Life on the Road
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Before you begin packing, sit in lotus position and repeat the following mantra: t-shirts and underwear, T-shirts and underwear. Then, pack the aforementioned items as deep as your luggage will allow. Six-day weeks are the norm on independent shoots, and you really don't want to spend every one of those days off doing laundry. If you have a sufficient number of t-shirts and underwear, you can get through up to two weeks without having to do laundry. Jeans can work for more than one day, and shirts can sometimes as well, as long as the T-shirt underneath is clean. I usually pack an extra T-shirt into my bag even when I'm shooting at home, so I can change in the middle of the day if it gets too sticky.
As a producer, there are certain things I usually insist on when looking for crew accommodations. Because of bad experiences in the past, I always check out the hotel or motel my crew will be staying at before we go on the road. If I wouldn't stay there, I wont put my crew there.
"Clean and safe" is the mantra I use before choosing housing for my cast and crew. If that sounds easy enough, you haven't spent much time on the road.
One of the experiences that shaped my opinion was on a film called The Bet, on which I was the AD. We were shooting in Upstate New York near Purchase, and for weeks before the shoot, the line producer and I would take trips up to look f or a good place for our crew. Unfortunately, there were no good places within a half-hour of where we would be shooting, and we felt that anything farther would be too much of an imposition on the crew. Also, no one place was able to accommodate our entire cast and crew. As such, we wound up taking two places.
My temporary abode was called "Mick's Motel," and measured up to the above-mentioned standard only if you found the right room. My room was clean, albeit with a minimum of hot water. The DP was not so lucky. He and his girlfriend, who was my second AD, had a room that had a serious bug problem the first night, We moved them to another room, where there were no bugs but an undetermined odor.
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