If There's a Hell Below

After a too-quiet period this Fall, we’re thrilled to update you on the steady march of IF THERE' A HELL BELOW.

The film is now in the final phases (throes?) of post-production, with final work on credits, color, and sound mixing taking place. Our cut landed at 93 minutes, we’re happy to say, giving us a film that’s tight and eminently programmable (hint, hint).

  Producing a feature for the smallest of budgets is a daunting task--though of course thousands of crazy-brave souls do it every year. We encountered long-expected challenges as well as surprise obstacles we never anticipated. We also were blessed with enormous generosity from expected and unexpected places, as hundreds of people offered financial support, labor, ingenuity, and even emergency rescue services.

    And how do we feel now that this phase is nearly at a close? Frankly, pretty darn good. We’re the least impartial audience possible, but as a team we’re very proud of the movie. It’s not without it’s flaws--trust us, there are a million small things we wish we could go back in time to do differently--but on the whole we think we put together something special.

That said, a film sitting on a hard drive or reel is really only half of the final product. It only comes to life when it comes into contact with an audience. A film is less a thing than a chemistry experiment. And while we’ve given it lots of thought (and hope and worry) we honestly don’t know how that experiment is going to go. But we’re eager to find out…

  Keep an eye on this space to hear about our festival submission process, upcoming backer reward deliveries, and other surprises.

(And be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.)

So, we made it.

It being the movie. As well as “back home alive.”

Creating a feature film on a miniscule budget and blisteringly fast schedule is bound to lead to challenges, compromises, and heartaches but also some inspired moments. We found all of these in ample supply.

Some of the challenges?

-Our camera needed to be replaced mid-shoot.

-Our “hero lens” (the lens we planned on shooting most of the movie) did not work from Day 1.

-Our motorhome (essential when filming a good 45 minutes from any place with electricity or running water) had several catastrophic problems.

-Our entire approach to filming driving scenes had to be reinvented on the fly due to unforseen technical challenges.

-Our picture car got two flat tires simultaneously on a road that does not exist on maps.

-Our director walked into an electric fence.

But of course, we experienced an even greater measure of good fortune.

-Local guardian angels came to our aide again and again (including that double-flat situation)

-All of the location owners were incredibly generous and understanding of our “evolving” schedule (we were substantially behind).

-The food in the Tri-Cities was pretty good.

-No snake bites.

-The weather was almost uniformly perfect

-Most critically, our cast and crew rallied valiantly, inspirationally in the face of every obstacle.

We’re thrilled with the footage (and sound) we got out there and are undaunted by the long but rewarding process of editing our 40+ hours into a stellar film. Can’t wait to share more with you along the way…

203 of you decided that you wanted to see this film get made--and together you made it happen. We are now green-lit to begin production on IF THERE'S A HELL BELOW.

You did your part, now it's time for us to do ours. Thanks for passing off the baton. In a few short months, we'll be handing it back to you as we will need your help spreading the word about our then-finished movie!

Thank you again. We are overwhelmed by your support and more determined than ever to make this film something truly special. With gratitude,

Nathan and the rest of the IF THERE'S A HELL BELOW team

We're 48 hours from the end of our campaign and just $776 away from our final Stretch Goal.

We've hit our primary goal!

I want to emphasize is how incredibly grateful we are. We have 181 unique supporters who are backing this movie, and I know maybe 50 of you personally. The sense that we might just have an audience for this thing when it's finished is really exciting.

Today we can finally announce the launch of an event that’s going to make this whole crowdfunding experience even more incredible: THE FUNDER GAMES!

  Regional Fundraising Teams competing for the premiere of IF THERE’S A HELL BELOW. Yes, the grand prize winning team will have the premiere held in their chosen town!

Meet the teams:

Our Seed & Spark crowd-funding page is now live! Take an in-depth look at our film project, the exciting incentives at every contribution level, and this innovative new crowd-funding and audience-building platform. 

We can only make this film with your help. Follow our project (there's no obligation to contribute) and spread the word. 

HM,

Please see my notes and resubmit this report by 1800 tomorrow.

IF THERE’S A HELL BELOW

by Matthew and Nathan Williams

Abe spotted the sign for Arco and drifted into the right lane.

Weren't they owned by BP? Or was that Amoco? He could never keep it straight. Abe had determined to boycott BP since the whole Gulf spill mess, but the tangle of subsidiaries and partners was hard to keep straight.  Plus, even he’d admit, he tended to be a little intellectually lazy with stuff like this.

What the hell. One of these days he was going to get a Leaf or one of those other electric whips when the price came down and they added a few more recharging stations back home in Wicker Park.

His gas allowance for this assignment was pitiful. Fifty bucks a day. And of course he had to take his own beat up Jeep out here—the one he really didn’t need for city driving but it was mom’s and since she passed he couldn’t bear to sell the old thing.

He took the turn-off, rolled gently through the stop-sign and hooked a right. The gas station was about a hundred yards down, across from a Jack in the Box—another business to which Abe extended his all-powerful personal boycott, ever since they put those four kids in the ground with E coli back in 1993. That one he didn’t have to worry about forgetting. There were ideals, and then there was self-preservation.

Abe steered over to an open pump, stopped the car, and hopped out. The station was plenty busy. As he watched the numbers on the pump turn he could feel a few cold pairs of eyes and wondered how much he stood out in a place like this.  Was he just an ordinary interloper or a visitor from Mars?

