Soundstage Shopping

We shot the musical portion of the first two Liken movies on the soundstage of a television station near the Salt Lake Airport. An old friend of mine worked there and was able to make it feasible for us to shoot there. But he no longer works there, and even if he did, the stage there isn't quite big enough to set up more than one set at a time. So to shoot there, we would need to tear down a set right after it wrapped, then build the new set and paint it ready to go the next day. Obviously, that makes for a long night, not to mention a wet floor the next day when we're ready to shoot.

When we moved to Utah in 2004, we looked for an office with warehouse space where we could shoot our productions. We found our eventual "home" in the East Bay area of Provo, where we shot the next six Liken movies. The space wasn't ideal (too small, ceilings too low, inadequate power, inadequate AC, inadequate restroom facilities, etc.), but we made it work, because that's what you do in the indy movie project world.

With the long lay-off between Likens, however, it didn't make sense to keep renting the warehouse space. So we moved all the walls, props and costumes to off-site storage, which costs about a tenth as much as the warehouse space.

But it does mean that we need to find space to shoot "Jonah." So we went soundstage shopping. It doesn't appear that there is a huge number of options here in Utah. But we managed to find one up in Salt Lake City that we think is big enough to handle all of our sets at the same time. That makes the prospect of rehearsing and shooting (on dry floors!) an appealing possibility. We still need to check out a couple more options before we firm up those arrangements, but it looks like we will be heading north to film "Jonah."

Another plus to shooting in SLC is that it is a little more central for our friends in that area as well as the Ogden area. But it will add a couple of extra commuting hours a day to our Utah County contingent. Hey -- just like shooting in L.A...