 All right, next we have Andrew Nicholson as a film scout He's made a living out of getting into people's homes and places of business to take pictures He's worked on Hollywood film and television productions for over six years His most recent credits include the black lightning pilot and the 2018 dynasty reboot So look forward to Andrew hacking Hollywood Thank you very much. Hey guys. How y'all doing tonight? So for six years my job basically consisted of getting a script from a producer or a director and Then going out and finding a house business Whatever and then convincing them to let me bring a crew of about a hundred people in there to make a TV show It's a little bit hard a little bit easy If I am Walking up to your house, and I'm trying to get you to let me film inside of there I've got maybe 30 seconds maybe a minute at most Through the door to get you Disarmed and to let me inside and take some pictures and the first thing I'm going to tell you is that I'm not here to sell you anything and When I say that most people, you know, you knock on the door. I'm not here to sell you anything What what what do you want? Well, hi, I'm a film scout. I find TV places to film You've got a beautiful house. Have you ever been approached about running out your property for filming before and? Usually with this statement, I've got them Based on how they respond to that I'm I know exactly how I'm going to proceed if they've never been approached about filming before then I get to Control the the information that I give them and I'm going to give them information. That's going to get me a yes We'll ignore the bad stuff until later. We kind of ease them into it as we go along If they say yes, and they have had filming not a problem We're usually good to go if they have been approached about filming and they say no I'm going to ask why I'm going to address their apprehensions Maybe the person that approached them beforehand wanted to make a rap video. Maybe it was a horror film Whatever that is, I'm going to find it out and I'm going to address it I'm going to alleviate their concerns so I can get inside So if they are not home First off, I'm going to act like I'm being watched at all times. You will not believe the amount of times I've left one of these letters at a house, and I'm five minutes down the road. I get a phone call and I Say wait you were home. Oh, yeah, we were inside. We were watching you you seem like a pretty honest guy So why don't you come back and take some pictures? Okay, great, but at any rate if they're not home. I'm leaving a letter that looks just like that I'm taking a picture of their house, and I'm writing down the address So when they call me back I can be like well, which house was it? You know, I only left about five of those letters and When I say that They're gonna I'm gonna be able to call back specific details about their house It had yellow trim who I really like the brick work And so that letter got me that house that is Not the original house that they did the pilot with dynasty We actually came in and found that after the fact the original team had about three months They only found 20 houses that would agree to a film crew of about a hundred people coming in every couple of times a month and filming My team had a month and we found 35 houses. So That's how we did that When and also another thing is when people call me back After getting one of these letters It's almost always a yes because they've had the time to digest the information to research who I am and They know that they want to deal with me If I'm at the property if I'm at someone's fence and I'm peering through in the cops pull up and they go excuse me Sir, can we help you? Absolutely, they can absolutely help me. I am so-and-so. I'm trying to do this Do you know how to get in touch with this person and that works? They're usually like, oh, yeah I know so-and-so and they'll call them up and before you know it I'm having a conversation with the person that owns that house Um Skip the hedge here a little bit Right, so being honest so you can like wait my slides are right. So when I do this When I do this job, I'm not trespassing I'm not breaking the law in any way because ultimately I'm representing a film network Like Netflix or CBS Warner Brothers. I've worked for all of them and I'm doing absolutely nothing that is going to get us In trouble. I'm following the law or the law to the letter. I'm going to be a hundred percent upfront with someone I'm going to be super candid if you're a homeowner. I'm going to say things to you like You know, I could get in a lot of trouble for telling you this but the producers really like your house I'm going to really You know and it's not a lie to them, but when I lie, it's usually to my bosses um My bosses will ask me to do things that they don't recognize that I have a relationship with the homeowner or the city planner or the mayor and They might ask me to do something that compromises that and so I'm going to lie to my boss But that's but that's the thing is I'm going to tell the truth so much I'm going to be so candid with you that when I lie you will have no reason to trust me or not to trust me You're not going to have you're not going to have any and you're also not going to have any way to verify that I'm lying to you because that's privileged information that I'm lying about So Getting into other places if it's not a private house Then these places are probably going to have someone to facilitate getting into and you just kind of got to know the right person to look to Government buildings depending on the size of the town there was the TV show Goliath anyone ever heard that Anyways, I was tasked with finding a small town to film Goliath then and I called all the small towns in the metro Atlanta area And one town they were like oh filming. Oh you should talk to the mayor about that. I'm like them the mayor really Okay, talk to the mayor. He's like, oh, yeah, you guys want to come up here and film a TV show Yeah, go for it. Okay. Well, do we need a permit or? Fees he's like no, no, just come up here and tell us what you want to do and we'll make it happen. I'm