[wrd]

If you're thinking about doing like this guy did, please don't.

Film crews are incredibly overworked, underpaid and work in absolutely terrible conditions. Film production is an intricate machine that requires everything to be perfectly in place in order to get a shot and things very frequently go wrong even without random people walking on set and gumming up the works.

Distracting people or touching / moving things can absolutely hold up a shot and bring the entire set to a halt. The result of that is you'll end up keep a very tired crew out for much longer than they need to be. It can also easily cost a production assistant their job.

Film production isn't a secret. You can watch a documentary on it, read about it in forums or even get permission to observe a film shoot where they'll place you safely out of the way. There are much better ways to satisfy this curiosity than just walking onto a set.

[prmoustache]

On the other hand they act like they owned the street and you have no rights to be there.

I have been annoyed by a film crew filming a netflix series for 2 x 5 days this spring around my house and it was fucking annoying. From the screetching tires and the horrible smell of that saab 900 they had chosen for one of the main character while I was on videocalls, to preventing me from actually leave my house and start my motorbike to do some errands and leave cigarette butts in front of my door.

Not a single warning a few days before so I can accomodate nor a compensation for the annoyance. Additionnally it may not be entirely the fault of tge film set but the police would put signs only the night before and tow all cars still parked in the street the next morning. Nice for the people not in town or who simply don't use their car everyday.

[softfalcon]

This literally happened to my neighbour when a film crew came into our neighbourhood.

My neighbour was out of town, off vacationing with their family. They had a large family with several kids, so they had a good 2 or 3 cars parked around the front of their home.

The film crew had mandated that all cars needed to be cleared from the set. So absolutely no cars on the street. They went around asking people to move all their cars down to the school parking lot a couple blocks away. My neighbours weren't home to hear this or even be notified.

The set director (I think that must be who they were cause they yelled a lot at everyone) was cursing at my neighbour's home, waving hands angrily, and called a tow truck to move all of the neighbour's cars. A person came to ask if we knew where they were or had their contact number. We told them they were out of town.

They did not move the cars back. School re-opened after the long weekend, neighbour got fined for parking tickets down at the school. Came back home to missing vehicles, called the cops, freaked out, eventually found their cars down at the school, had to pay over $500 in parking fines, one of their cars had even been towed down to the impound lot for improper parking on a private space.

It was a gigantic mess. Doubt the film crew cares, they were long gone and probably not even in the country by the time my neighbour was capable of filing a grievance with them.

[JackFr]

In NY the film crews out up emergency no parking signs 2-3 days in advance which 1) are issued by the police; 2) describe the time and date of the shooting and name of the production; 3) list the name of a production assistant in charge and a cell phone number. Seems like a pretty good compromise.

[etskinner]

How does that fix the issue where someone is on a week-long vacation? Seems like a letter a few weeks in advance is they least they could do.

[jffry]

In many large cities, there's shorter-than-a-week minimum notices for street closures. For example in DC, no-parking permits have to be posted at least 72 hours in advance.

If you are going out of town for longer than that amount of time, you either need to find somewhere you can pay to park your car, or you need to get a neighbor or friend to check in on it periodically and move it if there's a sign.

This responsibility is the only cost of using public space to store your car, aside from a nominal annual vehicle registration fee. Seems fair to me.

[mynameisvlad]

Most big cities have the shorter notice periods because they also generally have maximum parking time limits. In Seattle, for instance, you have to move your car every 72 hours if you're parked on the street.

Is it enforced? No. But technically, it's there.

[btilly]

The "improper parking on a private space" example in the story a few posts up strongly suggests that the car was parked in their own driveway. And yet the car was towed and impounded.

Even in the event of a street closure, I expect that a car parked on my own driveway is fine. And since I'm not using public space to store it, your "public space to store your car" comment is not applicable.

[jenny91]

In NYC you generally have to move your car twice a week due to street cleaning. No way you could park for weeks without issue.

[jjulius]

That is also commonplace.

