One of the most important aspects of our project was finding and curating the perfect location. Being set in a summer camp in the 80’s, we needed to film somewhere with the perfect combination of rustic and outdoorsy, while still keeping the summer camp vibe. Much of the locations could be cheated, making a dorm room look like a cabin interior, filming in wooded parks, old offices, it seemed fairly doable. Most of all, however, we needed a lake. We reached out to a lot of locations, primarily those listed on film.org, lots of old cabins or mansions, but none of them felt they fulfilled our vision for the camp. This made finding the YMCA campground all the more exciting.
A summer camp in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, Camps Ockanickon and Matollionequay were perfect for the retro vibe we were looking for. Best of all, they had a lake! We even found some signs that were still around from the 80’s!
After lots of back-and-forth with their team, we finally got to book the location for a whole weekend, but for quite a pretty penny. Initially, they had asked for $500 dollars for access to facilities over the two days we would be filming, but after explaining our situation as students, we managed to discount the price to $250. Still a lot, but doable, and worth it for the perfect location.
As we were only allotted two days to film, we decided we needed a secondary location, and we would break up some of the outdoor scenes to film on separate days so we could get the most out of the camp. That’s when we found Barclay Farmstead, a historical site just 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia, similarly equipped with rustic buildings and wooded scenery, and they had a spot just perfect for our old sawmill scene.
For the sawmill scene, we needed an old building, believable enough to be some sort of mill or old storage, and we needed enough space to hang pictures and swing our prop saw blade. Luckily Barclay had an old corn crib, a facility used to store ears of corn as animal feed, that had tons of old wood and rafters that we could use to our advantage.
Because of time constrictions, we ended up filming scenes at Barclay first, towards the end of October. Timing was important in our filming, because we needed to make these two locations look rather seamless, and fall foliage was ever-changing in the weeks that we were in production.
Besides our inability to control the weather and changing of seasons, the locations paired together well, the wooden buildings of both being quite similar, and viewers likely not noticing any change in location at all. Plus, if any of the leaves were a strong issue, it was something that could be fixed in post-production with a clever eye in color correction.
One of the setbacks of filming outdoors, at night, and in November, is that it gets extremely cold. We tried to mitigate this as best we could with blankets, layers, and filming breaks, but ultimately we just had to power through. Besides the dreadful cold, and our fear of the woods at night, our location scouting was surely a success! Best of all, we got to witness some beautiful sunsets and enjoy the outdoors!
