THEY GROW UP SO FAST: FINDING A HOME FOR OUR FILMS

by Benjamin Stark

So, here we are. Two great films completed, and nowhere to put them.

That’s probably an overstatement. Let me back up.

I’m part of Wonder Mill Films. We’ve made two “southern” films, utilizing the DIY ethos. Our first film is the sci-fi (-ish) adventure film A GENESIS FOUND, which we shot in 2008. The next year, we shot the noir thriller THE NOCTURNAL THIRD. Both are well-crafted genre pieces with moderately intelligent ambitions, and we’re very proud of them... but, almost like parents hoping to be “empty nesters”, we at Wonder Mill are ready for them to get into the world, able to be stumbled upon and enjoyed by casual movie watchers.

It’s a good time for us - and myself, personally - to look back at the last five or six years. My senior year in college was a flurry of filmmaking activity, as I wrote and directed seven or so short films in a small amount of time. As a group, we produced about twelve. Since then, we’ve managed to produce another few shorts, as well as two feature-length movies. We’ve achieved all of this through putting our nose to the grindstone and staying busy, but now we find ourselves at that scary point where, really, all of our striving doesn’t create an assured result.

I think every modern independent filmmaker realizes I’m talking about distribution. There are hundreds of us: We’ve dredged our hearts, found our stories, inspired our actors, sweat the small stuff, fought the hard fights, and yet we still find our films with marginal audiences, our work having a hard time departing the nest of our circles of influence.

Although every stage of filmmaking is challenging, it seems that distribution is the toughest nut to crack, because there is no formula. We’ve been very aware of the potential audiences for both of our films, but in the end, we’re only a few people, and our films dare to dabble in fairly populist territory. How can our films compete with mainstream entertainment? I might not be exaggerating when I say that for every new digital cinema camera sensor that hits the market to help filmmakers gain an “industry standard” aesthetic, the market for qualifiedly mainstream entertainment gets more crowded. How is my community college valedictorian going to compete with the rich Harvard kid with the 2.0 GPA, anyway?

I digress. There is hope. First of all, as Jean Pierre Geuens reminds us in his brilliant book Film Production Theory, “the joy of thinking, creating, and assembling images and sounds that mean something is your own reward.” No one owes me anything. I don’t have to make films, I get to make films. Not only is there amazing technology out there that helped us craft great-looking movies, but there are also services out there like Kickstarter and Distribber.

On May 25th, we launched our first ever high-stakes crowd-funding campaign. With the help of indie film journeyman and crowd-funding consultant Lucas McNelly, we're using Kickstarter to raise about $6,000 so we can submit our films to Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, and iTunes via Distribber. We also need some cash to screen the films at colleges in our area, hoping to share what we’ve learned with current film students, as well as learn what they’re learning right now. We’re currently between films, so it’s a great time to look back and revisit my experiences as a filmmaker thus far, while creating some sort of momentum going forward, as well as re-capturing the thrill of student filmmaking.

A social endeavor like a crowd-funding campaign is, to me, as adventurous and treacherous as a summer-long film shoot in a sweltering Alabama forest. If any of you readers have suggestions or tips for building an audience and generating buzz for our films, we’d greatly appreciate it. You can reach us on Twitter at @wondermillfilms or at wondermillfilms[at]yahoo.com!

I’m a natural director. I often feel anxious to move onto another project. But that would discount the hard work that our cast and crew have put into these films, and it would abandon the stories that we fought so hard to tell. If you’re a filmmaker, I’d encourage you to keep your head down and keep working at your story. You might eventually get to the point where someone else has to take it and run with it, but until then, it’s under your roof, and it’s your story. Give it a good home.

FC

I went on Filmcourage for a wrap-up of AYWR. Check 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 3 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

We need a different desolate section of highway for Day 3 of BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, one we haven't seen in the first two days, and so we load up the grip truck (minus the picture car) and drive southwest out of town until all you can see is the emptiness of the road for miles and miles in every direction.

It's about a mile and a half away. You could walk there rather easily.

Such is life in Marfa, Texas.