[NikolaNovak]

Yeah; I live in Toronto, and that's the closest thing that gets me to road rage. Streets are randomly closed for extended period of time, and everybody involved acts like... unprintables. Which, I get, is a self-feeding process - public members are unprintables to police and security and film makers, who then in turn are pre-emptive unprintables to anybody. But gawd, it's an awful experience that's difficult to describe to people who haven't lived it - it's my home on my street with the shop I go to and school my kids go to, and my car or my bus station I take to my work, and suddenly we can't use it, are third-class citizens on our own street, with no rights or permission or ask, and not for some emergency infrastructure process, but so that Jaw Sharks On a Plane 27 can be filmed :-<

I have some empathy to the film crew, but while I'm all about practical effects in some ways, the city neighbourhoods should be CGId ASAP. This isn't a tiny-non-issue. Think about all the movies and shows on all the networks on all the streaming services. The 37 seasons of NCIS and 32 seasons of Law & Order and ten million episodes of all the crappy shows - every how many scenes in all of them closing down some neighbourhood somewhere for the shot of actor walking down the street.

[rubylark]

Isn't the issue with your city, then? It's not like the film crew just annexed your street without asking anybody. Your city council approved it, likely after several public hearings. At least that's how it worked in my small hometown 25 years ago when a major Hollywood film shot there. They made a mess scattering dish soap on the streets and river front to look like snow and closed a public park for a few weeks. Lots of people were angry, but at the city council, not the camera people. The film crew only did it after a bunch of people in charge told them they could.

[TremendousJudge]

>Your city council approved it, likely after several public hearings

“But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”

“Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”

“But the plans were on display . . .”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”

[_benedict]

You're assuming they worked within the bounds the city agreed with them. I encountered a filming location near me recently, and the crew absolutely tried to restrict my movements beyond what was legally permitted, and did so rudely - presumably to appear authoritative, so that I would simply obey them.

[prmoustache]

Well the film crew were still rude with the people, most of them having no idea what was happening before seeing the equipment nor having experience with how they operate.

[anigbrowl]

They are actually renting the street and are paying the city for it. Sure there are guerilla film crews that just show up and do stuff, but that tends to be very lightweight, in and out quick, or using a location with so little traffic that it won't really impinge.

However, it's really the city's responsibility to notify everyone, unless otherwise negotiated; when film crews do all that it's generally a courtesy thing. Sometimes the crew wants to do that in advance but the city will ding them for taking the initiative.

Film shoots are a big kickback to the police department. Hiring cops for security is required contractually and it's a sweet assignment because overtime is inevitable. Those jobs go to cops who are close to retirement because pensions are usually calculated as a % of final 2 years' pay. Smart crews also hire or plan their own security because the cops just show up to eat and flirt with the actresses and can't be relied on to watch gear.

Location scouts get paid the big bucks to not only know where to shot but how and to grease all the appropriate wheels.

[nulbyte]

> However, it's really the city's responsibility to notify everyone, unless otherwise negotiated; when film crews do all that it's generally a courtesy thing.

Is this really common? If so, I'm glad we have rules here that say otherwise. If you want a permit to close a street in my city, it's your responsibility to notify residents and businesses affected. If you don't, the city might not issue it. And even if they do, if a car is in your way because you didn't notify folks in advance, the police will happily stand around to watch what happens. Here, our tax dollars go toward using the roads, not closing them. You pay for notices, you pay for the barricades, you pay for the guards. You even pay for the police, standing around, laughing at you for failing to follow through on your obligation.

[anigbrowl]

The reason it's sometimes left to the city is that they don't want the production company to start taking the initiative before the commencement of the permit period; they might ask for more than they're entitled to by the permit, or city officials might not like them treading on their toes. Recall that the production company is paying for the privilege, and it's the city that sets the prices and conditions.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'm guessing this varies a lot by location and what the local authorities are like.

