Director’s Blog: Making West Texas Park & Ride

Dec 22, 2017

7 12773

Written by: jasun

When Joe Gage is coming to shoot a movie with you… you have to pull out all the stops. His movies are known for their dialogue that’s as hot as the sex itself. His movies are also known to use multiple locations and specific costumes.. so when he said he wanted the film to open with “a helicopter shot showing the car driving through the Texas desert” and have a scene that took place in an open-air parking lot… none of us really were surprised, we just had to figure out how we were going do it.

We’ve had plenty of drone shots in Titan movies. I’ve used them a bunch of times… starting with the famous “Jail Break” scene in Jail Break, we’ve incorporated drone shots into a LOT of movies to give us a cinematic feel.

We drove out to Palm Springs early the first day of that production run so we could get the quick shot of the car driving under the camera… however, thanks to an accident on the 10, we didn’t arrive until mid afternoon and the wind had picked up enough that we couldn’t get a steady shot. We figured.. “we’re here for 6 days, we’ll find time to shoot it…” And literally every day there was another delay or snag that stopped us from getting that quick 20-second drone shot.

Finally.. on the last day… we drove out deep into the Coachella Valley to grab the shot and yet again, our plans were thwarted by wind, too many cars on a road and a lost cell phone.

So that drone shot that opens the movie… that’s only 20 seconds total… was shot a month later when we came back to Palm Springs.

One of the other challenges was getting a parking garage late at night. Even in very porn-friendly Palm Springs, we weren’t able to find an open air parking garage that would allow us to shoot. So we had to get creative. Our friends at the Jim Support factory where we shot Sling allowed us to use their loading dock.. we lit it with dark blue lights to simulate night (we started shooting at about 10AM) and in post, I added a bunch of cricket sounds and layered it with audio I recorded by literally sitting in an open air parking lot in Glendale one night. The end result was perfect (although shooting a scene in a warehouse without getting boxes in the shot was a huge challenge… we managed to do it). Joe also wanted someone in a CHP uniform. We had a lot of uniforms, but most of them were huge… for men a good 9″ taller than Jeremy Spreadums… we had to get very creative with how we used clips and deceptive angles to make it look like the uniform fit Jeremy. Watch for that scene with Jason Vario and Jeremy Spreadums next week.

One of the scenes called for Matthew Bosch and Dakota Rivers to meet up in a parking lot mid day… we did a bit of a sneak on that, shooting covertly in a rest stop out on the 10. Another scene required a construction site… luckily, we had one of those at our disposal but the house which had been torn down to not much more than the wooden frame) had no electricity. We had to pipe power in from a nearby telephone pole using about ½ mile of power extension cords.