We're shooting a scene where Brea Grant and Vera Miao walk down the middle of a highway, and while we've got permits to shoot on this stretch of road, we don't exactly have the road blocked off from traffic, mostly because there isn't any. Oh sure, a car comes through every half hour or so, but you can see it well in advance, and it doesn't even qualify as being urgent enough to cut a take short. It's a simple walk-and-talk, think Aaron Sorkin in the middle of nowhere, which means that all we've really got to do is bounce some light around.





Enter the 12x frame with some unbleached muslin.

There's no point in putting it on a stand, as we've got to move it as they walk, and we don't want to put more in the road than we have to, so all we really have to do is walk with it and make sure the wind doesn't pick up and turn it into a sail.

It's a two person job. We have four people, which leaves plenty of time to do housekeeping tasks like figuring out how to best organize the grip truck and taking photos of various crew members looking like desperadoes. Because if you were there, you would want a photo of you looking like a desperado.





In-between takes, I jump in and take some publicity stills, as this is a picturesque spot and kind of mimics the poster concept they're working off of.

Then, by lunch we're done and it's back over to the rest area we filmed at yesterday for the second half of today's shoot. Phil and I swing by the house to pick up the picture car, and then we're off.



We have to finish up the scenes with the hipsters, which requires further use of our stunt coordinator, Robbie Corbett.





I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to talk about the specifics of the stunt, but let's just say it involves the car and Robbie wearing clothes that don't fit. But here's the thing, a stunt involving a car is difficult (and dangerous, obviously). You've got to time everything just right or it'll look like shit. And that's hard enough if the car is a normal, functioning car that does things like start and run without stalling. But this car, the WAYNE'S WORLD AMC Pacer, is no normal car. It starts when it feels like it, and stalls more often than not. You would never, ever want this as a stunt car, unless the stunt involved pushing it off a cliff or blowing it up with a rocket launcher.



But that's the stunt car we have. And we need the shot, so we do our best.

It goes about as well as you could hope, all things considered. It doesn't help that the wind is whipping around at ungodly speeds, making it necessary to do things like stand on a c-stand because the sandbags just aren't strong enough. But even with all that wind, the winged insects are out, and they're friendly. Really, really friendly. Weirdly friendly.







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.

Correctly Budgeting Your Crowdfunding Campaign

The other day, I posted the results of a survey I'm working on as an on-going project to get a better sense of how perks are distributed across Kickstarter campaigns. I won't bore you with the details, but basically it's a survey of almost every successful Film & Video Kickstarter campaign since August of last year (it took a loooong time to finish). Then, I spit out the numbers, put them online, and went back to drinking.

Easy, right?

Well, what I forgot to factor in is that not everyone shares my affinity for statistics. You see, I'm kind of a stat nerd. I grew up obsessing over baseball statistics and pretty much taught myself Excel in high school as a means of winning my fantasy baseball league. I was always good at math. I took AP Calculus in high school and even considered minoring in Math for a bit. I minored in Writing instead. And Pre-Law.

Anyway, after posting the data, I kind of assumed that everyone would know what to do with it, but of course not everyone does. So, here we go. This might get a little nerdy. But it's worth it.

The first thing you need to understand is the concept of Expected Value (ooohhh…Probability Theory). I came across EV (that's what we call it) when I used to play poker for a living, where it's a really big deal.

EV in gambling kind of works like this: Let's say I offer you a bet. We'll roll a standard 6-sided dice. When "4" comes up, I'll pay you $6. When any other number comes up, you pay me $1. Do you take the bet? (Yes.) The reason you do is because if we do this 6 times (or 600), chances are that the "4" will come up once and you will make $6. But the other 5 numbers will also probably come up once each, and that'll cost you a total of $5. Ergo, you will net $1, so your Expected Value of that 1 throw of the dice is $0.17. Every single time we make that bet, you can expect to make $0.17, even though you never actually will make exactly that amount on a single bet. But you can't worry about the results of that 1 throw, because you can't control that. You can only control the decision you make with that 1 bet.