I live in a turn of the century neighborhood with a lot of craftsman bungalows, four squares, victorians, etc. So there's usually a couple smaller film productions every summer.

They're generally quite considerate. If they're doing an exterior shot they'll only block people going through for the brief moment they're actually filming. They're organized and tidy other than yes there's gonna be a ton of generator cables running around. Knitting seems to be the big hobby for staff waiting for the next shot.

I talked with the owner of the convenience store about this stuff one time. Some production was shooting across the corner and liked the look of his store and wanted to use it as a backdrop for a few things. So they worked out a simple deal where they'd repaint his entire exterior in trade for the rights to film. He was totally happy with the situation and said they didn't really disrupt his business.

I wonder what ends up making the difference?

[627467]

How is this topmost comment?

> If you're thinking about doing like this guy did, please don't.

The author starts by stating:

> The area did not seem to be closed off so obviously I went in to take a closer look.

And

> I was probably there for around 30 minutes or so until someone finally asked me if I was part of the crew and then kindly asked me to leave which I did.

Does one need to go through life like they are stepping on eggshells?

[jjulius]

>How is this topmost comment?

My guess would be that you're interpreting the comment as, "Please don't accidentally wander onto a film set out of ignorance," whereas my interpretation (and perhaps that of those who have voted for it) of the comment was, "Please don't be inspired by this to seek out and actively trespass on a closed film set."

They're two slightly different things.

[polartx]

I would say the title is disingenuous the same way clickbait is. A suggested alternate could be, “the time I wandered around somebody’s worksite until the inconvenience of my presence outweighed the crews’ Canadian-level non-confrontational demeanor”. But that’s not as grabby.

[sam1r]

Right! I was waiting for the “I’m now on this film, officially launching in 2023” drop.

I completely agree. Reading the title, and then reading the article, I was quite underwhelmed.

[hyperhopper]

Exactly. "Social engineering" implies he did something to make his happen. He didn't do any social engineering, it's just that nobody cared.

[EUROCARE]

Are you a machine? This is how machines act. "NO BOUNDARY DETECTED - PROCEEDING!" without any context awareness.

Why not instead be considerate and respectful for others' work by not ruining it? Road workers don't always have perfect boundaries and yet I hope you don't just go step into their paint while reciting your constitutional rights. This is the same thing without the paint.

[mrob]

The work was not ruined. The film crew were working in a public space that the blog's author apparently had every right to be in. If they wanted to avoid any possibility of interaction with the public then they could have built a private set, but filming on a public street was presumably cheaper. I don't see why an uninvolved third party should have their rights curtailed just to save some corporation money.

[EUROCARE]

Public areas can be very easily closed off if you ask the local government, most have a form ready for it, it's very usual - and at that point you have absolutely zero rights to be there, it's trespassing. It's most likely this was the case there as well, they wouldn't be able to setup the whole shop there otherwise. And it's not cheaper, it's actually much more expensive - but the result is better.

Corporations aren't the only ones making movies, btw. And the whole "but my rights" talk when it's about a person who could've just taken a different street makes me laugh, nothing else. Is that really how you think about your day to day life, or is it just a post-facto rationalization?

[mrob]

If they really had the legal right to exclude the blog author, then they also had the obligation to put up signs or barriers to exclude them.

[EUROCARE]

And that's the point where contextual awareness and respect for others come into play.

[Kalium]

I've accidentally wandered onto a film set before. When it's in a public space it's not always obvious what's going on or that you shouldn't be there. I had no idea why a generally quite busy part of town was almost entirely devoid of traffic that day. There were no clear signs or ways for me to know what was going on until I talked to a random guy and he told me.

Perhaps your ability to detect and understand context is simply vastly superior to mine.

[munk-a]

Especially when they're shooting on one side of a street near dusk (quite common for the good light) in downtown... yea, it's easy to assume you can walk on the other side of the street before realizing that the crew has shut down the entire block since they're capturing shots across the open street and all those randos walking on the other side of the street are extras.