But this country was always surprising. He’d find himself in the most desolate county in Wyoming, and behind the counter selling him cigarettes would be a middle-aged Cambodian woman.  It was always in flux, always agitating people from south to north and back again, from the coasts to the center and from the center to the coasts. Was California the fastest growing state or the fastest shrinking? Whichever it was it would be the other soon enough. Black folks had fled the South for generations and were now streaming back. His own uncle’s wife Sandy had sworn up and down for decades how she’d never step foot south of Pittsburgh and then suddenly here they were announcing they’d bought the cutest little bungalow on the Carolina coast. Industrial cities hollowed out and then were flooded again with bike-riding programmers. It was a perpetual motion machine of people looking for something better just down the road.

In some places, change was more glacial, and this patch of dirt just over the horizon from the Rockies certainly seemed like one of them. Not the sort of place Abe typically went hunting for a story. But this one, the one that at first seemed like a hoax, the one that he doubted and poked and nurtured for weeks, this one might just be worth it. If it was half as big as he hoped, it could break his career wide open.

The pump clicked to a halt. Abe didn’t even look at the total. More money he didn’t have. But if this trip panned out? Shit. A job with a real magazine? A book deal? Appearances on cable news? “Happy to be here, Rachel… Anytime, Chris… You know who to call, Ed…” It was about time he enjoyed a little success. He’d paid his dues.

But for now he was getting ahead of himself. The story out here wasn’t exactly a sure thing. And if it fizzled, as so many others had, he’d have just another year writing about police abuse, striking teachers, predatory landlords, health code violations at trendy restaurants. All that hyper-local crap.

He hopped back in his Jeep and quite unexpectedly found himself face to face with a serious-looking woman sitting in the passenger seat. 

Odd.

He startled, ever so briefly. But weirder shit had happened to him. After a beat: “Come on, lady... What are you doing?”

She simply stared back at him, as if evaluating him somehow.

Abe looked around. He didn’t want to get in an altercation with a stranger in a place like this. He stayed deliberately calm and polite. “Ma’am, I really have to ask you to get out of my car.”

No response. He glanced her over, his journalistically-wired brain taking in a thousand details at once. She was casually but smartly attired. Closer to plain-clothes cop than meth head con artist. Didn’t wear a wedding ring—or any jewelry for that matter. If she had a larger motive it wasn’t on her face.

“If you need a ride, I’ll make a call for you. A friend who can pick you up or something? I’ve got to meet somebody up the road or else I’d offer you a ride. Sorry.”

She looked him over for a second, made a quick decision—about what, he couldn’t tell—and turned to face forward. “Just keep driving. We’ll find a place to talk.”

 “Can we talk here? Maybe across the street at the, uh, Jack in the—“

“No.”

“Are you… somebody I should know?”

Instead of answering she lifted one of her boots—he now noticed she was wearing yellow cowboy boots under her jeans—up on his dashboard. Whoever she was, she didn’t lack confidence.

Mr. Hill,

Enclosed is the report you requested on the subject. Please direct how you would like to proceed.

-RLS

It's something of a surprise to realize Chris Messina and I have known one another for over a decade. We met in film school in 2003--feels like just yesterday--and the first thing I noticed was his talent. In fact, I knew him initially as a friendly rival, making work of such surprising quality and ingenuity that it challenged me to step up my own. His eye, sense of mood and rhythm, and intuitive grasp of the relationship between sound and image were apparent immediately—one of his very first class exercises (MELO) won him an Eastman Kodak Cinematography Award and a trip to Romania (I was a little envious).

Both inclined to keep our own counsel, we took a few months to get to know one another, but competitive feelings soon dissipated. Beyond similarities in taste (“What’s your favorite Fellini?”) we found we shared deep sensibilities about the medium itself. In fact--speaking only for myself--I’d go so far as to say our dialogues, our film viewing, and our collaborative filmmaking were a joint process of discovering and defining those sensibilities. Who I am as a filmmaker owes a great deal to Chris--along with a handful of other close relationships forged in that period.

And then there are the films. From my first post-dropout 16mm short, AN UNCLOUDED DAY, to our most recent, THINGS LEFT BEHIND, Chris has been a frequent, critical collaborator, while remaining an exceptional filmmaker on his own (winning First Prize for Doc Short at the Rhode Island Film Festival among numerous other honors). The choice to deploy Chris’s talent goes beyond friendship (wisely, he would not consider asking me to serve as his DP!) but is more than just objective calculation. Because of that innate shared understanding of the work—how one image leads to another, how the viewer finds meaning or emotion in a composition, the feel and pace of a camera move—we have at times an almost unspoken ability to communicate, to see the same movie as it is taking shape amidst the chaos of production. I suppose the best word for it is trust.

I've worked with a number of exceptional cinematographers that I would love to work with again. I wouldn’t even try to compare their talents. But I can say that as we embark on IF THERE’S A HELL BELOW, nothing will fill me with as much confidence as seeing Chris Messina huddled behind the viewfinder the first time I call “action.”

We're already hard at work making sure this film is going to be special. I hope you continue to follow us along the journey.

-Nathan

Last week's post was our raison d'etre and mission statement. Grand, misty-eyed stuff. This one is about the nitty-gritty.

Where are we now? What do we have ahead of us?

It’s a hell of a thing, making a movie.