like, oh, okay But yeah, so so each place will have their own place if it's a mansion. They're gonna have a tear caretaker You know universities will have campus relation managers To facilitate all that kind of stuff, but as a film scout you can get into places That most people can't and that's what really attracted me to the job There's like a dream come true So this is this is one of the places I can get into that you guys can't this is the Guardian Center It used to be a secret military base that they installed right around the height of the Cuban missile crisis And it actually had some nukes on grounds, which you can see the old bunker there in the bottom left-hand corner One of those bunkers actually the radiation level was still too high to let me go in but Company called the Guardian Center took it over and converted it into disaster preparation this training grounds for FEMA and other facilities and These guys reached out they actually reached out to my boss through a county official because they had about two or three months of downtime when FEMA's FEMA's not it's hurricane season. No one's there training. So they needed some way of bringing revenue the fifth element or no the fifth wave film there, so yeah, and This is the lab from stranger things It's about a mile from my house. This was actually scouted before the stranger things TV show came around I was scouting it for a show called containment And it was actually it used to be a former mental health facility Until it was taken over by AT&T and then emery took it over So it's campus owned and the thing is is this this building is filled with asbestos They can't do anything with it. It just sits there empty And there's a loophole which allows for filming because there's OSHA standards that say that If a building has asbestos you can do short-term work in it for anywhere between 10 to 14 days So it's kind of this beautiful thing because it would cost them three million dollars to tear down that building But stranger things has a relationship with them now and they can go and film there. So that's pretty awesome When I scouted it, they didn't really have an infrastructure set up. They just sent an intern with a key ring and You know most of these places You know that was that was great for me because he would literally take me anywhere in the building I wanted to go to and then the places I wasn't allowed to go into he would tell me so And I now know I can't go on to the seventh floor of that building Churches universities and neighborhoods so a Places like this are usually gonna have a board approval process and it's gonna slow us down Because we're doing a really fast turnaround and these guys have you know, they're dealing with weeks Oh, you know, we have a meeting next next month and we're like no, that's that's just way too slow for us but they also want script approval which studios are not willing to give up because With script approval a place can say yes or no to you filming there and ask you to rewrite a scene If they don't like the way that their place is being portrayed There was a scene in dynasty the reboot it was a gay sex scene that we had to film inside of a church and My co-worker was in charge of finding that building. He almost had a heart attack The way we were able to make it happen was we actually found one of the first churches in Atlanta that were allowed to They actually started doing lgbt Q services and they were more than thrilled to work with us So you can get creative you can find common goals that will help you meet your ends Yeah, and then my favorite are property managers If you get a good property manager, they are going to fill your day by showing you different properties they are going to devote significant resources to to getting you exactly what you want because They recognize a good look a good property manager will recognize that they can make in a matter of days What it might take them a month to make if they're working with a Hollywood film scout But at the same time these guys are busy. They're really busy And so you're gonna see them doing things like they're gonna use the address as a gatecode or an alarm combination Which is one of the things I wanted to address don't do that um Moving on so It's not too common, but this space has the ability to attract a lot of Malicious and bad actors Some might see it as a way to case a property for theft But more often than not you're gonna see third parties that will come in and want to act as intermediaries This is usually a money grab and if you're a film studio, you're just gonna walk away from the property They'll say thanks, but no thanks You know, it's it's better just to take a letter wait Yeah, it's if you are being approached by a film industry person I say don't don't open the door take their letter Verify that information on your own make sure it's someone that is actually legit and you can call the county The county has a film liaison office and most film scouts Should be registered or at least have their contact info with the county liaison So that's something that I highly recommend people to do because IMDB pages can be faked I have an office support staff when I go out and do this So if people want to verify my identity, they have a number they can call that can be faked The the county liaison is really the best thing to do and again do not use your address Your birthday or or you know, or in or even the year as a gate combo. I see that all the time I ask for references if you're working if you're truly working with a Good high-end production company. They are gonna have references. There are places that I wanted to film at 20 $50,000 a day places They wouldn't even look at you if you unless you can provide three letters of reference from other places that you have filmed that can Say that you do a good job Coming to town so once we've picked a location We need to build a support network and I also need to do a permit I'm following up on each of these individual elements And it may seem like a lot of work But again, I'm gonna have an entire team behind me and we can really accomplish most of this stuff in about three to five days where it