That said, they'll often just let you wander across as long as you're not wearing distracting clothing.

[EUROCARE]

Accidents happen, and I am not perfect too. I live in a city where film sets in public spaces are an (almost) everyday thing, so I also wandered into a film set few times. But I'd never do it on purpose - when you meet them at a bar you'll see they really do work hard, and that random strangers at the set are a really big problem they face daily.

[627467]

It's funny how the robot argument can apply to anything and the contrary: are all filming crews overworked robots unable to willingly decide to engaging in casual conversation with a stranger who happened to be in a public area before it was cordoned off?

[EUROCARE]

It's not about the film crew being overworked robots who can't talk, it's about accidentally ruining their work without even realizing it by walking into the middle of filming. This dude got lucky that he didn't ruin anything. The next 1000 dudes who will try based on his blogpost won't be so lucky - and I bet the film crews won't be as happy talking to them.

[marssaxman]

The film crew got lucky that they didn't ruin anything by failing to secure the location for their shoot. If a film crew wants to exclude the public from a public space, it is on them to make that happen. J. Random Bystander has no responsibility to know or care what a film crew is hoping to accomplish.

[boomchinolo78]

It's the most human of things to seek boundaries. Maybe in the thoroughly schooled and desocialized humans it is not a thing

[thebradbain]

It’s clear that the OP is curious, which was ultimately harmless in this case.

But as someone who lives in Los Angeles and sees this all the time — and has many friends who work on sets — you absolutely should not do this. Sets almost always “look like they’re open.” That doesn’t mean they are, it’s because there’s a-million-and-one things being done on the set by _skilled_ people who are being paid near minimum wage, working late, getting yelled at, and skipping meals and still can’t get everything that needs to be done done (Hollywood is lucrative once you get above the ground floor, but those early levels are brutal in every part of the industry).

How would you feel if someone just came and sat next to you working on a PR in a coffee shop and kept asking questions about everything you were doing? Now imagine you were as exhausted as the people on set, and there were dozens of people asking you the same question. Because this happens all the time here in Los Angeles.

Again, totally agree what they do is interesting! But they’re not doing it for you, and they’re in the middle of working.

Do you walk into the middle of a construction site when a crew is working because you’re interested in that process, too?

[djur]

Bystanders standing around watching and commenting on construction work is so common that there's a name for a specific type of guy who does that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umarell

Construction sites are often on private property and in any case have clearly marked boundaries, though. I don't think it's unreasonable for people doing work in a public space to expect and handle a certain amount of polite curiosity from the public.

[thebradbain]

Yeah, my analogy could have been more clear, I think Umarells are a fun cultural phenomenon.

I meant that even in a public space for construction, however, spectators usually aren't allowed to wander into the middle of active construction, bumping shoulders with the workers. Staying off to the side is fine – as is also normal when watching a set in action! It's just the folks that get in the middle of a site who have no business being there (or worse, try to pretend to be an authorized background extra and ruin a shot because they have no idea where they're supposed to stand) that disrupt things.

[jayd16]

Its a bit different for someone "thinking of doing this" and seeking it out.

[tmp_anon_22]

"They didn't say no"

Is not by itself justification to do a thing.

[rascul]

It's not justification not to do a thing either.

[jacquesm]

I've lived in Toronto and more than once accidentally found myself on a badly demarcated set near the Carpet Factory (which is used every other week for a shoot it seems because filming in Canada is cheaper than in the USA and it is large enough that you can pan a camera without immediately having a couple of modern buildings in view).

The degree to which this inconvenienced the locals was quite high, we didn't get any compensation at all for this use of the space that we were already paying for and more than once were unable to leave or enter the building because some hotshot director wanted to do things all over again.

Whether film crews are underpaid and overworked or not is really none of my concern, it is up to them to stand up for their rights and whether they work in terrible conditions or not I can't verify but I can tell you that what they spent on catering in a day probably dwarfs the budget of some African countries to feed thousands of times more people (and don't get me started on the amount of stuff they threw away afterwards).

