I am not put off by identifying myself as a redneck (obviously with the name of the blog and whatnot), but in comparison to my older brother I might be considered pretty much citified. Jake became a huge part of the film making process. He worked on constructing our cabin sets about as much as I did. He helped in production design by building some of the furniture in our sets and sifting through antiques stores for items to dress the sets with. Then during production days he filled as many roles as about anyone. See, he and I work at the same factory and have about the same schedule which meant he was available for nearly every filming day.

He was a sort of set/production manager, he was always dealing with transportation matters, helping to make sure equipment was where it needed to be and tracking details that some of us working directly on set weren’t capable of managing. Basically a lot that wasn’t the technical camera and lights stuff he took on his shoulders. But back to him being a much bigger redneck than me, and a hard ass to boot.

The bulk of our cast and crew were from the city and were troopers the entire shoot working in the mud and the cold and the spotty rural cell service, but Jake made sure to remind them every once in a while that ‘You city boys are weak’. Or he gruffly corrected them when they, maybe, misidentified a beaver as a platypus. And when someone mistakenly thought that the grisly looking thorn trees, which play into our film’s story, were some sort of manufactured prop he laughingly told them they grew naturally like that.

These thorn trees feature visually late in our movie and it was something we shot during the first week of filming. During one of our later production nights there is a scene where one of our main characters is searching in the woods, a scene near the beginning of the movie. We’re rolling through our shots, getting what we need, but our camera team sees an opportunity. They want to film the character walking past one of the thorn trees as a little foreshadowing for what comes later. Now we’re at a different part of the farm than where we filmed the scene with the thorn tree before, but to just about anyone it would look like the same sort of timber. As always it was cold and we still have some more setups to get through before the night is wrapped, but for a few minutes the camera team searches pretty diligently for a thorn tree they can point the camera at. Jake, who’s probably been attending to some other important business, walks up and asks ‘What’s the fuck’n hold up?’ so I explain, thinking he’ll be able to point us in the right direction. Immediately he says ‘Ain’t no thorn trees around here, ain’t none in this whole bottom.’ About then the camera folk walk up and we tell them that it’s not gonna happen with the foreshadowing thorn tree. They look a little incredulous, but if the woodsman says there are no thorn trees there are none.