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Scouting Locations There’s no great mystery to scouting good locations for a film. There’s no template that tells you exactly how to do it, either. Many of the requirements for a location will be in the script. Finding them is down to marshalling your resources. If you know the area where you are looking, you are well on your way, If you don’t, a good starting point is people who do know it well. Start with the local film commission. It is their job to
attract films to their area and not just big budget films. You may be shooting
on a shoestring today, but what about next time? Film commissions are keen to
generate future film spend, so they will always be willing to help you stretch
today’s pennies so you will be keen to come back. Their collective body is the
Association of Film Commissioners International, found at http://www.afci.org/
Their website is a mine of location information and their on-line magazine
“Locations” is packed with features on places where film has been shot all
over the world. When we were locating King’s Ransom in Newcastle Upon Tyne,
Northern Film Commission were delighted to assist. From notifying them of what
we had in mind to the day we wrapped at the last location, they did everything
we asked of them and more. They emailed photographs of possible locations from
their photo archive before our first recce and then spent recce days with us
getting firmer and firmer ideas of what we were looking for. You will find them
at www.nsc.org.uk Their suggestions were always pertinent and they would follow
up with calls to local estate agents to establish baseline property rental costs
for us before we negotiated with location owners. Until we got a local
production office established NFC acted as local referral point for everyone
contacting us. Nearer the shoot they also helped us find local crew. Other people who can come up with useful location suggestions
include tourist offices, jobbing builders, delivery people and local council
officials. When we needed to find a tidal watersplash scene for a pursuit
sequence involving 4X4s, we asked the local Landrover club. They not only knew
the places where you could drive Landrovers safely through the tide, but they
knew which rivers you could drive up with a Landrover as well! Useful people to
know. Their members also have 4X4s for rent as picture and action vehicles. Draw up a standard location form on which all essential
information can be recorded. It is a good idea to attach a sketch plan showing
the location layout, access points, fire hydrants, water main, parking areas and
so on. Also space for all the phone numbers of contacts people for that
location. You will also need to make a risk assessment for the location, of
which more later. Having homed in on some likely prospects you have to consider
aesthetics. The location has to be able to meet the needs of the scene.
Will it shoot just as it is, or will it have to be dressed for the part? In
King’s Ransom, Mr Bright’s antique shop was in a former cinema and the
entrance we needed to use looked like the emergency exit from a cinema rather
than the entrance to an antique shop. The broad pavement outside dressed nicely
with large antique pieces like a huge wooden mangle. A fresh painted trading
title and a couple of pavement advertising boards turned the place into
Bright’s antique warehouse and the location exterior looked fine. Be practical in your approach. If the exterior looks just
right, but the interior isn’t, find an alternative interior for a location
cheat. The World’s End Inn seen on the cliff in Devil’s Gate is not an inn
at all, but a lighthouse keepers house, with a working tower above it sending
out its guardian beams to warn passing ships away from the rocks. Inside it
appears as a comfortable inn, with a busy bar full of customers. In fact it was
a busy inn, but not at the lighthouse. It was 20 miles away, a busy inn in real
life, not just on celluloid. You can visit the Palm Shack, which was our bar
location at www.westings.shetland.co.uk
and you can drop in on www.eshanesslight.shetland.co.uk
which doubled as it's exterior. Then there are practical considerations. If the location lies close to an airport flight path you can expect a little noise to crop up. East to spot that if you are filming near Heathrow, but rural areas can be just as bad. Devils Gate had a choice location close to an oil airport that had jets lifting off with earth-shattering roars and noisy helicopters chattering about the place in an otherwise deserted rural area. The answer was to telephone the control tower, who were able to tell us the times top avoid for our “quiet moment” shots. It was also useful when we needed a shot of a departing plane overflying one of our locations. Much cheaper than chartering a plane for the appropriate shot!
