try and pass them off as the same thing. It's hard to do well.

Plus, I'm not sure what the status is of the squad car.

An hour later, they come back and the decision is made to push the scene until later.





That leaves the scenes at the grocery store, and for those we need to wait for nightfall. First up is a scene in the parking lot where Key Grip Joshua Jones doubles as a supporting actor. The blocking of the scene is pretty simple, all revolving around the bed of a pickup truck, which in an empty parking lot means there's a lot of room to operate. This allows DP Stewart Yost to set up 3 different DSLR's, which obviously cuts down on the amount of takes we have to do.



It makes sense. Almost every shoot I've been on this year has had a DSLR just sitting around, mostly taking pictures of various things. So when you've got a situation where you can actually use it to, you know, get the movie made, why not do it?



Then, we're around the back to film a different scene. We walk by a dumpster that's got a weird blinking red light in a garbage bag. Twenty minutes later, when there's the need for something in the cab of the truck, suddenly we're tearing open a garbage bag for that very light. (Oh don't act like you wouldn't do it)



Finally that brings us inside. It's a couple of scenes, one on each side of of the store and a walk and talk along the back. The walk and talk is the interesting one. The way a lot of people do this is to put the camera on a dolly of some kind (or go handheld) and just stay in front of them. You don't even need to pay Aaron Sorkin any royalties.



Instead, what Nicolas has decided to do is film the scene as a series of shots from about 10 feet down the aisles as they move aisle by aisle, across the store, the camera locked down for each shot.



Meanwhile, there's a second camera more or less freelancing from where the Sorkin camera would be. My guess is they'll cut to that in-between each aisle shot.

At least, I hope that's what they do.





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.

What Do You Hate About Film Festivals?

I'm working on a future article and want to cast a wide net and get a bunch of input first.

What about the system drives you crazy?

What do you love about it?

What would you get rid of? What would you keep?

Just remember that we don't publish anonymous comments here. So use your real name.



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.

I Slept Here #64: Moody, TX

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.

Tear Down This Wall

When Zahra Zomorrodian first proposed the idea of flying me over to the UK to work on THE STAGG DO, part of the hope was that she'd be able to find other European productions for me to work on, kind of a tour through the old continent. None came forward. Well, not exactly.

There were, of course, the Germans.



One thing people always find surprising is that a sizable chunk of the "Film Courage Community" (as we've started calling it) is in Germany. There's Movie Angel, of course, and Spoxx. But it's even bigger than that. I think for the original A Year Without Rent Kickstarter campaign, Germany had the 3rd most backers, behind the U.S. and the U.K. (maybe Canada was 3rd, but whatever).

In fact, without Spoxx we never hit that goal.

So it's not surprising that when the Germans heard that AYWR would be crossing the Atlantic, they found a way to get something for me to do.



That's how I ended up on the doorstep of a person I've never met before in my life, either in person or online, with my suitcase and duffel bag, ready to stay at his apartment for a couple of days.

This is unusual, even for me.

I should back up.



Spoxx picked me up at the airport. We saw the Statue of Liberty (no, really), and the memorial spot for the Berlin Wall. And then we walked over to the apartment of the person I've never talked to.



Gerold Marks is a German film blogger who specializes in 3D movies and my host for my stay in Berlin. Five minutes later, Gerold, Spoxx, and I are walking around Berlin as Gerold gives us a tour of the city. And not a short, "oh, here are some places a couple of blocks away" tour, but a full-on tour. I want to say we walked miles around the city. We saw the museums (well, the outside of them), statues, and probably 4 different parts of the Berlin Wall. I learned how to tell if I was in East or West Berlin (you have to look at the traffic lights). I saw monuments the Soviets built to themselves and ones that survived their reign.





It was undeniably cool.

The idea for my visit was to have me give the "keynote" speech for a crowdfunding event organized by Wolfgang Gumpelmaier followed, the next day, by a matinee screening of my first feature BLANC DE BLANC (which you can watch via VOD at the previous link)

The working title for my speech: "No One Gives a Fuck About Your Project".

(I'm at around the 2:45 mark)

spoxxtv on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

The thing about the German market (and other European markets) is that since they don't have Kickstarter, everything else seems to lag behind. This makes some sense. Over in the States, Kickstarter really drives the conversation and innovation. Take them out of the equation and the market penetration of crowdfunding goes down significantly and, by extension, so does everything else. In a way, it's like stepping back in time 2 or 3 years. People like Spoxx and Wolfgang are entwined with happenings from across the pond and, as a result, kind of serve as prophets who tell hesitant Germans that everything will be ok. It's kind of like getting in a time machine and talking to Red Sox fans in 2003.

It'll be fun to watch these emerging markets catch up.

