Location Scouting

Making movies seems like a lot of fun. I kept trying to tell myself that Saturday when I spent 6 hours driving around looking for locations. Since one of the green screen studios we'll be using is in Marietta I started out over there. I thought I remembered a bunch of skeezy motels along Hwy 41 and was pleased to see they haven't all burned down yet. These look perfect - the kind of place where ex-cons cook dinner over hot plates in the courtyard and the police just don't bother stopping unless they need to "confiscate" some more weed. Since our hero Bob will be taking his hooker friend here for a relaxing first date, the ambiance is just what I want.

This place wasn't actually the best I saw, but it was still great for what we needed. So I went into the office, a 4x8 white box, and rang the little bell for service. I tried to explain what I wanted, and he just kind of stood there. I asked if we could take a quick look at one of the rooms and he shrugged and handed me a key. The room was exactly what I was looking for as well - and we'd be able to do plenty of dressing to give it just the right tone. When we left the room the guy was waiting for us outside, but instead of talking there motioned us to go back in the claustrophobic little interrogation box.

He had the owner(?) come over to talk to me through the bullet-proof plastic and I explained again what we wanted to do.  I said we'd be happy to rent out two rooms, that the shoot would be about 4 hours and would that be cool.  He just stood there for a minute, shook his head and walked away.

At the next place a couple hundred yards down the road we didn't even get as far as looking at a room.  They said they didn't like it, but I could come back and talk to the owner Monday if I wanted.  I'm fairly certain they thought we wanted to shoot porn.


That left me a bit confused though - they didn't seem like the kind of places that would Mind us shooting porn.  Maybe I should have explained it wasn't porn - I don't know.  I'm not very good at talking to people.
I skipped the third place because I didn't want to jinx it with my bad karma, maybe I can get someone else to go talk to them.  Maybe I should look for motels that regularly Do have porn shoots, at least they'd be cool with the cameras.  On another note - it was only $35 a night for a room, which is nice.

On the other hand this convenience store is Exactly what I was looking for and the guy wokring seemed very positive about using it.  I've got a call into the owner there and hope to hear something very soon.  Unfortunately, I didn't find much else on that trip.  I still need to find the perfect alley and a restaraunt.  Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

Thanks for reading - and a detailed list of the locations we're looking for is linked over on the side bar - if you have any ideas please let me know.

Auditions

We have officially scheduled a first day of auditons for Saturday March 6th at Creative Studios of Atlanta.  It is a couple minutes from Atlanta Stations, so should be pretty convenient for just about everyone.  We will be beginning at 10:0 AM and going into the afternoon.  If you would like to auditon or have any questions please write to beardrivingcar@gmail.com.  You can find a link to the casting notice in the links in the right-hand pane.

We've had a really great response so far, but can always use more people.

A second round of auditions will be held March 13th at a place to be determined.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Bear Driving Car's blog.  I just formed the company about three weeks ago after I decided it was time to actually do something concrete to make films instead of talking about it a lot.

We are currently in pre-production on a major short film titled "Better Living Through Chemistry" which will shoot later this Spring.  I'm just getting started on this page, clearly, but the plan is to chronicle every step along the way towards making this happen.

On the right-hand side of the page you can see the widget for a fundraising site called Kickstarter.  Basically, Kickstarter is a site used to help artists find funding for their projects. We set up a project page describing what we want to do with our short film and why we need the extra money. If you like the idea, you can kick in anything from $1 all the way up. If the project gets fully funded to at least the target level, you get charged through your Amazon account and we get the money to make our movie. If we don't get enough pledges by the deadline (April 25th is the deadline we set up for this project), no one who has pledged to back the project gets charged and we go back to the drawing board, probably after a good long cry.