This comes up a lot in poker. Poker players play tens of thousands of hands a month, which means that the exact same situations come up a lot, especially stuff like flush and straight draws. Over enough time, the "luck" all evens out and that total EV will converge with your actual winnings. So you train yourself to not be so worried about one individual river card. Of course, if you're on ESPN and you're trying to win the World Series of Poker, the EV calculation changes and maybe you give up a positive EV situation to wait for a better one, since there's the risk of elimination.

You see this more than you think. Nate Silver (who used to post in the same poker forum I used to post in) of FiveThirtyEight uses this a lot (along with a number of other things). After a while, the whole world becomes a series of EV calculations.

So let's see how we're going to apply this to crowdfunding and Perk Distribution. Here's the numbers after 717 campaigns:



After that many campaigns, the average backer amount comes to $95.50, so if you're hoping to raise $15,000, you can expect to have 157.1 backers. Will you have that many? Probably not. You might have more. You might have less. But at the end of the day, this is the best estimate you've got. The rest is kind of easy. 7.15% of 157.1 is 11.2 and so on.

Then, you want to figure out what your perks are going to cost to fulfill. And here I'm just making up some numbers.



Remember, for total EV, your $25 backers are also your $50 backers and your $500 backers and so on. $$ Cost is the cost of fulfilling the perk. $$ EV is just the $$ Cost times the Total EV. Here you should spend roughly $117.64 fulfilling your $5 perk. Again, it might be more, it might be less. But on average it should come in around here.

So you want to raise $15K? Great. First of all, make sure you can actually get the film done for $15K. Then…

Amazon and Kickstarter take, on average, 8%. 8% of $15,000 is $1,200. Now we re-run the numbers for our new goal of $16,200. That takes our perk cost to $492.17. (I'm not going to re-post the image. You're smart enough to figure that out.) Let's call it an even $500. Now you're looking at $16,700. To be safe, let's make our new goal $17,000. That's your actual goal.

Of course, since we're dealing with percentages, everything else moves. Our fees back to Kickstarter and Amazon are now $1360.00 and our perks now cost $516.47, which leaves us $15,123.53 to make the movie. And if you've budgeted the film correctly, that's what you actually need. Had you gone with your original $15K, you would have actually gotten $13,344. I'm guessing your budget is tight enough already without having to cut over $1,600.



Lucas McNelly is a cynical filmmaker who recently spent a year sleeping on couches around the world and has somehow fallen into teaching people how to run crowdfunding campaigns. You can hire him, if you want to. Also, you should follow him on Twitter.

post

One question I get a lot is what I'm going to do post-AYWR. Well, besides catching up on everything, I've kind of fallen into consulting as a way to make some actual $$, so that I can pay rent.

Read all about it here


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.

Trailer for FAT KID RULES THE WORLD

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.

Too Soon?

This is not nearly enough time before hitting the road again. Fuck. #AYWR

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

It's 11:36 pm. Right now I'm supposed to be on a Greyhound bus en route to New York City for DIY Days, a free conference for creatives that's one of the things I look forward to all year.

Literally at the last minute, I grabbed my bag and walked off the bus, eating a non-refundable ticket.

I just couldn't do it.

@marty_lang I'm at the greyhound station and I still don't know if I'm going.

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

Sure, a 7.5 hour bus trip across Pennsylvania isn't exactly a good time, but it's nothing I haven't done a dozen times before. But as I sat on the bus, it more and more felt like a terrible idea. I guess you could call it a panic attack. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't.

I'm *thisclose* to getting off this bus.

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

Maybe it just was too soon to do any traveling.

I'd like to think that if the bus wasn't full, or if Greyhound had provided the outlets they promised, or if the bus hadn't been scheduled to drop me off in Manhattan at 6am, giving me almost 4 hours to kill, then I probably would have been ok, but maybe not.

Maybe it's just a terrible idea to try and do something like that so soon.

@gregorybayne yeah but I'm going to have to travel overnight to do it. Not sure I have it in me right now.

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 2, 2012

All day I kind of knew it was a bad idea, and if my ticket was refundable, I probably wouldn't have even gotten to the bus station. I even tried to get it refunded at the counter before I got on the bus, but the Greyhound agent didn't seem to care. Eventually, I came to the realization that not only had I stopped caring about the ticket refund, but that'd I'd gladly pay money to not have to go. That's when I knew I had to walk off.