But all this is a precursor to the real reason I came to Berlin: for the beer. Ah the beer. Thing is, people are ordering for me in German, so all I know is that I'm getting German beer. And that it's good stuff.







It's 4am when I get back to where I'm staying, and later that morning, I have to be back across the city for the screening of BLANC DE BLANC.



For days I've been trying to get my computer to burn a PAL version of the film, but it keeps crapping out on me. Still, Spoxx had his computer hooked up to the projector yesterday, so it seems like we'd be able to use that. Except when we get there, we realize the audio won't work. Oh, and the theater could absolutely play a NTSC DVD, if I had one, which I do. It's just in my car, which is in Seattle.



And since it's Sunday, nothing is open. We can't burn a NTSC DVD because there isn't a blank DVD for miles around. So we start digging for solutions, finally settling on hooking the video up to the projector and then running the audio through some detachable computer speakers we found behind the cash register. Is it a perfect solution? No. Hell, it isn't even a good solution. But it's a solution. And it's better than people not seeing the movie at all.

The exception maybe being if one of them thinks you ended the movie wrong, like this guy:

Watch live streaming video from spoxxtv at livestream.com

Maybe we did. Maybe we didn't. See 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.

I Slept Here #63: Marfa, TX

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.

States

As you can see, we're running out of new states to hit, and the ones that we have left are kind of, well, out of the 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.

Ryan Demers' THE HONEY COOLER

Back when I lived in Pittsburgh, there was a yearly convention of furries. It was always big news, for all the reasons you can imagine, and because not a whole lot happens in Pittsburgh that isn't somehow related to a sporting event. The big convention center in Pittsburgh is downtown, across the river from where I used to live, so it wasn't uncommon to stumble across a furry on the way to Starbucks or on the way out of a bar on a Friday night.



Still, I can't say that really prepared me for the experience of working on a movie that's partly about furries. And it certainly didn't prepare me for making out with a tiger.



Don't judge me. It's partly your fault I'm here.

But before we get to that, let's talk about casting. THE HONEY COOLER is written around this, um, "character" in Denver. He does a bunch of stuff, but mostly he's one of those guys you meet at a bar and say to yourself, "man, I should totally put him in a movie." No doubt he's interesting.

He's also unreliable.



Director Ryan Demers and I have been sitting in Ryan's car for over an hour, waiting for this guy to come downstairs. He's awake. He's just doing whatever. Ryan's not all that surprised, as apparently this has been going on for the whole shoot, only today it's worse because it's the final day and what's he going to do? Fire the guy?

Obviously, it's unacceptable. The guy should be fired. But Ryan's right, he can't reshoot all the guy's scenes. He's fucked. This is why you check references. Because if you're repeating someone else's headache, then you fucked up in pre-production.

Eventually, he shows up. Hooray.



We get to the bar, over an hour late, and I put on my costume. Thing is, when you volunteer to wear an animal costume, that pretty much precludes you from doing much else. You can't really carry all that much, so once we're loaded in, I'm limited to shuffling around in a ridiculous outfit and taking pictures.







I'm playing a panda bear (like in LOST, if LOST took place in a dive bar in Denver) who plays pool with a tiger and then, in the next shot, is making out with said tiger on the pool table.

This is why I turned down the option to join SAG.

The eye holes in the panda head make it really hard to see what the hell is going on, which is great for keeping your focus on the pool table, but makes it really hard to see any cues. Still, I do my best to repeat my actions each take--a shot in the corner, pause, survey the table, line up a shot side pocket. Then, I make out with the tiger, which essentially just involves pushing our costume heads together and rubbing our hands on each other's backs. As far as making out on screen goes, it's either the most or least awkward way to do it.



From there we go downstairs into what, I assume, is the green room for when bands play. There's food variants of band names written on the walls and no one wants to sit on the furniture if they don't have to because God knows what's happened on them.



It's a quick scene, then we wrap the bar and head to the next location, where Ryan explains to me what the fuck just happened.





Then, to a public park, where we've got to film the second half of a scene they already shot. Only now there's a lot of fucking people where they need to shoot a bit of a stunt involving an elephant falling off a bike. We can re-block it, or we can start setting up and hope people get the hint. We do the latter and it actually works. People clear out. We get our stunt.



Really, we spend more time figuring out if we'll be able to get the shot then we actually do filming it. Things go as smoothly as you could imagine, considering that we've got the following: a public park, an elephant that needs to run his bike into some rocks and flip over the handlebar, a girl in a bikini he flies over, the actor who's eternally late chasing him, and the camera on one of those things you can ride behind a bike. Just…yeah. Controlled chaos.







And that's a wrap. I guess. I don't know. I'm so confused.




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.