Instant Production Value

A good location adds instant production value to your project.  In the best of cases, it helps to shape the story.   My favorite example of this is from “Safety Not Guaranteed,” a great movie I worked on last year that is currently in theaters.  (If you haven’t seen it yet, you should– it’s awesome.)   The script called for a secluded lake back in the woods, where several scenes take place. A few months prior, I had come across a tract of private land just outside Seattle that fit that description.  Tucked about a quarter mile behind the landowner’s house was an incredible find– an ancient, abandoned pickup truck, left to rot beneath the trees.  It clearly hadn’t moved in decades.

I took the writer and director to check the place out, and they loved the truck.  So much so that they rewrote a key element of the story to incorporate it. It was gratifying to see them so inspired by a location, and even more so to see the scene play out on the big screen.   SNG had a tiny budget by film standards, but locations like this helped it look like a million bucks.  That’s production value.

The stars of SNG on location

On the set with the makers of “Safety Not Guaranteed.”