So I got the driver to open the door and got off the bus. He warned me that they were about to leave and I told him I didn't care. It was the most sure I'd been of anything all day.

It was absolutely the right move. And while it'll suck to miss DIY Days, it's worth it.

The second I walked off the bus it was like a weight was lifted. Sorry I can't be at @diydays, but hopefully people understand why.

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) March 3, 2012

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 #79: Santa Monica, CA

The final couch.





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 #78: Echo Park, CA

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 #77: Pasadena, CA

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 #76: Salt Lake City, UT

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 #75: Park City, UT

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 #74: Purchase, NY

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.

Perk Distribution

As of right now, this is over 500 successful film & video Kickstarter campaigns. It should update as more are added. Perks are grouped, when needed, into the correct bin (i.e. $25 perks include anything in the $20-$35 range).






Early thoughts:

+ Documentaries don't draw better than Narrative films. On the contrary, they do worse.

+ Is it easier to attract backers if your film is in the can? Not really.

+ The most popular perk level is clearly $25, right? Wrong. The most popular perk level is the DVD. When the DVD is, say, at $50, the spike in the graph is at $50, almost without fail.

+ The $750 perk is dead. So dead.

+ Campaigns that don't offer a single digit perk actually raise slightly less money than those that do, but they average 24 fewer backers. So by starting at $10, you're pretty much telling 24 people you don't want them around.

+ If you're thinking, "We need $20k, but we want to make sure we don't come up empty, so we'll ask for $10k and try to go way over...", it isn't going to work. You'll almost always end up below $12k.

At some point, I'm going to log more of these, but this should at least give you a better starting point for your next campaign.

If you want, I can break this down for you further. Email me (lmcnelly [at] gmail [dot] com) for more info.




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 #73: Purchase, NY

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.

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 Final Day

This is the blog post where I'm supposed to get all teary-eyed and profound. Or, where I wow you with "One More Thing...". But I don't have any of that right now. There's no big, epic, raging party at the finish line, no balloons falling from the ceiling, no confetti, nothing grand at all. At least, not that I know of.

And that's totally fine.

I'm not even on a set today. I'm going to go down to Santa Monica and hang out with Dustin Pearlman and his couch will be the final AYWR couch. Simple as that.

But I think what gets lost a lot in talking about AYWR is how important the community has been in quite literally keeping this thing afloat. Ultimately, this is your project and a document of how you collectively operate. I'm just the guy going from place to place to see it first-hand.

So on this, the final day, I think it'd be better to hear from you. AYWR kind of lives on Twitter, so I'd love if you could tweet your reaction to the end of AYWR--good, bad, whatever. I'll collect as many as I can and add them to the bottom of this post.

Without you, AYWR doesn't work. Without you, it's nothing.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It's been a hell of a year.

Tweet #AYWRfeb18

@lmcnelly's year has been an amazing achievement and a wonderful exhibition of independent filmmaking spirit at its best. #AYWRfeb18

— TheClapperBored (@TheClapperBored) February 18, 2012

I think AYWR has created connective tissue between all us #indiefilm makers around the world. We have a common thread now. #AYWRfeb18

— Marty Lang (@marty_lang) February 18, 2012

I also think AYWR has showed that it's not as hard as people think to help others make their films - and for them to help you. #AYWRfeb18

— Marty Lang (@marty_lang) February 18, 2012

But mostly, AYWR has conditioned me to accept random texts/phone calls from Lucas - and to keep my spare bedroom open. :) #AYWRfeb18

— Marty Lang (@marty_lang) February 18, 2012

AYWR is indeed a strange beast. Happy to have been part of it, happier I'm not @lmcnelly - he *must* be wrecked! Well done mate! #AYWRfeb18

— zahra (@fnafilms) February 18, 2012

There was something beautifully polarizing about #AYWRfeb18 seeing what floated what sank and why was better than film skool Thnx @lmcnelly

— Stefan Wrenshall (@IndieJoneser) February 18, 2012

I just clicked #AYWRfeb18 to see what'd happen. Now I'm embarrassed. Um YAY @lmcnelly - well done, good job. Santa Monica is my fave place.

