It’s the summer of 2010. I’m slightly more fresh-faced than I am now, having yet to discover Beowulf. I’ve just spent a tedious year learning important life skills, like how to move a 650W light without breaking everything, so when the opportunity came up to move to Canada for a month and move lights on a whole other continent, I wasn’t going to turn it down.
The project is called Locked in a Garage Band and it’s a feature film that raised $20,000 on a website called Kickstarter. I met the producer, Victoria Westcott, on Twitter and interviewed her for a podcast. After following the project through to Crowdfunding fruition, I asked whether there might be room on the set for me.
A few months later, I arrived in Vancouver and, about five hours after that, I was in the small(ish) town of Mission, British Columbia (coincidentally the hometown of Cherwell favourite Carly Rae Jepsen).
Victoria was making the film with her sister Jennifer, who is the writer and director of the film. They are both from Vancouver Island, which someone tried to tell me was the same size as Germany (it’s not) but, logistically, it was hard for them to get the top British Columbia actors to go over to the island for the shoot, so they moved production, first to Vancouver, and then to the town of Mission, which seems to mainly be famous for vagrancy. For all its apparent problems with homelessness and drug addiction, Mission turned out to be a quaint little town which didn’t even have a Starbucks.
I spent a few weeks (one of preproduction, two of production and then a few days as a tourist) basically locked in the eponymous garage. It’s a single location set-up: a group of kids who’ve just graduated from high school get locked in their garage when rehearsing for their band and are forced to confront all their issues. In order to pull this off, however, the cast and crew had to live through much of the plot. The garage was like an oven, filled with about fifteen people at any one time and countless burning lights. That’s where pretty much the whole film was shot so, as you can imagine, it’s hard for me to avoid seeing those breeze block walls in my nightmares.
Writer, director, producer, cinematographer, actors, me – we all lived in the house. I never knew who I was going to be sharing my room with (I remember waking up one morning to have Andrew Jenkins, the film’s leading man, informing me that he would be wearing my underwear today) or who I might walk in on in the shower. Sometimes it was the ridiculously attractive actors, at other times it was a member of the resolutely ‘behind the camera’ crew. Whilst it was claustrophobic at times (I occasionally had to make the 40 minute walk to the local cinema just to get some space) on the whole it was remarkably easy to live with.
The reason that this experience in June 2010 comes flooding back to me is that, last week, I attended the Raindance Film Festival world premiere of the film, and finally got to see what all those sweaty shooting days turned into. The answer was a very funny Canadian teen comedy, although that’s somewhat missing the point of my nostalgia. In almost every shot I could see myself (not literally, thank God) crouched off screen serving some, usually useless, function. When the rat scrambles about behind some boxes, I remember making that movement with a stick. When someone opens a business school letter, I remember writing and signing it. When a can of Snapple mysteriously disappears between shots, I remember drinking it.
It’s a small contribution to a film that has required an enormous amount of time and commitment from the Westcott sisters, but, as summer jobs go, this must be pretty much as good as it gets. You can have your Deloitte internships but I’d rather this any day. Even if you only get to be the hand behind a stick that’s pretending to be a rat.