The Guard Room Diaries
In exciting news, production on our third film begins later this week. Entitled "The Guard Room", this film was inspired by my time in security work. Most of the characters are based on coworkers I worked with and some of the situations in the film were situations that I had to deal with at work. It will be a bit more grounded and serious in tone, but it will still have that comedy element with some goofy moments. (We make comedy films after all).
Overall, pre-production for this one has been a bit of a challenge. Originally we were going to shoot scenes on Mare Island, which is a peninsula in the United States in the city of Vallejo that is an old navel shipyard. It has a lot of big empty warehouses and creepy buildings, great backdrops to be used for filming. One of the owners of the warehouses was going to let us film there, but unfortunately I guess he got busted by Mare Island for renting out his warehouse for film productions. They drove by one day when a big crew was filming and shut it down. It appears they were mad at him for offering a cheap rate and told him that he couldn't do that. So now I gotta pull out a backup location to use. One sliver lining is the backup location is a lot closer to my house.
The Mare Island Warehouse we were going to use as a location for the film.
Another tricky part of the production process was having two actors drop out. One had a family emergency situation pop up, which, life happens, and the other actor ended up ghosting me. (For reasons unknown). Thankfully, there was time before production started to find some new people to fill in and come up with additional plans. But now I have like I have a ticking bomb ticking behind me as one of the actors ended up getting booked in a play later this year and the other one wants to change his hairstyle for another production soon. So as you can, these are just some of the struggles us filmmakers deal with even before production has gotten started.
Another big challenge for this project is that this will be the first time I am traveling out of the local region to film. We'll be going down to LA to rent out a set to shoot about a third of the movie. So it's definitely going to be interesting to try and manage that. All of the actors and crew are great people so hopefully part of the trip will be a bit of a fun camping trip. But with filming on a set, we'll also have a limited amount of time to get the shots and footage we need. So hopefully everything goes mostly to plan with no road bumps. One stressful part of planning a trip is the worry of someone dropping out last minute. Trying to refund a Airbnb and the set rental will be almost impossible, so I guess your only other option would be to try to reschedule with them. But let's hope it does not come to that.
The Set we’ll be using when we go to LA. Looks pretty grungy!
In honest truth though, this is isn't too surprising for me. On my first production, Sophie and the Serial Killers, we had the lead actress drop out 3/4th of the way into production due to personal reasons. This led us to recast the two main leads and reshoot about one third of the film again. During my 2nd production, Scorned Waifu, one of the actress's got pregnant doing filming and we had a countdown to finish her scenes before she got too far along. We also had a limited amount of time to use one of the main locations for the film as well. So if there's one thing that filmmaking has taught me, it's that you gotta be flexible and adapt to what ever happens to see the project through.
I am excited to start work on my 3rd feature film, and hopefully the start of production goes well. I don't know what other challenges this project will throw at me down the road, but the first few it has thrown me is sure keeping me on my toes.
