The hunt for Baghdad

[dougspice]

Hey everyone. I'm working as producer for a short for the Army, and there are some unique challenges. The main one is finding locations near L.A. that pass for Baghdad. I thought I'd do a mini-diary here just to share some of those challenges and (hopefully) how we solved them with not a lot of money. Hopefully someone will find it interesting, helpful, or (who knows) maybe even give us a pointer or two.

So. The short is about some soldiers forced to make a difficult decision. This difficult decision (like most of them these days!) takes place in Iraq; specifically outside a small home in Baghdad, where they have stopped to search a home.

With a lot of CG, a lot of places here could be made to work, but again the budget for that sort of work is small. So we need the best possible starting point. The director has already spent months touring various Army MOUT sites from Louisiana to Kentucky, and no luck. We can't afford to shoot abroad, even in Mexico, so we're basically stuck here in California. In the best case, we stay within the 50 mile zone, because if we go outside that we have to pay significantly more to our actors.

So the choices are practical locations or a set. I've always preferred practical locations whenever possible, but this time we're talking about making over a place to look like an entirely different country... not to mention one that's in the middle of a civil war.

 

[dougspice]

STANDING SETS

The sets in question are the various movie ranches around L.A. Even if you don't know it, you've seen these places countless times in dozens of movies, episodes of JAG, whatever. Strike one... do we really want to shoot somewhere that seems "oddly familiar"? No, we don't. They cost a lot, but they're privately owned, and the owners fully expect you to blow stuff up and fire off a lot of rounds – that's what they're built for, and no one's around to complain. The disadvantage is that they tend to look pretty fake without a lot of dressing, and we're only going to have one day, maybe two, to dress them in entirety. So out of all the ranches around, that leaves us only one really decent option: the Blue Cloud Ranch, also known as Valuzet's Ranch. If you've seen Iron Man, you've seen this place. Not bad, but not quite the urban environment we're looking for.


PRACTICAL LOCATIONS

We're not covering a lot of area here, so with careful shot choice we can make a lot of places work. Surprisingly, an hour driving around Watts and Compton yielded some interesting possibilities... unfortunately I wasn't expecting to be location scouting and didn't have my camera. I will have to go back on an official scout soon. Big disadvantage here is that we have to get the city involved, and with the guns and shooting we'll have on set, that means a lot of police monitors in a place like Watts.

I'm also looking into Calexico, which is a city directly on the Mexican border east of L.A. several hours. The city on the other side of the border is named Mexicali. Cute, right? Anyway, this whole area really does more or less look and feel like Iraq. The terrain's a lot flatter, and it's desert but heavily punctuated with irrigation and palms. Unfortunately, it's way outside the 50 mile zone, and I don't know the area. So a substantial scouting trip would be required to see if it might meet our needs. I've spent a couple hours poring over the area in Google Earth, and if you avoid the awful areas of cookie-cutter subdivisions which dominate the area there's some interesting potential here. It certainly doesn't have the density of central Baghdad, but everything else is a match. If only we could go a couple miles across the border, it could look PERFECT... but that's the challenge of producing on a tight budget.


In the next few days we'll be talking to a couple location scouts to see what they can offer. You would think that this sort of thing would be in high demand these days, and pretty well cataloged, but my experience with other aspects (casting Arabic-speaking actors, for instance) has showed that not to be the case.

The shoot should be in late July or early August.

 

[dougspice]

I'm going to keep this raging thread going by posting some pictures of what we're aiming for.

 

[dasher]

very cool. If you don't mind me asking what is the budget on this type of thing?

 

[dougspice]

Below half a million, which maybe sounds like a lot until you start actually crunching the numbers, and suddenly it definitely seems like not enough. But that sort of thing is what we're good at over here, so we'll make it work.

 

[pia12254]

I know you said you are looking for stuff around L.A. but there is a location right near downtown Dallas called "Little Baghdad". It was used to shoot the "Saving Jessica Lynch" TV movie years ago and I don't think it has been used much since.

Here are some pictures:

Little Baghdad Pictures

I figured you may have already checked this out or it might be completely out of the question but figured I might as well throw it out there...

A quick question...what is the video going to be used for? Also, are you in the Army or part of a private contractor being hired by the Army? I was always curious how much they do "in-house" and how much they outsource...

Thanks!

Daniel

 

[dougspice]

They do both. I honestly don't know how much of each. But it's obviously an enormous institution so they produce a LOT.

I definitely did NOT know about Little Baghdad, and it looks really good, so thanks... although it's hard to get a sense of the size of it really from the photos. I'll try to pull it up on Google Maps. I doubt we'll be able to move our whole production there on this budget, but we might at the very least be able to shoot some VFX plates and such.