— zahra (@fnafilms) February 18, 2012

@lmcnelly Thank you for connecting filmmakers throughout the world and sharing your experiences #AYWRfeb18

— Wolfgang Gumpelmaier (@gumpelmaier) February 18, 2012

If I am ever forced to trade or sell my futon for food, I will use the fact that "Lucas McNelly slept here" to try to get more $. #AYWRFeb18

— CaptainAwkwardDotCom (@CAwkward) February 18, 2012

I can't wait to see Lucas' IMDB page and all the credits therein! #AYWRfeb18

— Paul Osborne (@PaulMakesMovies) February 18, 2012

Well done! What a great place to end it. Santa Monica, where I met @fnafilms No regrets. #AYWRfeb18

— James DeMarco (@jazadal) February 18, 2012

Congrats to Lucas McNelly for wrapping #AYWRfeb18. Happy that FM was part of it. Was cool to watch the way it bobbed and weaved.

— Scott Macaulay (@FilmmakerMag) February 18, 2012

Sorta don't believe Lucas McNelly is already done with #AYWRfeb18. Where did my own year go?

— David Lowery (@davidlowery) February 18, 2012

I cannot believe @lmcnelly completed #AYWRfeb18today. I have at least two more films for him to work on for free.

— Wonder Russell (@bellawonder) February 18, 2012

We've had an incredibly honest look at the realities behind independent film, which will reveal more as information is collated. #AYWRfeb18

— Leilani Holmes (@momentsoffilm) February 18, 2012

Learned alot watching from the sidelines & frontlines @FlywayFilmFest & @filmcourage. Your journey's just begun. #whataride #AYWRfeb18

— Elizabeth Karr (@elizabethkarr) February 18, 2012

. @lmcnelly's social media film experiment was the best glimpse into the changing landscape of DIY film we've had. #AYWRfeb18

— Wonder Russell (@bellawonder) February 18, 2012

I am now two degrees away from an international community of filmmakers simply because I bought @lmcnelly a burger. #AYWRfeb18

— Curt Hendley (@chendle) February 18, 2012

also, I have a T-shirt with a Sasquatch on it that I wear at least once a week no matter what the weather's like. #AYWRfeb18

— Curt Hendley (@chendle) February 18, 2012

Give myself and @lmcnelly about two years, and perhaps we'll both have correlating sequels. #AYWRfeb18

— mattson tomlin (@mattsontomlin) February 19, 2012

@lmcnelly killed it, connecting filmmakers far and wide.What a trip it was to follow it online, then have him show up at my door #AYWRfeb18

— Michael Babiarz (@mikebabz) February 19, 2012

Congrats to @lmcnelly for surviving a year of being a professional indie film hobo! May your bindle always be well tied. #AYWRfeb18

— Noah J Nelson (@areyouthatguy) February 19, 2012

@lmcnelly met and got to work with @breagrant.Do I really have to say anything else? :-) #AYWRfeb18Seriously tho, what an achievement!

— Tzuriel Kastel (@audiowizard25) February 19, 2012

With @lmcnelly travelling, the global world of #indie #filmmaking has become as flat as never before #AYWRfeb18

— spoxx (@spoxx) February 19, 2012

Doing #AYWR and not just talking about it encapsulates the spirit of true indie film.Excited to see what @lmcnelly does next #AYWRfeb18

— Richard C Jones (@richardo) February 19, 2012

Cant believe #AYWRfeb18 is over... Congrats @lmcnelly for surviving, hope you can adapt back to normal life now lol

— Tina Frank (@Art_Dept_Tina) February 19, 2012

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.

A Very Short Crowdfunding Survey

Let's get some numbers. The results are updating below as the data does. The more surveys we get, the more accurate the numbers, so add yours.



Updated (with a chart!)