So if someone accidentally walks on to a set then that's just too bad. Some people have a life and/or a job and that counts as well.

[Cd00d]

It's possible you are compensated for this though. It's not unlikely that the shoot pays your locality for the inconvenience and in turn your taxes are lower than they may otherwise be.

[softfalcon]

I live in Canadian city, I know some of the officials for my city who manage the budgeting and scheduling for film crews in our city. I also know some of the music and film production studios that are hired out for these shoots. We are also one of the primary cities for filming in Canada.

I know for a fact that we subsidize film production into our city. Us tax payers literally pay money to the film companies to subsidize their costs. They do not pay us or our city. The idea is that this would promote more use of local businesses. It does not usually work out that way though.

A bunch of investigative reporting has been done in our local news that indicates that the majority of the companies filming here do not even hire local businesses, even going as far as to have their food frozen and flown in with their gear because they can treat it as a subsidized cost.

In short, they frequently do not help our community, they actively tie up our streets, don't employ local businesses, and exploit our tax system to make a profit on their shoots. Never underestimate corporate greed and its ability to subvert tax laws for their own gain.

To make matters worse, from the folks I know who run local film, recording, catering, etc, they indicate that they have to aggressively cut their prices down and make almost no profit because the corporations hiring them are unscrupulous in negotiation. If they don't cave to their demands, they corporation walks away and brings in their own stuff from outside the province/Canada and writes it off as further subsidized costs.

[Cd00d]

Thank you for your comment. I had no idea, and appreciate the correction and lesson.

My old neighborhood in Brooklyn always had filming, and my current town is on its third movie shot on main st so far this year - I wonder if those are usually subsidized too.

[mynameisvlad]

> The idea is that this would promote more use of local businesses. It does not usually work out that way though.

Great Youtube video on this topic, especially since you're likely talking about Vancouver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU

[ausbah]

isn't another reason tourism? see cool place in a movie and people want to come?

[jacquesm]

That definitely wasn't the case.

[krisoft]

> If you're thinking about doing like this guy did, please don't.

idk. Obviously don't be in other people's way, don't climb fences, don't lie to security, don't "social engineer" your way in, and if someone asks you politely to leave leave. This is in fact what has happened. Once they figured out that he doesn't belong they asked him to leave and he left.

But if it is true what he writes the set was just a public street and he just walked up to them unimpeded. I don't see a problem with that. If it is a problem for the crew they should get fences and security to block people's way.

[garyfirestorm]

I don’t understand what exactly did this guy do wrong. He simply observed and chatted with someone and reported what he saw. When someone asked to leave, he left. What’s the problem here exactly?

[wrd]

Walking onto a set without permission is inconsiderate and disruptive because the crew is working very, very hard to make something happen and his presence isn't helpful. He effectively got lucky that he didn't mess something up and accidentally force the crew to work longer and harder than they have to. There's a reason the entire job of some production assistants is just to keep random people off set.

[rhoeft]

The title kinda makes it sound like he tricked someone to let him on a set, but if you read the story he was watching from a distance and then they started setting up where he was standing. He just stood still until he was asked to move. He employed the same "social engineering" tactics as a frightened hare.

[rascul]

> He effectively got lucky that he didn't mess something up and accidentally force the crew to work longer and harder than they have to.

You got that backwards. It's the film crew that got lucky, since they apparently didn't provide any indication that he shouldn't be in a place he is otherwise allowed to be.

[tjs8rj]

Film productions don’t do a good job of engendering good will. Too frequently have they popped up on my street out of no where and tried to prevent me from walking to my home because they are filming in front of it. Unless they are compensating people for the headache they cause, their not much more than an annoyance to a community they don’t even live in.

[IncRnd]

> Film production isn't a secret. You can watch a documentary on it, read about it in forums or even get permission to observe a film shoot where they'll place you safely out of the way.

