Project Updates from Producer Josh

Hello, all! Time for some Alone Together project updates. Truth be told, this last month is has been an exercise in why it’s difficult to make your own project.

When you’re a professional crew member (eg, working in production, G&E, camera, or art full time), you’re living the mercenary life. That life has its own difficulty, work is bang or bust. Feast or famine. Some productions are great, some are unorganized messes. Either way, you show up to work, do your job, come home, and (hopefully) get a paycheck. Department heads and the production and art departments have a ton of pre-production work to do, but very broad strokes, that can be how it is.

But creating your own project is a different barrel of monkeys. Without constant will and effort, your project can all-too-easily die on the table. You have to constantly breathe more life into it. When you’re trying to translate your own project from brain to screen, it’s even easier to fail because you invariably have a life outside your film. You’ve got health or family concerns. You’ve got a day job. You’ve got bills to pay.

This has been one of those months. Sometimes, unfortunately, when you’re balancing real life with your creative projects, you gotta make sure the fucking rent check gets sent to your landlord.

That being said, progress is still being made, friends! For my part, my focus on Alone Together the last few weeks has been locations. Katie has a guy with a potential connection with a school. Now, you may sit there and say to yourself, “but Josh, you want to shoot in a school in the summertime when they’re out of session. Shouldn’t that be easy?” Well, mon frere, yes and no.

We are looking to shoot over long weekends in the summertime, this is true. Practically speaking, it means that we have a better shot of getting access to locations on a high school campus. BUT, this is LA. And in LA, everyone is at least tangentially familiar with filming. Meaning everyone wants their cash.

When I shot in Chicago and middle-of-nowhere New Mexico, people more often than not would get SUPER excited at the prospect of a film shoot. I mean, it’s freaking COOL right? When we shot Stygian, the whole little town we stayed in helped out with food/plowing snow, etc. You’re much more likely to get stuff for free. Here in LA, there is a well-oiled infrastructure for getting shooting permits. Hell, you can swing it in a day or two. But, because people are used to it and think it’s less ‘cool’ than it is ‘inconvenient,’ they want money (and more of it).

For instance, Hollywood High School has a basic per-day fee range of $5000- $10000 for non-student commercial productions. Obviously, that’s waaaaaay out of our range. Santa Monica School District - with whom I’ve got a query out - has their own dedicated film person!

So, while we hope that Katie’s friend can pull out some magic, I’m trying to line up alternatives that are as inexpensive as humanly possible.

-Josh