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 Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

It takes about 30 seconds out on the plains of West Texas at sunrise to understand why Willie Nelson wrote so many songs about them. To call the colors "stunning" would be an understatement. It reminds me a little of when I drove through Montana earlier in the year, only it's more vibrant somehow. Maybe it's the scope you get from the big windshield of the grip truck. Or maybe it's something different about the humidity in the Texas air, but it's hard to fathom the sunrise until you see it first-hand. As we drive to set, it's just twenty minutes of Phil Matarrese and I with our jaws on the dashboard.



Today we're shooting at a different picnic area, one that's up against a hill overlooking miles and miles of nothing.



There aren't very many characters in BEST FRIENDS FOREVER other than our two leads, but today we're filming a scene where they encounter three hipster (played by Kit Williamson, Alex Fernie, and Alex Berg). Their characters are kind of assholes, to put it lightly.



We set the 12x12 back up with the unbleached muslin and then Phil puts Billy MacCartney and I on a project involving some more muslin. We're going to be bouncing light around a lot with some 4x4 foam boards, but Phil isn't happy with the light he's getting from them. So he has Billy and I create a dirty muslin for him. Basically, we cover it in reddish dirt. This sounds really easy--dump some dirt on a cloth and you're done. But, the ground is completely dry. It'll make the muslin dirty, but not dirty enough to make a difference. You really have to grind it in. So what you end up with is Billy and I standing on a 4x4 cut of muslin, scraping our sneakers on it over and over again like we're trying not to track mud through the house, making sure the dirt is really in there. Then, we gaff tape the muslin to one side of the foam board and just like that we've got another option for bouncing a dirtier light.



The 12x12 has to go inside a rock formation where the main action of this scene is taking place. It fits, more or less, but it's really windy out and there's a worry that if the wind whips in through the rocks just right, it'll turn into a sail and potentially hurt someone. There's no room to drive in a stake, so Phil and Ellie Ann Fenton come up with the idea to tie it to a picnic table on the other side of a boulder, effectively using the boulder and the table (which has been cemented into the ground) to keep everything safe.



Then, it's time to do a stunt.

Robbie Corbett, our stunt man, is something of a parkour expert, and in-between showing Vera Miao and one of the Alex'es the steps of their stunt, he'll randomly hop up a rock wall, just because. The run it over and over again--quarter speed, half speed, a little faster each time--while they figure out the best place to put the landing pad mattress among a pile of rocks.



With something like this, normally you'd shoot it over and over again until you got it perfectly. You'd shoot the rehearsals, everything really. Maybe even the half-speed stuff to see how it reads on camera. But BEST FRIENDS FOREVER has to be a little stingy because we're shooting it on real, actual film. Super 16mm, to be exact.





I've never actually worked on anything other than digital before. It's pretty cool.

And this is not a big budget film, by any stretch of the imagination. So conserving film stock is of the utmost importance, even more so when you consider that we're at least 3 hours from any airport in West Texas. If we need more film, it's not going to be easy to acquire.

So we rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. Brea Grant's not in this scene, so she can take more of a normal director approach, and the camera team has a handicap they've rigged up to record from the Super 16 camera as a video assist for Brea to watch playback on. They tweak the blocking until everyone's happy and then it's time to burn one. It goes smoothly, so the process is repeated for all the coverage.





Meanwhile, Billy and Ellie Ann are building some dolly track for a shot later in the sequence, staying ahead whenever possible. For some reason, our dolly doesn't have a normal push bar, so Billy has decided to construct one out of a bunch of gobo heads and arms. It's kind of like the Rat King of gobos.



Speaking of disgusting creatures, this picnic area has the most aggressive flies any of us have ever seen. At lunch they're everywhere, and they don't give a fuck what you do. Swat at them and they don't even move. You can kill dozens of them if you want. Hell, Billy even manages to get one to stay on his finger and shoulder, like a pet bird. It's weird and a little bit creepy.



And then comes the picture car.

The picture car didn't start earlier today. That took awhile to fix while everyone was setting up. And now it won't start when we need to shoot with it. Thing is, we need it to run on camera. We can't just have this car conveniently sitting in the right spot every time it's in the film. It need to move. We need it to be able to drive in and out of shots. Mike Myers got it to run, but it's proving to be a little more finicky for us.



Eventually Shannon gets it to work and we're able to film the scene. A bunch of books get dumped on the pavement. The car works (sort of), and we're done.

