Last week, Megha and I spent four very long and intense days scouting locations in Marin, Oakland and then Humboldt County. Raspberry Magic takes place in Oregon, but on our low budget, it would be tough to actually shoot it in Oregon. So, we've been pondering corners of the Bay area which would work well for the story, and have decided on several places that we really like. Having spent years (and years) writing this screenplay and developing the sense of place in it, it's so interesting to take something that's in your head, like a magical forest, then make it real. For example, we checked out several Redwood forests, and then when we went up to Humboldt, there was also an amazing Sequoia forest. The challenge in all of this is finding locations that I pictured, but also keeping it practical so the shoot is as tight as possible. In that vein, I truly like the magic of the Humboldt County forest/trees, but then if we're just staging a small corridor to feel magical, do we really need to move the entire cast/crew up to Humboldt? We're lucky on this film because there really aren't many locations, so if we can find them all in one small area (which I believe we did), then we'll save lots of money, and can really concentrate/focus on getting excellent performances, which is most important to me, along with the overall visual look/feel. We feel pretty lucky because there is an amazing spirit around indie film in the Bay area that will really and truly help us as we hire cast and crew, and just generally make the film happen!
Last week, Megha and I spent four very long and intense days scouting locations in Marin, Oakland and then Humboldt County. Raspberry Magic takes place in Oregon, but on our low budget, it would be tough to actually shoot it in Oregon. So, we've been pondering corners of the Bay area which would work well for the story, and have decided on several places that we really like. Having spent years (and years) writing this screenplay and developing the sense of place in it, it's so interesting to take something that's in your head, like a magical forest, then make it real. For example, we checked out several Redwood forests, and then when we went up to Humboldt, there was also an amazing Sequoia forest. The challenge in all of this is finding locations that I pictured, but also keeping it practical so the shoot is as tight as possible. In that vein, I truly like the magic of the Humboldt County forest/trees, but then if we're just staging a small corridor to feel magical, do we really need to move the entire cast/crew up to Humboldt? We're lucky on this film because there really aren't many locations, so if we can find them all in one small area (which I believe we did), then we'll save lots of money, and can really concentrate/focus on getting excellent performances, which is most important to me, along with the overall visual look/feel. We feel pretty lucky because there is an amazing spirit around indie film in the Bay area that will really and truly help us as we hire cast and crew, and just generally make the film happen!
1 comment:
I'm sure you guys already know this or have explored it but in case you haven't, I do believe that Oregon offers nice incentives to film there and those incentives might help your bottom line. In case you weren't familiar, http://oregonfilm.org/incentives/ . Interestingly, I just read about this today in another blog.
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