FEATURE: CEMENT SUITCASE – a feature comedy about a guy who can't let go

dougspice

dougspice

Veteran
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Franklin’s a wine salesman who has given up, and only two people can help him.
One just moved into his house and changed the locks. The other is having an affair with his girlfriend.

Cement Suitcase is a micro-budget indie comedy shooting in Washington's Yakima Valley, where writer-director Rick Castañeda grew up. You might call it Sideways for a slightly younger audience, as seen through the eyes of Michel Gondry.

We're shooting over 15 days in Granger, Toppenish, Prosser, Sunnyside, Wapato, and every other town I had never heard of before arriving here. We've rented a production house that is actually a functioning dairy farm. We're greeted by roosters and cows every morning, and we're making a movie!

Stay tuned for more details!
 
We are less than one week from production! I can tell that you all are thrilled to hear about it!

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

Anyway, we're all frantically busy packing our bags and getting ready to head out, so it's not the best time for social media in any case, but stay tuned to the blog for more posts from our various wacky crew members!
 
We're about halfway through the production, trucking right along despite the usual production-related ridiculousness that always occurs. Tomorrow is our day off, and well needed.

We've been posting up behind the scenes segments as we go, expertly edited by our second unit man, Scottie Minshall. Check 'em out to watch us lose our minds and get a movie done.




 
I knew you all were dying for an update, so I'm here posting on like 4 hours of sleep. Day 10 is in the can. Five more to go!
 
New post on our blog today at http://www.cementsuitcase.com. Reposting here...

We’re into the home stretch now on shooting Cement Suitcase, but it’s been a wild ride full of hiccups and unexpected turns. That’s how any production goes, but it’s particularly likely when shooting far from home! Having done a number of shoestring productions away from real Hollywood support, I’ve seen firsthand the huge variety of problems that can come up. Losing a battery charger far from home can be much more than an inconvenience! So, here’s a quick list of tips if you’re planning to shoot in your hometown, or a foreign country, or the tundra – Granger has felt like each of these at some point during this shoot! :)

Part One: Local Support

The most important advice I can give is to really explore all of your local resources, as far in advance of production as possible. You’ll probably be amazed how supportive some people will be, and how excited they’ll get about your project, if given the chance… so find those people early and get them involved! Talk to your friends and family in the area. Have them read the script. Brainstorm ideas for locations, for local acting/extra talent, for added production value you might be able to include. On this movie we’ve been fortunate to have the enthusiastic support of all the local governments, police departments, store owners, and more. Each of these people have contributed memorable performers, locations, and props that we couldn’t find otherwise. It’s all about building the relationships. The sooner you can do this, the better. Unless you’re touching down in a place for the first time, you probably already have an idea who these resources are. Talk to them, and you’ll find out who they know! It takes a village, they say. Build that village.

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Start working out your lines of communication. Figure out who on your crew needs to know what and process information. You don’t want to start overwhelming yourself or the crew with headaches that don’t concern them. But you do want to get everyone everything they need to know before they need it. There’s a ton of free tools available now to help you do that. For Cement Suitcase I created a Google Map documenting the location of all of our housing, filming locations, potential locations, gas stations, hospitals, grocery stores, hardware stores, and everything else I could think of that we might conceivably need. Then I shared it with most of the crew and they added their own contributions. Pretty soon we got a stew goin’!

There are tons more examples of things you can do to open up collaboration and get everything you need to make your movie. I’ll share more in future posts, but hopefully you’ve got some good ideas already! Keep a handy list of these resources in mind. Keep notes on everyone you meet who offers to help and you’ll find tons of opportunities for improving your film and saving money. You’ll identify people who are going to go above and beyond the call of duty and help you for no cost – and you’ll also identify people who are likely to be trouble. Doing this far in advance will help immensely once the camera starts rolling!
 
Doug,

Sorry to come late. Sounds cool and like you're getting it done.

Look forward to more posts when you're in post.

-M
 
Thanks Martay. Today is our last day of on-location photography! Of course we didn't make it easy on ourselves. Three location changes, all of which are outdoors, and of course it's supposed to rain today. (It never rains in the valley, they say... right.)

New BTS videos posted to our site...


 
Post more stills!

How many days and how many pages? You shot DSLR, how did it affect your method of shooting? Still considering changing up the camera next go around... trying to find ways or experiences to justify it...
 
I'll try to get some more still up soon. Those are only from the first 5 or 6 days.

The script was 102 pages, and we shot 14 days. We've still got 1 day of shooting to do here in Los Angeles in a week or two. The 14-day schedule was frankly insane, but somehow we managed not to go over on most of our days. One thing that majorly helped was having a 2nd unit team (really just me and a shooter) doing car/highway/establishing shots and various other little things not involving principal cast – without that there would have been no way to do it in less than 16 days.

I don't believe the 7D affected our method of shooting at all, really. Our DP, Jeffrey Waldron (who we've worked with on many projects in the past), was one of the first people shooting films with the 7D -- certainly one of the first shooting a feature film that way. So whatever magic tricks he's got stored away in his brain are probably second nature by now. Interesting question, though, and I'll have to ask him.

Funny thing about the 7D, though: when we showed up for Day 1 of shooting, our "PR Producer" looked on as they removed the camera from the case. It was just a normal SLR, and he was disappointed. "Aww, man, we're shooting the movie on THAT?" he said. But then the camera team started putting the camera kit together. Baseplate, follow-focus, mattebox, shoulder mounts, monitor... and suddenly he was on board. "I didn't know you guys were gonna turn it into Megatron! Cool."

I'm sure many DSLR shooters can relate. The amount of accessorizing you need to do to these cameras can be way more than trivial.

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(one setup of "Megatron")


edit: it occurred to me pretty much in the middle of the night that he actually meant Voltron, but hey, whatever.
 
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I wet the ground. There's footage of me being the hose-boy. Getting that pavement all Nispel. It doesn't really rain in that part of WA, as far as I can tell.
 
Hey you want to go get a tuna fish sandwich or something? I figured since last time I met you downtown for Thai food, you could come up here and get some tartines.

Also, when will you show some footage and a trailer? The only way I'm coming down to Psychic Bunny is if you show me footage. YES!!!
 
As if to hammer home all the things I've said in the past about how much fun it is to shoot outside of LA, and how much not-fun it usually is to shoot here, getting together locations for this simple one-day shoot here has proven annoying. We're on track to do it now but it's taken some effort.

(on a semi-related note: maybe be on the look out for the biggest episode of "Castle" ever this season? I'm not sure why but blocks worth of production trucks, craft services, picture cars, and all the other movie hordes have been making traffic hell outside my office all week now. It's easy to get things done when you have that.)

Anyway. Day 9 recap video was posted a while back, and I never posted it here. BLAM.

 
Thanks Brandon. Mostly a lot of tedious PluralEyes syncing and so forth going on these days, aside from the shoot next week, but hopefully we'll have some new stuff up to show pretty soon!
 
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