We drive back as the sun goes down. It's beautiful, although it doesn't feel as fantastic as the sunrise. Maybe we're just tired.





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 #72: Waldoboro, ME

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 Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

Most films I work on don't have a picture car, in the usual definition. Sure, there's cars in the film, but it's quite often the director's car, or at least the car of someone working on the production. But a real, actual picture car? Rented from a company that rents such things? Almost never.

Actually, scratch that. Never. It's never happened. I think.



Here we've got one, but not just any car, but the car from WAYNE'S WORLD. The actual car. If you want to see a bunch of jaded crew members getting instantly giddy, tell them they're leaning up against a iconic vehicle that was in a film they grew up watching. It's the filmmaker version of being in Oprah's audience.

Thing is, the car won't start. At all.

Which is how you end up in the freezing cold of dawn's first light in Marfa, Texas with four women attempting to fix a 1976 AMC Pacer while four men watch, completely helpless. Best Boy Grip Billy MacCartney offers to call his Dad, but no one's sure how helpful that'll be.

It's quite the sight--four men (five if you count Lonestar purring at our feet) watching four women try and fix a car. Shannon Deane sets her sound gear down to hold open something under the hood while Key Grip Ellie Ann Fenton revs the engine.

Or, to quote Gaffer Phil Matarrese, "it's kind of hot".



Eventually they get it started and we load the car back on the trailer so that the grip truck can tow it to the location.

Marfa is a small town. And while it can be tricky to film in a small town way out of the plains of West Texas, you can easily drive 20 minutes (or less) in any direction and be in the absolute middle of nowhere with nothing in view for miles. It's beyond desolate, which is perfect for BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, an apocalyptic road movie. The less we can see, the better.



We start off my shooting at a sparse picnic area at the intersection of three highways. We pull in the grip truck and a bunch of cars, but there's nothing to hide them behind for shooting, so Phil talks to DP Michelle Lawler and Brea about which direction everything will be looking to start the day. It's one of those locations where at various points we're going to want to see in every direction, but moving cars and gear is a major hassle, so if we can shoot everything that goes in one direction first, we can re-load the truck and move everything over to the other side of the picnic area.



It's a small thing, but a reassuring one nonetheless. It shows that people are thinking more than an hour ahead.

For BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, I'm the Best Boy Electric. We've got a G&E team of four people: Myself, Phil, Billy, and Ellie Ann. We start unloading the truck. There's a lot of sun so Phil wants to break out the 12x12 bounce as our primary lighting trick. It's versatile, accomplishes a lot, and doesn't require any electricity, which is important, because we don't have any.



We get to work setting it up and I get a crash course in tying knots that I didn't get in the 2 days I was in Boy Scouts. I know what you're thinking: how do I still not know how to tie the correct knots? I don't know. I'm bad at knots. My father has shown me at least 50 times how to change the oil in my car and I couldn't tell you any of the steps beyond figuring out how many miles I've driven since my last oil change. My brain just doesn't work like that, I guess. But I can tell you small details from this Red Sox game I went to in 1996. By the way, if you get the right seats at a game, you can really see a knuckleball dance.



It's pretty windy, so we drive a stake into the ground and tie the bounce to that. Or, we tie it to whatever is nearby that isn't moving, whatever is the combination of easiest and safest. Mostly we just move that around, as needed. There's not a ton we can do with sun in wide-open spaces other than bounce light and flag as needed.

After a bit, Stacey Storey shows up with a RV she acquired somehow to serve as our mobile green room (and bathroom facilities). The story behind it is suspicious, in a Jerry Springer sort of way, and if I'd written down more details, I'd recount it here.



As the day moves along, we have to move the grip truck and the RV to the other side of the picnic area. Most of the things we've got out are on wheels and the rest get temporarily ratcheted down so nothing breaks.

There's a bit of a stunt involving falling on a mattress (the mattress I slept on last night), and the normal battle against the fading light. We wrap and pack up the truck as the sun sets, cracking open some cans of Lonestar in celebration. And when we get back to the house, Lonestar the cat is there to greet us.




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.