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.

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.

Day 0 of Brea Grant's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

I've never really heard of Marfa, Texas until a couple of weeks ago, but apparently the place is mythical. Everywhere I've been--Wisconsin, Kansas, Arkansas, Dallas, Austin--I keep hearing the same thing: "Oh, you'll love Marfa."

I'm not really sure why.

Marfa is this tiny, tiny town in West Texas. The census bureau has the population at 1,900 people, which seems high. Real cowboy country. They shot THERE WILL BE BLOOD here, as well as NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and the one thing 1st AC Brian Nelligan (who I picked up in Austin) try and figure out as we drive into town is, where the hell did they put everyone? They shot two decently big movies in the same town at the same time and there aren't exactly a bunch of hotels all over the place. Our theory is that Daniel Day Lewis just camped out near set in a tent that he made himself.

The first thing we notice as we drive through town is that the roads don't match up with my GPS, so it takes a bit of driving around to find the house we're looking for. I call the producer, Stacey Storey, but she's not in town yet, after some sort of issue with the grip truck breaking down on the way from LA. Apparently they're still in Arizona. We start shooting tomorrow.

We find some other crew people, and we all head to a bar to find everyone else. Introductions all around. Brea's there, along with AD John-Michael Thomas and DP Michelle Lawler, trying to figure out how to shoot the first day with a grip truck that may or may not show up on time.

Your first thought is that you'll have to cancel the day, or at least part of it, and no one wants to do that. You put yourself in the hole on day 1 and run the risk of spending the entire shoot trying to catch up. On the other hand, if the truck shows up late, you've got some real chaos on your hands, and that's not the best way to start a shoot either.



Eventually, the decision is made to turn day 1 into a prep day, which feels like the right call. The truck shows up with Stacey and gaffer Phil Matarese already exhausted from driving all night. And the prep time is helpful. Things need to be unloaded and sorted. Plus, it gives the various crew members time to get to know each other a little bit before the actual work starts. An opportunity to ease into things, if you will.



After an hour, we've completely taken over the yard and part of the street, which attracts the attention of a neighborhood cat. He starts looking around for food and before anyone realizes it, he's ripped into a bag of bagels and eaten part of one. I didn't even know a cat would eat a bagel.

No one knows where he came from exactly, but he's apparently been inside the house 3 times already.

Before long, he even has a name: Lonestar Bagels Sebastian III.



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.