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Filmed 30 days at working mall for free!

D

Dominion Pictures

MALL ROBBERS is my second comedy feature, a sort of sequel to my first comedy feature COUNSELING DAY.
And since I named the story MALL ROBBERS, I needed an actual mall to film it in. But because my budget was less than 40k and I was shooting 16mm film, that left about three bucks for location fees.
So I put together a glossy press kit with newspaper and film festival reviews from my first movie and approached a mall north of Seattle.
Turns out they gave me 30 nights of full access to both the interior and parking lots, all lights, and a security guard to lock and unlock doors for free!
Not only do I have the biggest building within 30 miles as a set piece in my film, but in the spirit of Dawn Of The Dead, Mallrats, and Back To The Future, I now have a mall in one of my pictures!!

You too can do something like this!

Watch the trailer at www.mallrobbers.com
The DVD comes with a 4-hour 'making of' documentary.
 
Thread moved to appropriate forum...

I'm always shocked at how much people are willing to give you for free if you ask really nicely and offer them credits with proof that you'll be able to get those credits in front of an audience. I figured out why by shopping for advertising locally and the prices that newspapers/radio/tv stations charge for reaching a large audience is absolutely exorbitant.

Letting you run around with a camera and spend a little bit of their electricity with a security guard who is probably there already costs a fraction of a half page ad in a newspaper. I see alot of indie productions that are set at a table in one of the crews' houses (I'm just as guilty)... this is so easy to do away with just using a phone call and a smile (and the mindset that we actually do have something to trade them in the way of advertising dollars). A mall is an incredible score though... nice job!
 
Yeah, the link to the COUNSELING DAY trailer is http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=32536719.

There are a handful of clips at www.counselingday.com.

Regarding filming at the mall...it was pretty unreal. I didn't think they'd let us do it, in fact I was writing the script to DIARY OF A JERK expecting to film that one first.
The mall originally had a list of requirements:
-$3 an hour for electricity.
-$18 an hour for security.
-no guns.
-no car chases.
-approval on scripts subject matter.
-resigning store names that appear on screen
-3 million insurance.
-in at 10pm/ out at 5am
-ect.

They dropped all the requirements except the story's subject matter. Pretty awesome.
 
They droed all the reuirements ..........

i cant believe it.. are you an exert of Magic ...........lolz

what was your line of action which forced them to dro all their requirements.


By the way when is the movie getting released and whats the distribution plan i mean self distribution or sales agent or directly distributors.

Regards
 
Well, the reasons why mall management started dropping requirements isn't entirely clear.
I started negotiations by agreeing to everything they asked. We had several meetings with their team, and as they got to know me and my team, they became pretty comfortable with us. The main guy watched my first flick and read the script...he liked both, so was excited about the story (both are PG rated slapstick, so that helped--he wouldn't have allowed a Kevin Smith style comedy).
I planned several gags involving guns and car chases, so I asked if we made sure the public wasn't alarmed, could we do them? They said we could as long as no bad publicity came of it, also asking if we could stage them away from the main boulevard.
Then he lowered the insurance from 3 million to 1 million--which I already had for the production (cost $800), so I just added the mall to the policy and gave them a copy.
Then I asked for specific days we needed to film outside the allowed time...and they agreed to let us film right up to mall hours (9am).
I advised them I would fame the shots to conceal most shop signs...they were fine with that.
After production, I went in to pay the fees for electricity and security. The head dude said he didn't hear of one complaint about us, so not to worry about it (around $4000). I was pretty surprised!

The film has been released. We had four pretty big screenings in my home town, then I released it through my own marketing outlets--email lists from previous customers, indie video stores, Ebay, website, ect.

You can watch the trailer at www.mallrobbers.com
 
Dominion Pictures

Great wrok friend. SO the movie is being screened already. Thats great. I hope it is doing good business.
 
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