Joshua Caldwell's $6,000 film LAYOVER is now available for rental and purchase

Perhaps you remember that a few months ago I promoted director Joshua Caldwell's feature film Layover. Caldwell shot the entire film for $6,000 dollars, keeping the budget down largely via the usage of a small crew, calling in favors and stealing shots throughout Los Angeles whenever possible.

Oh, and almost the entire movie is in French.

I saw the film when it screened in L.A. as part of Dances With Films. I have to admit, I was prepared for the possibility that I wouldn't like the film. I was especially wary of the decision to shoot it in French considering I knew the director didn't speak the language himself. To my relief, the film worked. It had a very cool look and the subtitles didn't provide the barrier to entry I feared they would.

I'm for anything that encourages people to get out there and make their own content. I'm not sure this makes sense as an ongoing business model (just try getting a crew of people to work for free on several projects of this type and you'll learn the limits of the favors people are willing to do for you) but I'm excited by the potential for motivated individuals to produce "calling card" films and use them to get to the next level.

Starting today, Layover is now available here. You can make your own judgement on this film for the low price of $6.95. What's more, you can get a dollar off purchase by using the code: bttr.

You can also simply rent it for $4.95. Or you can purchase the film with a DIY bundle that includes commentary, an interview with Joshua Caldwell and "anatomy of a scene" clips. That'll cost you $9.99, but the bittr code will get you $1 off of that purchase too.

LAYOVER: In this French-language feature film debut from writer/director Joshua Caldwell, Simone (Nathalie Fay) is a young Parisian en route to her wedding in Singapore. But when the airline cancels her connecting flight, she’s forced to spend the night in Los Angeles. She decides to make the best of it and contact an old acquaintance, Juliette (Bella Dayne), who is going through a rough patch in her marriage. Invigorated by her friend’s arrival, Juliette insists on taking Simone out for a night of club-hopping. With little regard for her friend, Juliette soon disappears with a stranger, leaving Simone stranded downtown without a ride. When an attractive motorcyclist (Karle Landler) appears and offers her a ride, Simone cautiously accepts, leading to an evening of adventure that results in her questioning her life’s direction and, ultimately, if she’s truly ready to make her connection in the morning. 

Joshua Caldwell is an accomplished director, writer, producer, and MTV Movie Award winner. He has worked with a number of high profile producers, including CSI: creator Anthony E. Zuiker, for whom he produced Cybergeddon the online global motion picture event for Yahoo! and directed all of the film’s ancillary content for the immersive website. His award-winning short film Dig, starring Mark Margolis of Breaking Bad, was featured in numerous film festivals. He’s directed episodes of Welcome to Sanditon, the new series from the creators of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Furrocious, a webseries for Discovery Channel Online. Most recently, released his latest short film Resignation and his debut feature film Layover had its World Premiere at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival where it was nominated for the New American Cinema Award.

Festivals: 
World Premiere: Seattle International Film Festival (In competition) 
California Premiere: Dances With Films (In competition) 
Festival du Nouveau Cinema de Montreal 
Scottsdale International Film Festival 
Surrey International Film Festival Awards: 
SIFF: Nominated for the New American Cinema award 
DWF: Nominated for Grand Jury Prize.

See Joshua Caldwell's $6,000 feature film LAYOVER!

Those of you in Los Angeles tonight should try to catch the LA premiere of friend-of-the-blog Joshua Caldwell's film LAYOVER.  The film is screening in competition as part of Dances With Films, following a successful premiere last week at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Caldwell shot the entire feature for a budget of $6,000, making use of a borrowed camera and stolen shots.  He also wrote a fantastic post about the whole experience on the site No Film School. It's something everyone dreaming of making an indie film should read. An excerpt:


Write Set Pieces that Can Be Accomplished on a Budget

If you know how to pull it off for no money, you can allow for a few scenes that look expensive but were actually the cheapest scenes we shot. There’s a trick, however, to making some of those set pieces scenes work: don’t write any dialogue or require any performance from your actors.

The reason for this is while you might have a really expensive looking scene, you may not be allowed more than one take. These are scenes you shoot guerilla style. Here’s an example:

There’s a scene in the film where our main character Simone meets up with a friend and they go to a club in Hollywood. The club is packed, it’s busy, it’s fun, colorful and dark and our editor, Will Torbett edited the hell out of it. Feels like we owned that club.

But we didn’t. We got permission to be there with our camera and film but nothing else. We couldn’t control the lights; we couldn’t control the crowds or anything else. But I knew that would be the case (because we didn’t have the money to shut the place down) so I wrote a scene that didn’t require any dialogue (dialogue requires multiple takes) and only had specific piece of action to be filmed (Simone seeing her friend). The rest was just girls dancing and having fun.

BUT that was also the point of the scene. For Simone, this is the point in the movie where she starts to let go and have fun. So it became the perfect character-based set piece and it really increases the production value of the film.

SlashFilm also conducted a video interview with Josh that you can find below:



The film screens tonight at 9:30pm at the TCL Chinese Theatres.  Tickets are available here. 

Over on his own site, Josh talks about his Indiegogo campaign to raise money to film the remaining two films in what he sees as "The LAX Trilogy."