Laggies: By the Numbers

I recently wrapped on Lynn Shelton’s “Laggies,” another excellent and very location-intensive local film. Over the course of production on a movie, the Locations Department interacts with a huge amount of people.  I did some number crunching based on our experience on Laggies, to give a sense of what the Locations Department does for an indie film being shot in Seattle.   Here’s how it shook out.

Laggies shot at 23 different locations over the 26-day shoot, all of which were scouted and secured by the Locations team.  To support those filming locations, we used 18 different basecamp sites (where actor trailers and other support vehicles are staged).   In situations where set or basecamp couldn’t support it, we also secured 8 additional locations for crew parking, and 9 additional catering sites.    We also utilized 19 residences and businesses for various aspects of production support– things like craft service, equipment staging, extras holding, vehicle placement, restrooms, and the like.    In the residential areas we shot, we made personal contact with over 50 neighbors and distributed our contact information to dozens more.   We worked directly with 4 different city governments as well as both King and Snohomish Counties, plus the Seattle Police, Renton Police, Snohomish County Sheriff and Washington State Patrol.

And those are just for the locations we actually shot.   Lynn selected the final 23 shooting sites out of a total of 87 scouted locations.   That number is actually on the lower side compared to other recent projects– last year for the feature “You Can’t Win” we scouted over 160 different possibilities.

Shooting on location requires the cooperation of literally hundreds of people, most of which go unrecognized.    Developing and maintaining relationships with all those folks is a huge part of what the Location Manager does.