Locations
close to airports mean planes... Another practical consideration to do with neighbourhood is
the possibility of disruptive roadworks. One of our filmshoots had four days of
disruption when an emergency drainage ditch was being dug across a road. The
works were two miles from the film location, but they were across the only
access road leading to it and that road was single track. Anyone travelling to
or from the location was certain to be held up. The repair men were very
obliging, covering the ditch with a steel sheet as soon as any film traffic
approached and reversing their excavator clear to let our vehicles through. The
alternative, if we had stopped their work, was the very real threat of the whole
area being flooded out by very heavy rainfall and the road becoming totally
impassable, which would have cost us thousands out of our budget for lost
shooting days.. On the question of access, with a winter shoot in cold climate, you need to consider what might happen in snow. The same road that flooded with heavy rain was also vulnerable to snow. This could stop the film crew arriving at location in early morning unless the road was ploughed.
Snow
can enhance a location... This is where an obliging local council comes in. Every council has to have a snow clearing plan which lays out priorities. They would plough out the road at 6.00am if there was a doctor or nurse living along it, or if it was a bus route. Failing that they would plough it out at 7.00am if there it was a school transport route. The schoolbus’s last pickup was at a house just half a mile away from the location. As a help to the production it was indicated that the snowplough driver should extend his schoolbus clearance by going a further half mile to our location.
Or
make it impossible to get to before the plough can get through. A further consideration about your possible location is where
to put all the vehicles associated with the shoot. Two generator electric trucks
are large, like removal pantechnicons, and heavy, so don’t like soft ground.
They also make noise when providing electricity, so can’t be too close and
then they must be able to reach the location with a cable run. Next, where are all crew vehicles going to go? The have to be
out of shot and not obstructing the access to location. If space right next to
the location is available, everyone will insist they must use it, for easy
access at all times to their vehicles. It doesn’t matter what their role is,
they will all insist they need access to cars at all times. So how many vehicles
are there likely to be and just where can they all go? Picture vehicles can be parked up some distance away until
needed, but them must be able to gain access to the location when required. In
towns they may need to be on meters and meters will need to be fed, but that
means someone must do it or you risk having picture vehicles impounded, which
will do wonders for continuity! The niceties of managing the vehicles will be
part of the unit manager’s remit, but a good location scout needs to be aware
of these problems and how best to avoid them. For example, we parked up unit
cars in a nearby quarry and ran a minibus shuttle service to and from location
when filming permitted. You also need to consider location services. You need
electricity for lighting, even if just for working lights. Get meters read
before and after occupation. Note readings on your location form. Water may also
be required, maybe in a hurry from a fire hydrant if there should be an
accidental fire on the set. Where is that hydrant? In UK it will be indicated by
a black letter “H” on a yellow rectangular plate. A land-line telephone is a
bonus and if disconnected it can be
restored again. Failing that and as a matter of course anyway, what is local
mobile phone reception like, across all networks? Unless you are trailing portable toilets, you will need some
toilet facilities available for cast at least. Film crew are adaptable and can
cope with most situations, but cast in costume, particularly period costume,
need somewhere decent for their private moments. A facility fee to a local
household for comfort breaks usually works well and is much cheaper than a
portaloo. Cast will always need some convenient resting place where they can
prepare themselves for their next scene and all crew will need somewhere as a
retreat from rain or baking sun for a few minutes. Where at this location could you erect the hot table? That is
the place where there’s an urn always on the boil, coffee, chocolate, teabags,
potnoodle, biscuits,fruit, mineral water
and fruit juice available for
tea-breaks or whenever someone needs a warming or cooling drink or snack. These things are essential after a few hours of intensive
filming, but where would you plan to put them?
And what about mealtimes. Where are maybe forty film crew going to eat
their meal when dinner break is called. Where will the film catering vans park?
Once you have found your location, you need to cost it.
