Filming “No Exit” Short Film for Nashville Film Institute

Day 01 — I’m helping students at Nashville Film Institute complete their final exam short film. With the rain came a beautiful sunset and rainbow which I encouraged the cast and crew to check out. Don’t show me a beautiful sunset, God, because I’ll get distracted.

We had a walkaway lunch after midnight and went to After Five Pizza because Waffle House interiors are closed.

Day 3 — We wrapped Friday at 5:30 AM; long shoot considering I officially started each day no less than 2 hours before call time, which was 6 PM on day three. That’s just me pulling the van out of the driveway, not including the time to pull batts off chargers, and packing up the van with the batts and DIT. Then there’s about 1.5 hours of driving to set, followed by another 1.5 hours back home to bookend each day. Walkaway lunch, by the way. Now I need a few days to recoup and reset my circadian rhythm. My feet are sore. Also, I took a nap in my van at a truckstop at the halfway point returning home…and the seats can’t recline so I’m totally sore all over.

But, oh boy, did I have a fun time filming No Exit with everyone!

We finished strong on our final day. We got caught up, got all the effects and stunt gags we needed to acconplish. Everyone did a great job accomodating everyone else and we all just took care of each other. I’m not necessarily a fan of horror movies, especially slashers, but I am a huge fan of making movies with awesome people!

This post, in particular, is a special shout out to the awesome SFX crew — Justin, Mike, and Mattison — for going above and beyond with their work on such a tight schedule, and delivering killer results. Y’all are outstanding. Mattison was also doubly fantastic at wrangling stuntwork and standing in for Anna.

Thank you Hillary for being the bestest friend and bestest AD ever. Thanks to Doug and the sound dept for playing well with the camera dept and being so cool under pressure. Thanks to Jonah, Emma, Robert, Chris, and Eric, for being great crew. Thanks to Anna, Addy, and Robbie, for being a great cast. And special extra thanks to producers Don and Walter, and writer/director Joey, for having me be there DP on such a wild and cool project. I love all y’all, and I hope you students learned a lot hanging with us old pros.