From the article: All in all if you ever get the chance to observe a film crew in operation I highly recommend it. It is a better "making of" experience than any professionally produced featurette or documentary.

> There are much better ways to satisfy this curiosity than just walking onto a set.

Next time consider putting the set in a private location instead of literally in a public square. Everyone gets the benefit of entering such a public location.

[mrandish]

> It is a better "making of" experience than any professionally produced featurette or documentary.

This shouldn't be true but, sadly, it probably is. Many "Making of"-type docs and featurettes used to actually show interesting things about how the film was made. As someone with extensive experience in video and film production, I always found these fascinating. In fact, seeing some of these as a kid strongly influenced the fact I worked in the technical end of production.

However, for at least the past decade, outside of a few trade-specific publications, the vast majority of such docus feature very little that's not obvious about how something was made. These things now focus almost exclusively on celebrity actors because they have the broadest appeal to the mass market public and such docus are funded by the distributing studio's marketing dept.

The rare exceptions are some massive-budget, effects heavy, blockbusters which already have huge fandoms where the marketers have enough budget and perceived interest to fund the creation of real behind-the-scenes, making-of content. A good example is some of content released around The Lord of the Rings trilogy which actually focused on individual aspects of production not directly involving the actors.

As someone with a lot of production experience, I should add that I disagree with the idea that "just walking onto a set and watching" is a good way to learn anything - or even very interesting. I have a tween who was fascinated by movie production, until I actually took her to some movie sets where she got to experience just how slow and boring the process can be to watch. Hours of rigging, lighting and camera tests for two minutes of shooting, which you often can't clearly see from most places on the set other than directly behind the camera, and it's rare to be able to hear any significant dialog unless you're almost in the shot. Frankly, even I find visiting a set as an observer pretty boring (other than seeing old co-workers and friends), and I actually understand and like the arcane technical aspects of production like lens focal lengths, color temps, etc. I'd much rather watch a well-produced, insightful docu which shows the gear and setups being used edited together with through-the-camera results and narrated by the technical crew when they aren't busy actually working. Unfortunately, that kind of content is all-too-rare these days and most featurettes called "Making-of..." are 90% celebrity actor/director interviews focused on the marketing team's talking points about the film slapped over a little behind-the-scenes B-roll.

[analyst74]

> Film crews are incredibly overworked, underpaid and work in absolutely terrible conditions.

People get into the arts by choice, nobody chooses to work in films because they're starving. It's weird to feel sorry for people who get to do their dream jobs.

> Film production is an intricate machine that requires everything to be perfectly in place in order to get a shot and things very frequently go wrong even without random people walking on set and gumming up the works.

I've been on filmsets and have the opposite impression. While they have a script that describes the set, most of it is actually improvised. As long as you don't get into the shot, or disrupt people doing work, you are not affecting the production.

[Hnaomyiph]

Lots of people choose their industry.

I have heard endless complaints from fellow devs about being overworked and burnt out.

I think it’s okay to point out when conditions are rough even if you’re getting paid to do the thing you wanted to do.

[andrew_]

As the author responded to you on your comment on their post; they did none of the things you're baselessly accusing them of. Bad form.

[gaws]

We get it. You already made this comment: https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2022/07/that-time-when-i-acc...

The author responded:

> In case it was not obvious from the text, I did not do either of these things. No-one else should either.

[TheBlerch]

Appreciate a good film production documentary recommendation. Any suggestions? My partner worked in film and described sets - love to learn more about how a larger production functions. I think good film production teams require incredible organization and coordination skills and processes.

[SkipperCat]

Agreed.

I don't know why but for some reason, more people feel like they need to be the main character in an adventure. Maybe it's TikTok or who knows what. Either way, I'm sure if some rando walked into their life and started messing with their work, they'd be quite miffed.

I live in NYC and I see film crews all the time. I love the fact that it happens here because it's one of those things that makes NYC so neat. But it's like the zoo. You're encouraged to watch from a distance but please don't jump into the animal's enclosure.