Bad experiences with locations....

Alex Haspel · April 30, 2006

We shot one day at this location in vienna, it's basically just a gravely jard where once was an appartment house. most likely until WWII.

now there's a appartment house on the left, on the right, and at the back, all without windows of course, since those were once walls merging with the house missing now.

and right in the middle there is a huge tree, as high as the houses surrounding him, probably 15-20meters.

the guy who ownes this place is a retired lawyer who charged us 100euro just for coming and opening the chain blocking the entrace, altough he knew that we shot a noncommercial studentfilm with extremely tight budget.

okay, we agreed to pay for one day, but couldnt finish, because the steadicam operator

who would be so kind to operate for free for us had no time that day.

but that greedy old bastard won't let us shot another half hour there on tuesday (that's all the time we'd need, we are just missing one shot) without charging 100euros again.

so here i sit, with a steadicam operator at my hands the first time, a wireless bartech radio focus unit scrounged from another operator i was recently assisting for, but a production that hasnt 100euros left(/doesnt want to pay another 100 euros) and beeing pissed off to no end.

goddamn, i'm angry.

so, what were your bad experiences with locations?

P.S: that shoot was the last day for the shortmovie i already posted the trailer for here ...

oh and sorry for the probably annoying rant and my bad english.

Edited April 30, 2006 by haspel

Alessandro Machi · April 30, 2006

Did you say he was a laywer?

He probably could have been a lot worse. It's drilled into every well to do lawyer's consciousness to charge for every quarter hour of every billable day. If word got out this lawyer only charged you a hundred Euro per day he probably would be disbarred.

I recently was called by a lawyer about a short film I had made and after we had talked for about 20 minutes he seemed to have a panic attack because he realized he had called me and apparently it was not a billable call.

I can laugh about it now but frankly it kind of disgusted me at the time.

Matt Pacini · May 2, 2006

I'm not surprised at all.

I've known a couple lawyers who were decent guys, but I think the training and experience conditions them into what I call "lawyers morals".

There's right & wrong, and then there's what you can get away with.

Most people feel bad about the second one. Lawyers don't.

MP

Josh Bass · May 2, 2006

I worked on a no budget "pilot" as a camera guy, and we got booted off a few locations.

On one of my own short films (no budget, of course), a location scout had taken me to a pretty sweet location, and essentially told me it was cool to shoot there.

So we get there, we're setting up (this is about midnight), and some dude in a building next to the empty lot where we are is freakin out 'cause he doesn't know who we are and says we're not supposed to be there, and blah blah blah, and apparently called the cops, who told me they'd had some complaints about noise (bullshit, 'cause we weren't even doing anything yet, just getting set up, and there weren't that many people there, and we weren't making noise, and all the houses were several hundred feet away, so the only complaintant was the a**ho** who called the cops). So the cop didn't shut us down, but said she would if she got any more complaints. We therefore decided to forgo using the genny we'd brought, since it was just a plain old genny with no noise shielding whatsoever (i.e. not a film genny), and would be loud as hell. We literally lit the scene with firelight and a fairly powerful blue flashlight (a night scene involving torches and moonlight). For all you could see in the background, we might as well have (and probably should have) shot it in the gaffer/DP's backyard, 'cause it would looked the same, if not better.

So. . .don't shoot nowhere's you ain't gots permission. That's my new rule.

Oh. . .there was another time I had a script I wanted to shoot at an office in my alma mater. So, the guy who ran that area of the school had to approve the script (it was a Catholic liberal arts college, so there could be nothing in the script that "went against Catholic doctrine"). So, he didn't approve the script. So that went away.