Property rentals always reflect local market conditions, so if you are looking
for dirt cheap you might be wasting your time looking on Nob Hill, try Bottom
Row instead. That said, it is possible to find a good cheap location in an
expensive area, maybe because of the owner’s interest in the what you are
doing, or because it is sale property “stuck” on the market where the owner
will accept a short-term let as a means of getting some short-term income from
his empty property while he waits for the market to pick up. People can react in strange ways when they hear a film shoot
wants to make use of their property. For most people film = Hollywood = a lot of
money. You just have to blame the studio publicists who used to hype budgets as
keenly as they hyped starlets into movie stars. It is a good idea to lay your
cards on the table if you are a low budget operation before people get too
carried away with the idea of Hollywood coming to town – that just results in
the cash registers ringing far too early. Give them some parameters within which
you would be prepared to make an offer, depending on …. their cooperation, the
art department, the director’s reaction, the frequency of the local bus
service, whatever. That way no-one
gets mislead and no-one goes into the stratosphere! We lost a good location once which everyone thought was ideal
and could never be bettered. It appeared the owner planned to raze the location after we
were gone and build a new house on it – paid for by our low budget film! We
tried to get the price down to a more realistic level, but this particular owner
had overheard talk that the location was felt to be perfect and would not back
down by a penny. We abandoned it as the location and within a week we had
found one that was even more perfect than the last. It is better to cut your
losses and move on than to get into a strung out wrangling dialogue on prices.
If you have a problem getting in, you can be sure you’ll have a far bigger one
getting out afterwards. Make notes on locations organised to a standard format that
includes a risk assessment on all matters concerning safety. That petrol pump in the scene at the country shop, is a
potential hazard. There are petrol tanks under the tarmac there, so no heavy
trucks driving over them. No smoking, no naked lights. Before and after checks
for fumes and everybody must know where the fuel isolation switch for the pumps
is. Crew to wear reflective vests when working on the roadside. Police and fire
authorities should be routinely informed about filming operations, but make sure
you have all the pertinent numbers for each location written on your location
notes form. Other hazardous places include windy cliff tops – we put
cast and crew on out-of-shot waist ropes tied to 4x4s that the wind would have
real problems blowing over the cliffs. Cliff fall scenes or anywhere people are
going to be working close to water, need a safety boat nearby, just in case. You’ll need to check out availability of these things for
locations you select. Also, in the case of marine waterline shoots you will need
to know states of the tide. Is there a fisherman’s tidal almanac published
locally, or is there a harbourmaster’s office, or coastguard station, that can
help with this? Details go on your
location form. After agreeing a price with whoever owns or controls the
location, you must secure it by means of an agreement, that is a location
contract. This will indemnify the owner of the property against accidental
damage the shoot may cause and lays down the agreed daily or weekly fee and a
date. The date should not be fixed, because schedules are known to change. The
date needs to be on an on or around basis. It should also say when the owner
will be paid his location fee, usually on the day it is used, or at the end of
the first week if it is used for a number of days. Do not delay on getting signature on this agreement, because
there is a danger of price escalation and you may by then be too close to
shooting to go elsewhere. One parish hall became a problem for us in this respect.
Having offered them the rent their treasurer had asked for and which was
comparable with other parish halls in the district, we were made to wait for
signature until their monthly meeting had agreed it. Needless to say when the
meeting came around the price escalated, but by that stage we had nowhere else
to go. We paid twenty times the original price they had requested. Strangely
enough, we had a second film locating in the area where this particular hall
would have proved ideal for our requirements. We went elsewhere. Finally, complete paperwork for each location. A location
form with all contact numbers; a signed contract, a how-to-get-there map, a
location plan with important items marked. You will also need neighbour letters,
telling them what is happening and when and what you may ask them to do –
“park in a another street on Thursday morning”. Also include a contact
number they can call with any queries. Sometimes a local contact number –a
screen commission say- can be useful for this. Investing in this kind of public relations will help ensure
the shoot goes off smoothly at least as far as the locations are concerned.
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