Here are some other film location issues you might come up against. Better to deal with these before the shoot than on the day you arrive and are ready to go.
Location of Location/Distance from Other Locations:
The farthest I have had my crew and cast travel between locations is 1 block, and this was still time consuming.
If you are shooting a low budget short, you are racing against the clock and trying to get as much out of the day as possible. You don’t want to waste too much time moving people from one location to the next.
Try to pick a script that has only one location when selecting or writing the script.
Or select locations that are close to each other. You’ll be glad you did.
Does the location work with the script?
Once you have arrived at a location, the director will probably want to go through the script and make rough decisions about how you intend to get the shots you want for your project.
Ideally you also have some other departments there to keep an eye on other issues that may come up on the day of the shoot.
Sound Check:
One of my mentors mentioned a concept that would have come in extremely handy with some of my earlier work.
“When scouting for locations, don’t forget your scouting for sound as well.”
You may not have the luxury of bringing your audio department to scout the location, or you may have to just not worry about sound issues if the location is otherwise ideal. But sound is important, and crappy sound is the telltale sign of a low budget project, even if everything else is awesome.
At the bare minimum, after you’ve checked that the director can get all of the shots, do a sound check for about one to two minutes. What do you hear in those two minutes? Heavy trucks driving by? Construction? The freeway?
The one that gets most of us is the air traffic overhead. They can be non-stop, and though in your day to day life you might not even notice the sound of planes passing above you, they are extremely loud and picked up very easily when using a sensitive, high-quality mic.
I once was on a shoot that had to do about 20 takes of one simple shot because a very loud plane would pass immediately after the previous plane got out of earshot. And then a garbage truck started collecting garbage and would interrupt every shot we attempted. It set our schedule off by half a day, and the producers were not happy.
Do you have an area to keep the actors?
This area is called “Actors Holding” and it is exactly what it is called: a place to hold the actors while they are waiting to go on to set. This is also sometimes a good area to set up make-up, or to have a Kraft service table, or to keep people’s belongings.
You want this area to be comfortable to the actors, and I like to keep it a bit far away from where I will be shooting if possible because there are often conversations going on in this room and you don’t want that to interfere when recording dialogue. Nor do you want to have to slow down to keep telling people to be quiet (though this is usually what ends up happening so don’t worry about it too much.)
