Location, Location...

I have always found the most difficult part of short film is getting the locations. Kit hire, actors, crew and all the other things you have to find with a limited budget have always been tricky but I usually manage to get by showing the passion and desire I have for the project.

But finding a location that both fits the visual idea of what you want and is contained so you can control th

e sound and light, feed the crew in and get access to at the times you need I always find a headache, plus anyone who has had a film c

rew in the house before knows the pitfalls of the accidental damage that may occur and the sheer inconvenience of having 20-30 strangers wandering around in an environment you own.

Also, until you get a location you are a little stuck with pre-production. You can’t hire lights (as you don’t know what you’ll need), work out where kit will be stored overnight, how the days will be scheduled, how you will feed people, how all production materials will get there and back and which members of crew will struggle to get there.

For “Parental Control”, “The Man Who Stopped”, “The Din” and “Saturday” we filmed in relatives/friends houses, for “The Longest Pint” I used a friends pub which was shut on Sundays a

nd for “Awfully Deep” and “Transference” we paid a heavily discounted fee to use.

For “Clowning Around” we have eight locations we need to source. A school, a park with a pond, a house interior, two

house exteriors, a supermarket, a pub and a carpark and we have been trying to get a location manager to handle getting these, but had no such so far. In our last production meeting we worked out that rather than keep waiting, assistant producer Juliet and co-ordinator Dan would start looking, as well as the rest of the crew who would send any ideas to them.

We already provisionally have a school, thanks to my mother in law (who is Deputy Head at a primary school in Bexley, South Lon

don) but other than that have no real leads so it is of pressing importance to solve.

Katherine (our production manager) had a few places near to her work in Vauxhall which we looked at on Tuesday which would be the park, the pub and the car park all in close vicinity. All three could work, but weren’t perfect as they had the backdrop of a very inner city landscape and I want the film to take place in a ‘normal’ small suburban town, where everyone knows each others business and the characters are framed in the greenery rather than the greyish concrete.

The car park (image featuring Katherine and Greer as Bonzo and Mr. Fernelli) will be night time so you wouldn’t see much of the background, the pub was small and intimate so could work but the park had a concrete pathway running through it and we would have to fill the pond (that Bonzo jumps in) and has a wall he would have to climb over, which doesn’t fit his mood in that scene.

Dan then sent me a list of places he had sourced from Amazing Space and Location Works which were Bonzos flat, the pub and the supermarket. The locations for the pub and supermarket were absolutely perfect and exactly the type of place I envisioned, but the shots of Bonzos apartment felt too grand and open as I would ideally like to have a small living room with connecting hallway, stairs and kitchen to add some interest and depth to the shots (rather than flat walls). I fed back these thoughts to Dan and he will now look for further locations when he returns from holiday on August 23^rd.

I am going with Katherine to look at another pub in New Malden on Sunday and hopefully before the end of August we will have progress on all the locations so we can focus on the other aspects of production and the environment these characters exist in will start to become real.