gets really overwhelming is when you layer four or five locations on top of each other because a typical 42-minute TV show is going to take about eight days to film and The norm for that is about two to five filming locations depending on on how extensive your set is So while I'm permitting location, I'm out finding parking and I'm reaching out to your neighbors and I'm gonna put them on my payroll I have a few tricks that I'm gonna use to get this done If it's just a piece of property that I'm going after I'm going to switch over to plat records I'm going to use property tax information and maps and Ocent to find out you and I'm gonna find you and I'm gonna make you an offer. You can't refuse I might recruit your neighbors to talk to you if you don't want to work with me I'll get someone to come over and do that Some people do not want to accept film studio money. This is especially true working in the Bible Belt Some people view it as lewd. They view it as crass Indecent and so if I get that kind of pushback, I'm gonna come to you and be like, oh, well, what's your favorite charity? How about I donate five thousand dollars to your favorite charity and then you might want to work with us? And then you get the individuals who I absolutely love they will not give you your so they will not give out a Social security number under any circumstances. They want to work with you, but they're not gonna sign a contract They're not gonna do the money. So I'll say, okay, we'll do a contract for zero dollars and zero cents Love it By the time I walk on to your street to film, I'm gonna know as much About the street as possible I'm gonna try to know everyone on that street by a first name basis and I'm also gonna have a map of your street That has who lives at what address their contact information How much we paid them and what we paid them for and my entire team is gonna have that information So you can't really do the the he or she he said she said thing because we'll know So this is a visualization of the hierarchy of a film production set You see the flow of communication It's gonna go across at the top and then down you're not seeing a lot of cross at the bottom levels And and these people are talking to each other, but it's not it's not that often. It's it's more in a friendly capacity It's not in a professional Kind of way, but you also see that my department over there location manager on the far far right side We're very loosely associated to the director because we're gonna have more affiliation with the unit production manager and the line producer Those are the guys that control the money the director might love a property But if it costs five times then any of the other options we have the line producers gonna step in and they're gonna quash that so now That we're on a film set. So if you can get on to a film set and you can get a call sheet That's probably the best thing in the world It's gonna have most of the information that you would need to form a pretext Like the previous speaker was saying you get on a call sheet Go to the bathroom study that you're gonna have pretty much everything you need To navigate around like I said the people that you saw in the bottom part of that hierarchy aren't talking to each other Play off of that you can say oh Well, yeah, I'm so and so they called me in from darada and though the other guy's not gonna know in my experience These call sheets are giving out like candy by PAs, which I think is insanely dangerous I Person I'd like to see them Signed out and then signed back in at the end of the day. I've been on a few film sets where they do that But everything is a little bit different from film set to film set. So some might make you sign it out. Some might not Continuing on the set. This is a turnkey industry. So people are used to working a job two three months and then they go on to the next job and They expect things for the most part to stay the same from job to job As a result, they're often using their personal email for work This includes scripts. It includes dailies all sorts of confidential information that studios are entrusting To people's personal email. They're not getting security training. They're not getting any type of multifactor Authentication on their emails trust me. I've tried to talk my co-workers into this It doesn't work so That's something that can be exploited and I don't want to see it happen Getting on to a film set the most common thing I'm gonna see when people try to sneak onto film sets because I've built this set and now I'm in charge of keeping people off Of it is when people try to act as extras It's not gonna last very long They're usually gonna see how far they can write it out Bogies I have part two parts The unintentional bogey is gonna be someone that's just standing on the street watching something and then the next thing he knows there's a film crew around him and He's just gonna be too scared to do anything else So he'll probably just kind of sit there and wait until someone asks to leave no big deal Bogey number two knows exactly what they're doing They're gonna walk right onto the film set and see how long they can stay on that film set until someone takes them off Malicious extras is When you get in someone that might get a job on a film set as an extra Legitimately and then when someone's not looking they're gonna use that opportunity as steal from other people Extras aren't allowed to bring their own personal goods or their own Purses luggage any of that kind of stuff onto a film set they have to leave it in a common area And so what you take someone that makes eight nine dollars an hour and put them in a room with two hundred purses Yeah, things are gonna go bad And then you've got the universal uniform which is what I think that most of you guys would probably use if y'all are Trying to sneak onto a film set if you don't know what that is a universal uniform is it's a radio a headset and usually a fluorescent traffic vest But the thing you don't know about that is unless you have some type of specific gear that tells me if you're a grip or an Electrician, I'm just gonna think you're a PA or one of my people and