The Ride Pre-Production Journal

After taking a brief sabbatical, I am back to updating about my new short film 'The Ride'.

Back in April, I started plotting out an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for this new short film, with the goal of having enough of a budget to enable me to pay my cast and crew. After campaigning for 60 days, I was able to raise just about $5,000 dollars.

Although I consider the campaign to be a huge success (this is more money than I've ever gone into a film production with!) my team and I will still have to get a bit creative with the budget.

With an eye towards starting shooting after the new year, I'll be updating here periodically about the hurdles of pre-production; everything from locations to scrip revisions.

Here's where we're currently at: the main heads of production and I had our first meeting on Sunday, November 2nd, at the infamous 'House Of Pies' on Vermont Street. Initially started in the early 60's with the intention of building a franchise, the idea never took off. The mastermind behind it, Al Lapin Jr., licked his wounds and started a 2nd franchise; The International House Of Pancakes. However, the original location still remains near Hollywood, and I've become really fond of it.

Present where Brad Jones, who is now acting as our 1st A.D since my old pal Michael Edwards, initially signed on, has since had to move out of the Los Angeles area. Joel O' Neil, who helped film most of the campaign video's, was also on hand, and is now acting as our producer, splitting duties with Adrian Marcato while he finishes up work on his truly terrifying interactive haunted house Heretic.. Brian Bon, our cinematographer, also made it, along with my trusty partner in crime and casting director Amy McDonald.

Prior to the meeting Brad had created a series of budget sheets that showed different scenarios for what could be done with what we have. Problematically, each one of these had sacrifices that would be tough to make, so much of the meeting was spent looking at ways to do things for less.

Two of the most pressing concerns involved permits and base camp scenarios, as the whole film is essentially one giant location shoot. A base camp, for those not in the know, is where a film crew will set up shop when shooting on location; anyone who lives in the Los Angeles area will be utterly familiar with those yellow signs posted all over the city directing cast and crew to these bases.

Normally for a shoot such as this there would be porta poties on hand, and/or an RV or trailer to house costumes/makeup/etc.

Unfortunately, we don't really have the budget to allow this. Luckily, I've been able to find ways around these sorts of problems in the past, and that is what we'll be working on over the next few weeks.

Joel O' Neil recently shot a feature in Riverside, and discovered that the permit situation there is highly reasonable; on Sunday, Amy and I will be taking a drive out to Riverside to see if we can find some spots that will work for the project. As well, we'll be looking into local businesses that might be so kind as to let us use their restrooms.

I also found time to make a final pass at the script, as there had been some pacing issues in it that were driving me crazy. Of course, this means I now find myself in the position of having to re-storyboard a number of sequences, which I'm almost done with. Some of the rough 'new' boards can be seen below.

I'll be posting again soon with pics of our location scout, and will hopefully have more to report as we continue to work on wrangling to budget into shape.

Cheers, Waylon