It’s been a while since I posted an update on The Third Age. In previous entries, I discussed the origin of The Third Age, and the first step, casting. To catch you up, The Third Age is a sci-fi webseries that I co-created. We’ve been working on it for two years, and are getting ready to launch the show on November 17, after which point new episodes will air weekly, and updates will be appearing here weekly as well, detailing the production process.
Last time I discussed casting. This time, I’m going to talk about locations.
One of the greatest challenges facing us on every shoot of The Third Age was finding locations for all the varied settings of our story. After 30 shooting days, we’ve exhausted basically all the favors that were around at the start of the film, but have luckily made some new friends along the way who’ve helped The Third Age find a home.
One of the toughest things facing any filmmaker, but particularly the independent filmmaker, is the need to balance the ideal space you imagine and the reality of the space that you have. And that often means making compromises and trying to figure out the minimum of what’s necessary to convey the points you want to make.
The question that arises then is where is the line? When you’re getting down to the wire and need a location, it can be easy to say "this is a room, let’s just use it." And, that’s why a lot of the scenes in the series take place in either voids or plastic spaces that we could easily build.
In our story, one of the major locations is the offices and labs of pharmaceutical mogul Jerrod Woolf. In an ideal world, we’d have a large office, full of the kind of details that enhance the themes of the story, but that's not always a possibility.
Luckily, we’ve had a bunch of people help us out with finding spaces that have looked great on film. Here are some of our favorite spots:
Bayard Studios – We’ve worked with the owner of the studio, Kevin Foong, on a few things, and he’s been kind enough to let us use his studio from time to time. It’s a huge open space, painted black, with some ancillary spots off the sides. In this space, we created a psychological testing room, Jerrod Woolf’s den, and used the vast open space for some very cool dream sequence subjective stuff.
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