So today was the day to find a location for my new short ‘Couple’. I was after an empty bedroom with a high ceiling. Simple yeah?!... Nope!!

Criteria: Cheap, empty and easygoing landlords = student accommodation.

After a day of driving around Stoke-on-Trent and ringing landlords numbers posted in student accommodation windows with Sorcha Anglim, we soon realised finding a house may be harder then we first thought….

The first problem we hit was that students aren’t moving out until June… which means there are very few empty at the moment.

Secondly after explaining we are filmmakers looking for a bedroom to shoot a short film in, a lot of landlords assumed we were making porn and said no to us, without giving us the chance to explain…

And thirdly, when finding an empty house, getting to the stage where they understood we were making drama not porn, we were hit with £300 to £600 costs for the location!!!! WHAT!??

The three exact reasons we chose student accommodation for failed on us…. Bugger.

In the end we did see one location that was in our price range, but the layout was not quite right for what I envisioned.  GOD DAMN!

It’s funny how when you think of a location for your film in your head, it seems so simple, “just a bedroom…. How hard can it be?” and the things that run though your mind are lighting it, the set design, and how the room will look though the lens, but what you always seem to overlook is how to get the right location for all these elements to begin with.

It seems it’s harder sometimes to find the right canvas then actually painting on it!

So what do you do? Do you keep looking until you find the perfect one, or change your idea to suit what you know you can get hold of?

I guess the question is, “How much time do you have, and is the idea worth it?”… If you have all the time in the world you can keep looking I guess, but if you’re like me and you only have a small window to make it in, due to other commitments, what do you do?

I guess films always throw something at you, whether its locations, actors, weather, crew, story or kit. So you should just stick with it or you’ll never finish any film you want to make.

So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll stick with it for now and keep looking. However, I think its good to keep an open mind for new ideas and new ways to tell stories, especially when there’s time limit… Like I always say, change is never a bad thing.

‘One of these days I will lay down an idea and stick with it… I promise!’

 

Keep you updated with how this pans out.

 

JT