SK3055
Active member
I am a student filmmaker at U. Miami and my partner in crime :kali: (well, filmmaking anyway) is currently writing a script that takes place entirely in an indoor mall. While I'm sure that's very expensive, changing the location to anything else is simply not worth it. Even just eight hours of shooting time would suffice, so I know we can afford something. But we'd like to shoot for as long as possible in a nice, big mall as it will add a lot of production value and be very worthwhile for this particular script.
So my question is, how much should this cost? Has anyone done this before? I am willing to make hundreds of phone calls to Florida malls until I find one that's doable, but first am trying to get a grasp on how much we should expect to pay. After all, we'd like to maximize our time at this location while keeping its percentage of our budget to a minimum. If you have any experience that's particularly relative, I'd appreciate details on what shooting in a mall entails, or tips on negotiating the best deal.
For the rest of it, we will film in various shops, hallways and other places that can pass as being at the same location. We will also add stock footage for cutaways and opening footage if necessary. I'm aware that filming at night is probably our only option, which isn't a problem as extras aren't nearly as big of a concern. But hey, if there was some random reason we could shoot during operating hours, we'd make due with terrible audio. Really, with my modest Protools skills I could still make it sound better than most of our competition. But I know circumstances like that are unlikely and that malls are hard to film in even when closed - after all, they are big businesses whose priorities lie in the best interests of their clients, many of whom are big names.
I am also not as concerned about the legal issues of having trademarks in our shots; Jason Reitman just spoke at my school and he said to just make the film you want to - his most popular short was based around someone going to heaven for killing Ricky Martin's "Livin the Vida Loca" and Jason never got a single call about it, despite the film playing at hundreds of festivals and featuring the song so negatively. I am just worried about how the presence of these trademarks will deter a mall owner from letting us shoot there. I'm hoping presenting documents stating we won't show any in our film (yeah, right) will suffice. And for that matter, I hope having those trademarks won't get us rejected from too many festivals once the film gets made, assuming we're careful not to feature them prominently.
So my question is, how much should this cost? Has anyone done this before? I am willing to make hundreds of phone calls to Florida malls until I find one that's doable, but first am trying to get a grasp on how much we should expect to pay. After all, we'd like to maximize our time at this location while keeping its percentage of our budget to a minimum. If you have any experience that's particularly relative, I'd appreciate details on what shooting in a mall entails, or tips on negotiating the best deal.
For the rest of it, we will film in various shops, hallways and other places that can pass as being at the same location. We will also add stock footage for cutaways and opening footage if necessary. I'm aware that filming at night is probably our only option, which isn't a problem as extras aren't nearly as big of a concern. But hey, if there was some random reason we could shoot during operating hours, we'd make due with terrible audio. Really, with my modest Protools skills I could still make it sound better than most of our competition. But I know circumstances like that are unlikely and that malls are hard to film in even when closed - after all, they are big businesses whose priorities lie in the best interests of their clients, many of whom are big names.
I am also not as concerned about the legal issues of having trademarks in our shots; Jason Reitman just spoke at my school and he said to just make the film you want to - his most popular short was based around someone going to heaven for killing Ricky Martin's "Livin the Vida Loca" and Jason never got a single call about it, despite the film playing at hundreds of festivals and featuring the song so negatively. I am just worried about how the presence of these trademarks will deter a mall owner from letting us shoot there. I'm hoping presenting documents stating we won't show any in our film (yeah, right) will suffice. And for that matter, I hope having those trademarks won't get us rejected from too many festivals once the film gets made, assuming we're careful not to feature them prominently.
