Making several houses look like one location?

[Azmyth]

We have our first day of shooting this weekend, and we are shooting some interior scenes from a college kid's house. He lives kinda on the outskirts of town, with a roommate. The house we picked for this location is perfect on the interiors.. but its IN town.. so we can't use the outside for the shots where he will be in the yard.

This is just one occurence of many where we are using rooms from different locations for completely different parts of the film.

There is another location where we loved the exterior, but the interior living room was carpeted and we needed it to be hard wood. We had talked about trying to figure out how to use the exterior of that location and the interior of another location.. but the issue is the front doors would be different, and we'd have shots where the door is open.

Anyone have any ingenius ideas how to make this work?

 

[J.R. Hudson]

Shoot one house as an establishing shot and the other for interiors.

 

[Azmyth]

Right, but both dialog and action happens outside and inside the houses.

 

[El Director]

How different are the doors? If they're not that bad, most people won't notice it's in different locations. Aside from hinges being on opposite sides, you shouldn't have a problem.

 

[Azmyth]

Thats what I am worried about.

 

[Gohanto]

If you need people walking in the front door, why does the door NEED to be in both the EXT and INT shots?

My suggestion would just be pick INT angles where you don't see the front door. Get enough room tone at both locations to bridge the gap, and watch the sun on both days.

Or maybe I'm not 100% following...

 

[Azmyth]

Yeah, I think I have i figured out.

Basically this is the scene...

Guy drives up to his house, and gets out... he doesn't realize someone else is already there because he is out of it. Girl startles him, and they have some dialog and then she insists that he invite her inside. They go up on the front porch.. he opens the door.. and she walks inside, him following.

I think as long as we show the angle of them going in the door from the side where you can't actually see inside, and then once they go inside you don't see the interior of the door.

 

[Azmyth]

How different? Just different color or different design entirely... You could get away with shooting all wide exteriors at one location, but when you get close into the door, use the other, so if you can see it inside, it matches. If the doors are close enough in design, couldn't you CC just the doors to match in color.

I.E;
Location 1: Wide Exteriors
Location 2: Tight Exteriors/ Interiors

That is unless one house is brick and the other siding.

We got that scene taken care of. We are going to use that location as we originally intended. That scene is a house way back in the woods.. and we needed to be able to do blood effects in the interior.. but we didn't want to mess up the carpet seeing as its not our house. So! there are parts of the house that are not carpeted and we are going to edit creatively, and place things in the location that we can bloody, like our own couch, our own lamps and other props. And try to avoid showing the floor, and just use other parts of the house to get the idea across that it has been ransacked by someone bleeding profusely. This way we can use the same location for exterior/interior since they were both perfect.. we were just concerned with messing up the carpet.

 

[polfilmblog]

You may want to create blocking diagrams to show the various angles and fields of view. Some still photos from the camera positions could help too.