Originally titled Eye for an Eye, this was my second feature to write and produce and the first micro budget feature. My partners in this venture were friend and fellow producer, Brian Jones, and longtime friend and director, Stephen Lambert. Add the exceptional hair & makeup artist, Erin Koskella, and that was the extent of the primary production crew. We scheduled for 14 days, shot it in 13, one week in Los Angeles and another in Sacramento. As has become a theme, we bit off way more than we could chew. Stephen has some VFX skills, and I gained some VFX skills in post. But action probably wasn’t the genre we should have started with to see if we could pull off a micro budget movie. Lots of fun moments, a few successful beats, and we were able to ultimately finish production, post and deliver for release. It's not a great movie by far, but some people enjoy it. One element that really elevates the film is the original score by tremendously talented composer, Arhynn Descy. Planes, trains and automobiles. We wanted to shoot a scene in the sleeper car of a train, providing a moment of downtime to get some dialogue in to help character arcs and move the plot forward. I discovered that trains don’t work like planes. There aren’t 10 trains per day running directly from Los Angeles to Sacramento and back. There are train routes between distant destinations and LA to Sac is just one leg that happens once a day at a really precise window. We looked at different lines and routes but only one made sense. Problem was the leg wasn’t Los Angeles to Sacramento but San Jose to Sacramento. This was also the way most of us were getting from LA to Sac for the second week of the shoot. We ended up shooting half a day in Los Angeles, flying from LAX to San Jose, taking Ubers from the airport to the train station, then boarding the train in San Jose and shooting in the sleeper car along the way. We had about 4 hours. We arrived in Sacramento at around midnight. Lots more tales and lessons learned, but this experience made me think micro budget was very doable, especially emboldening me to shoot in the wild, stealing shots, etc. We had a scene where a character gets a gym bag out of locker storage in the train station. Turns out, most train stations don’t have lockers anymore. We drove aimlessly around Sacramento in the time we slotted to shoot the scene and eventually found a bowling alley that, in the middle of a weekday, was not very busy. Stephen and the actor shot in the locker area and we were in and out in 20 minutes. One last anecdote was that thanks to Brian Jones’s persuasion and persistence, we were able to permit and shoot in LA City Hall for $1700 for 6 hours. A seasoned line producer friend of mine said he’d never seen it permitted for less than $20,000. Such are the possibilities if you ask and persist.