Film Biz: How To Rent Your Home Out To A Vancouver Film Production

VANCOUVER- Are you sick of doing the dishes and cleaning up after your kids and the dog, like me?

I can’t offer a permanent solution to this existential dilemma, but you might be able to temporarily rent out your digs as a filming location to a movie company. If you do you can both pocket some fast cash, and also leave the tidying up to the maids and kitchen staff at the Holiday Inn for a bit, while your house is in process of becoming a legend of the silver screen.

Movies and TV shows will often build standing sets in a studio to shoot their scenes. This approach offers certain advantages: a setting that is perfectly designed to suit the project, and also a large degree of control over the process. However, it is expensive, as labour, lumber and studio space rental doesn’t come cheap these days.

The alternative is to shoot “on location” - on the street, in commercial properties or in private residences – maybe yours. Feature films, TV shows and commercials all use private homes if they can find a suitable fit, and if they are able to strike the right deal with the owners.

A film company’s point person for researching filming sites is the location manager, who will often also send out scouts to find promising places to shoot. Factors scouts consider when hunting for locations include suitability for the script, available parking for crew, accessibility and willingness of the owner and surrounding businesses to co-operate with film crews.

Compensation is negotiable. Those displaced from their homes, or neighbours disrupted by by prep or filming are provided with suitable hotel accommodation.

Alterations to your home may be necessary to make it suit the script, such as putting your furniture into storage and/or repainting your walls, for example. Homes are then restored to the original state once filming is complete.

There are certain pitfalls to renting your home to a movie company. Film and TV production is an industrial activity, which requires many, many people and vast stores of industrial scale equipment. Will your cozy bungalow really accommodate this kind of activity for 14 or 16 hours a day, maybe for a week or two? You should think carefully about that before allowing a film crew into your home.

What is really amazing is how well this unlikely scenario, of cramming film crews into domestic environments, is handled by Vancouver’s location managers and their personnel. Flooring and walls are rigorously protected with rubber location mats and cardboard, so that grips in a hurry can’t damage floors by dragging heavy equipment, for example. In general, the system is so well developed in our city, and our crews are so professional, that these rental arrangements usually operate flawlessly.

Long ago and far away, when I was much younger, and less grumpy about the kids and the dog, I worked on a completely forgettable network TV movie in Santa Cruz, California. Santa Cruz then (and probably now) was a filmic frontier town, a place entirely bereft of skilled crew people.

We shot a script, some weepy story about someone dying of kidney failure, as I recall, almost entirely in one suburban house. There was no cardboard on the floor; there were no location mats; and there really wasn’t anyone working in that house that cared much about it. The crew people were thinking of nothing at any given moment beyond the minutia of their own particular jobs.

When the shoot was over, the muddy brown (formerly ivory) shag carpet, in particular, was almost comically filthy and destroyed. As I packed up my car to drive home, I still remember seeing the owner of the house standing on the street and screaming at the project’s production manager for destroying his place.

This is not – repeat: not -- how we do things here in Vancouver. Far from it.

In homes used as locations here, in addition to the aforementioned cardboard and location mats, boxes of blue surgical booties are prominently set out by entrances, and crew people are made to wear them while working in the house. In practice, fourteen hours into a typical, monstrous day, some crew will stop taking their booties on and off as they enter and leave. You must be prepared for some damage to your home, and do a careful risk/benefit analysis before you rent it out.


So, how can you make your home available to the film industry?

Location managers themselves rely upon certain resources to find suitable homes. One of these is the database of registered homes kept by the BC Film Commission. Interested homeowners can register their homes and submit digital photographs to the BCFC here. This service is free.

Fully accredited location scouts routinely access these BC Film Commission files when searching for suitable locations.

Vision Net BC, created by former locations manager Michael Gazeckas, also offers a home and property registration service aimed at a film industry clientele. For a small fee you can register your property and advertise it on Vision Net’s website. You can register here.

Angus & Associates, the company that manages film productions and promotes locations for Metro Vancouver (formerly known as the GVRD), has a home and property registration service too. Partners Tom Crowe and Mark DeRochers are seasoned ex location managers who also spent years working at the BC Film Commission. They can be contacted through their website.

Around Town

Frankie and Alice, a feature film starring Halle Berry, (also a producer on the project) has started prepping. Based on a true story, it will film around town for seven weeks, wrapping in December.

TV series in full production mode include: Supernatural (season 4) filming until late March of 09; Harper’s Island, until the end of Jan, 09; Psych (season 3); The L Word, the sixth and the final season; Reaper (season 2) until mid-December 09; and Eureka (season 3) until February 09.

Biography

Kevin Brown has been working in the BC film industry for the past 25 years, as a prop buyer, a set decorator and in other capacities too numerous to list. He has sweated blood over some excruciatingly bad television and some pretty awful feature films too in his time -- but hey, it’s a living! A pioneer of the BC industry, he helped set up film commissions and technicians’ unions back in the early days. Now a freelance writer as well, he is covering Vancouver film industry news and views for www.vancouver.com.