Need Help with location / idea for Short Film

[lukewarmwater]

Hi, Everyone I'm new to the forum. Sorry for being blunt about this but I'm in a bind and was wondering if anyone could help.

So I'm in the pre-production process of shooting a short film. The short film is kind of like a twilight zone story. A little bit of horror/sci-fi, bleak ending.

The story takes place in two locations. A house ( which I have ) and a park/forest.
The story climaxes at the end when the character goes into an environment that is unsafe. The character risks going into the enviornment to get something, but as he goes to get it the environment proves too dangerous and kills hiim. It's not important that it kills him, so much as the character losses a lot. Although I would prefer if it was death.

That is what I need to happen dramatically.
In the context of the story I wrote a cave. And that the character is a security guard/ranger and has gotten a memo that the cave is dangerous, and should be avoided. He goes in to get something and eventually it collapses on him and dies inside.

The problem I have is that it is damn near impossible to shoot on a cave. All caves are either blocked off or tourist attractions. I have thought maybe if I go with the actor and myself and shoot around the tourists, or break into a closed site, but realistically that's not going to happen, and ultimately I'll end up with nothing I can use.

So I am stuck. I either need to figure out how to "fake" a cave Or find a substitute environment that is able to do what the story needs dramatically.

I thought about the character wandering into a closed off building and then getting caught by the police, but it's not dramatic enough.

I thought about the character waking across a rope bridge, and it proving unsafe, but that seems too coincidental.

I have very little money and would prefer a location I am actually able to shoot at. I.E. Public Park, House, etc.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

[WhiteOpus]

are there any abandoned (and very dilapidated) structures near your location? that could work if you want to make the audience believe that the character died because of a collapse. then again, it's going to be a huge risk filming in a building like that because A. it's dangerous and B. the property is most likely private, so you're risking a trespassing fine. You could always find some kind of rock structures on the outskirts of town and make it a boulder that crushes him or some pile of rocks gets loose and falls on him. i dunno. i'm also trying to find a cavelike place to film and it indeed is very difficult to find anywhere that is suitable for a multiple day shoot without being interrupted by tourists or police. is a natural (meaning no other people involved) death something the story requires, or can he get killed by some mysterious being? perhaps the "spirit" of the forest just like sucks his soul out, leaving him a husk of a human. again, i don't know. just had a LOT of coffee today and i'm killing some time. haha.

edit: ask your facebook friends! you'll be surprised at the locations they name off

 

[lukewarmwater]

Thanks for the ideas. I dunno if they will work. If a spirit or "other thing" causes the death it means another element I have to introduce and set up, another thing the audience has to belive.

The problem also, I should have added in my first post, was the character goes into the location in the first place to get something of value. In one draft it was that he first see's silver in the cave, in another it was a dead persons valuables. Like the tombs in an edgar allan poe story.

My first idea was that he goes into a construction site and is a construction worker. After working in the construction he see's gold under a building, that is going to be demolished and goes back just before they get blown up, but it seemed to hard to set up and too coincidental. Also shooting on a construction site will be as difficult as shooting at a cave.

The cave being dangerous, having something valuable inside, and collapsing because he goes into seemed to work on all levels.

There are a lot of rocks, rivers, waterfalls, and cliffs around here that I can shoot at. Just not caves.

And also if I could find something dramatically that would work at a house or easy shootable location I would prefer that too, I just can't picture anything else that would work.

The genre is meant to be a horror, and to me it just doesn't feel like a horror if at the end of the story the character just losses money or is arrested. I also don't want to cheat and have the character fall of a ladder or something convenient like that.

 

[WhiteOpus]

if he's stealing a dead guy's stuff you could make the dead guy's spirit responsible for his death/soul removal. Perhaps he doesn't even have to die, but instead he's just permanently hollow inside, or like psychopathic, or possessed by a demon, or brainwashed or something. his death feels predictable. i think something that leaves his brain totally wiped or skewed would be the most chilling, because then you feel like his greed for stealing things from a dead person is transformed into this force of evil that causes him to become a killer or something. i just like films that leave you sorta hanging, but with the knowledge that there is definitely more to the story after the film is over. i've found that most of my (very low budget) films are best achieved when they depict a mere window into a moment, instead of an entire beginning-to-end type of story. that way you can spend less money, time, effort, etc. AND you create intrigue and engagement with the story.

 

[lukewarmwater]

The story isn't going to have any supernatural elements. It needs to be practical, and somewhat realistic. I just need an alternative to what I have, not a complete rewrite. Thank you though.

 

[PhantomScreenwriter]

If you could manage to find a cave where you could at least film the outside of the cave and the inside of the cave looking out (of the same cave, with the character entering from both angles) then after getting those two shots you could change location to maybe an empty storage shed (of a decent size) and then dress it up so it's dark and the audience can only see pitch black to hide the cheated location but with lighting on the character to make them visible to the audience.

As for a cave in you could create styro-foam versions of rocks that are thrown off camera at the actor, and framed in a way so that you're not seeing the cheated location but just enough for the rocks to be in shot. You could then add point of view shots of the styro-foam versions of rocks being thrown at camera, and then have a shot where the character is lying under the rubble.

You could get lots of real dirt and dust too and cover the styro-foam versions of the rocks with it so when they fall there's dust and dirt bouncing off, as well as dirt and dust poured out of a few buckets off camera so there's dust and dirt falling from the roof of the cheated location after the "rocks" have fallen.

Through the magic of editing you can make the sequence look believable, cutting away at the moments where you can tell that the styro foam rocks hitting the actor are in fact fake (if they bounce off the body or seem light) and to sell all of this happening through the use of sound effects.

 

[reobert]

It's good you already have house for filming which fitted to your film. You can used the cave for tourist buy renting it for just few hours or days just to shoot. But since you budget your money, I go for creating fake cave. There are a lot of techniques to do that and applying such special effects.

 

[sfoster]

There are more caves than you know about.
One of my best friends is the president of the baltimore grotto (caving association)

I don't really know the geography of texas. Out here it's a bit of a drive but west virginia has one of the largest caving networks in the entire world.

Look for a grotto in your area.. you need to talk to someone experienced and ask them about caves. they will know what is a tourist attraction or not