I mentioned losing access to a location a week or so before our shoot was to begin a few posts ago. The details of how I lost the ability to use the ready made location are irrelevant to this discussion, but the anxiety of the incident and subsequent hunt for a new location is not.

We were having a blocking and production meeting down on the farm and a few of the cast and crew were coming down. The 1st Assistant Director (or as the old man called him the straw boss) shows up early and I show him around as this is his first time being on ‘the backlot’. Now we’re not going to be working at this particular location that day, but I swung by to show it to him. It’s at this visit that I find out we can’t use the site. I’m sort of sent reeling at the news.

I had had a slight fear of such an occurrence early on. This location was one of two locations I didn’t have complete control over. It was on a neighbor’s property, where as all the rest (save a town for our ‘town scene’) were built on mine or a close family member’s property.

So with about 5 days till cameras rolled we had to start a search for a new location. All of my rural family and friends were racking their brains trying to think of a suitable spot to replace the one we lost. Story-wise the location is not horribly specific, but enough scenes take place there that you want to make sure it is a decent looking set. There might have been a moment or two during this search that the idea of doing a period film on such a tiny budget was a really bad idea (note: there were other times as well).

In my scheduling insanity I was still hoping to find something that we could dress and film at on the same days we had blocked out for that location. But with only a couple days left till everyone showed up for Day 1 we made the decision to postpone those scenes to a later date. And those precious hours of our main bulk shoot became available to spread out the rest of the filming a tad bit.

We did find an available nearby location that would work for an exterior; most of our other sets, as well as the lost one, were complete locations, interior and exterior at one site. But having that exterior I reverted and put the exterior scenes back into the schedule. And thus half rearranged the schedule again the day before we started filming. Obviously we had a million other things on our plates and decided to forego any thought to those interior scenes until after we got through the first week of filming. The important thing was that we had to find an interior to match the exterior we shot.

Once we got through our first week of production and then a few weeks later a second 4 day shoot we started to run through our options for the needed interior. And on the surface we had a number of possibilities; from redressing and adjusting one of our other built sets, to extending our ‘town scene day’ and  using an interior from the numerous period appropriate buildings there, to possibly dressing a room in Raubyn’s (one of our cinematographers) mother’s recently acquired 200 year old home to try and match. All of our options have either minor or major drawbacks so we kept looking.

We ended up in a barn. An old barn about a hundred yards from my parents’ house. There were a couple of rooms that were full of junk and my old man thought to clean them out and see what they would look like. Turned out it matched pretty well to the exterior location we had shot a couple months before. So we knocked out a wall, rehung a door and dressed it to become a tiny run down 2 room shack. Then we hauled all our gear down through the cow shit covered lot (most of it was frozen).

And that filming day was just another example of how silly and fake as hell movie making is. Cast and crew trekking back and forth from the makeup trailer passed the grain bin and the feed troughs, through the lot and into the old hay and cow shit smelling barn. Then back into a dressed and lit set with C-Stands and cables going everywhere. And our camera team trying to keep all the dust off their rigs.

It was a stressful road from losing the location to setting up shop in the old barn 3 months later, but I reckon it was also an example of a thousand other moments other folks have had scrambling to bring their own scripts to life.