So Location, Location is one of the most important aspect of issues, especially on the visual intensive project. Location is everything like in real estate, you need to find the perfect location, you need to find something with a lot of character. And a place that you need to do the least work possible to make it look like what you want. set design and VFX should only serve to enhance a location, hopefully already has, you know, like 80% of what you need in that space. So especially in the low budget that's going to make or break a shoot on location to find the perfect location. You need to ask friends, acquaintances, people that have shot at different places, or you need to ask the local cinema office that you're you're in touch with.

They're gonna be most of the time helpful. And also you need to get permits. I know it's tempting to shoot someplace without permission, especially in the no budget, but a piece of paper is Going to save your life. If somebody shows up at two in the morning and wants to kick you out, or the police gets called, piece of people calms everybody down and will legitimize your presence at that place. You can always do guerrilla shooting, we've done it. For example, on the cure project when we shot the highway sequence, which was basically me and two friends with my car driving really fast in the city.

That can be done. If it's something small, you keep the crew very minimal, and you're able to be flexible and moving all the time. If you're not, you really need to plan out the location and you really need to avoid the realist shooting as much as possible. For example, on the camera, we spent a month and a half looking for ideal locations. We needed to find a post apocalyptic place that looked the part of Neo Tokyo. That was very hard to find, but we did find it and it made that scene work.

Without that location. We couldn't have shot that Completely, so it's worth the effort. And that you know, requires time, patience, and a lot of work and a lot of legwork put into it. Sometimes you'll need to talk to people, you'll find the perfect location, but it's too expensive for you. And there's no ways around it. You need to explain who you are that you're not a Hollywood production, that you only have so much budget.

And you can also cut deals with people and agree that you know, you come back, you'll come back to them if you get the feature film finance if you get a bigger project that you can send their way. If you're nice to people most of the time they'll be nice to you. And I found that people skills are a really good way to get a location locked down. Be mindful of Windows. You walk into legation it looks perfect. Look at the windows if you need to blackout windows and your scene happens at night but you're shooting during the day.

You need to know how Long and how expensive or complicated that's going to be. It's very complicated to rotoscoped out windows because of the reflections and just the sheer amount of work required. So be careful. Also make sure that the ceilings are high enough that you have enough backing that the room is big enough for you to get the angles and place the camera in the positions you need. It's always going to be extremely difficult to shoot in a small place, you won't be able to get the shots you want. And no matter how wide the lens you have, you are not going to be satisfied with the coverage you'll be able to get.

So be very careful of that. One important aspect of location is that you need to be mindful of what's in the background. If you're shooting a futuristic project or a period piece or something that doesn't happen today, anything that's in the background that doesn't look part of the universe will sort of snap the view out of it. It's sometimes you know, easy to just disregard some In the background, but I find that for for my projects, at least when I do something that has some sort of big world building, I really need to be careful of what I show and not show on screen. So what I do is I usually keep my shots either very tight, or very, very contained. So that's one trick I use.

And the other thing I use is that to create the world buildings I pull out of the of the tight shots and they show a very wide landscape very big world building shot, and I spent a lot of money and time doing that, such as on the shot with temple with the highway being flooded by the ocean, but then I punched right back in into the action. Some other times it's impossible to find location you want for example, and the cure I needed to shoot on a space station and the cooling chamber. So I knew I didn't have a space station in the back of my pocket. So I needed to do everything on a green screen. which is you know, sometimes you need to do that there's no there's no going around it and you need to plan for it. But be very mindful of these shots because they require a lot of time and a lot of work, 3d modeling, compositing, all that is very labor intensive, and people are not going to be able to do it on a on a short time basis.

So be very respectful of their time and also try to minimize the amount of work that you ask people to do. The other thing you need to be mindful of is everything else around the location, such as a production support, is there enough room to put the equipment in? Can you have the crew stay somewhere warm if you're shooting outdoors, is there a way to lock the equipment overnight so that you don't have to bring everything back in and out every single day of shooting. These things are very important and they all make or break your production. If you can hold the crew and equipment you won't be able To shoot the the shot that you want. So these are as important as the location itself.

Sometimes you'll find the perfect location but everything around it is impossible to handle. And it's not worth the hassle to do it. And always have backup, especially if it's a place where you think there's a chance for you to be kicked out, or there's a chance that somebody is going to walk in and tell you you can't go past a certain hour, you need to have a fallback location because you sometimes will only have access to the equipment, the people the gear only on the one day and you can just cancel that day. So you need to have a place to fall back on