I'm gonna find out who you are and kick you off harm that can occur so Leaks and pictures that show we have weak security are probably my least favorite thing because it perpetuates the notion Of sneaking on this film sets for fun or sport these are all things that can occur and I Recognize that they lower our stock But I'm most concerned about the people that are getting onto a film set to case it for later in the night When perhaps the security guards asleep and they come back with a pickup truck and steal Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cable Yeah So now it's my job to kick you off of a film set bogies Usually their behavior will give them away because once they get onto a film set They don't know how to behave they don't realize that certain people are allowed to do some things and certain people aren't allowed to Do other things extras aren't allowed to drink coffee If I see someone looks like a normal person drinking a coffee. It's gonna give you away Extras aren't allowed to take bathroom breaks except for its certain times They have to be supervised. So that's gonna give you away now I could go up to a PA and The PAs have to check in every single extra that comes on to that film set and I could go up to a PA and say hey Do you is this one of your people and they could say yes they could say no but I'm gonna go to a wardrobe assistant instead because Every single piece of wardrobe that goes in front of that camera has to be approved by a department head So I'm gonna go to the wardrobe assistant that spends three or four hours with the garments And they're gonna be able to tell me instantly if that belongs to them or not I had someone try to sneak onto my films at one time and I go up. I'm like are you with production? Yeah Oh, yeah, I'm an extra. Oh, no, you're not an extra. Yeah, I am. No, you're not Well, why well because they were wearing a bright pink shirt The DP would never sign off on that it throws off the color temperature. It throws off the camera settings They're gonna go with light colors So that's that's another thing we can do and universal uniform I think I went over that unless you're really varying it up and getting specific with what job you have on that film set You're just gonna look like a PA So good bad These are some steps we took to secure our sets You're often gonna find on a film set that the security is at the perimeters. They're not actually on the set They're out by the trucks. They're by the equipment. They're at the perimeters to keep people off But once they get past the security Most of those people the people you see on the film set, they're not talking to each other They all assume that if you get on to that film set that you're supposed to be there and So what do we do? Well At nighttime We started doubling our security because we were finding our security guards were falling asleep So instead we double all up now we have an accountability system where one person has to keep the other person awake Those security guards I talked about that were on the outside perimeter of the of the set I'm gonna put a security guard right in the middle of the set and I've had producers come to me and go Why is the security guard right here on the middle of the set? I want them on there because I Find that when you have a security guard Right next to the other crew members working with the other crew members if they don't recognize someone that's not supposed to be there They're gonna be a lot more Eager or willing to go up to that security guard and be like hey I don't know this guy also that security guard that is used to being on set with the employees every day Is going to be one of the first people to come up and say hey I don't recognize this guy. Um, do you know him and then we're gonna find him? We're gonna kick him off The thing I talked about earlier with malicious extras. I'm gonna hire a security guard I'm gonna put them there purely to watch extras equipment Purses bags, it's all gonna be safe because we're gonna have a security guard there dedicated to that And another thing so when we do this you find that people want to work with us more because We have security guards watching out for other people's property. It's not just the equipment. It's it's also the employees When We have PAs I had a PA one time and it was either him working with me or another film production company And he chose to work with us because the other film production company wanted to hire him as a security guard No, you don't hire a film student as a security guard for nine dollars an hour. That's that's insane That's how people get robbed and shot So Steps that production can take The thing I talked about employees using their personal email moving from job to job No, at least give them training on how to have safer emails safer passwords Don't skimp on security. Don't hire PAs to use as security guards get actual security guards for crying out loud Have a crew list Like when when people are parking Have a security guard check their name off before they get on the bus And then when they arrive at the crew the film set have as another security guard check them again And then share security breaches I'm a lot of these breaches and things that I was telling you about I only know about because of rumors That other film managers tell me it's not the studios talking to each other It's not studios Sharing information about their faults and their hazards because that's the last thing they want to do if I was Still working in the industry. I would not be allowed to be up here talking about this right now probably And then custom bracelets. I love this. I see this like a badge You can fake a badge. You can go to kinkos and fake a badge It's a little bit harder to fake a custom Bracelet that people have to wear that indicate their roles on sets and then finally in force social media practices You're not allowed to take pictures on set It still happens if you go on to if you go on to Instagram and search a number of hashtags You're gonna get photos of people on set now. What happens? I used to have co-workers that would post pictures of them on set. They get a phone call a couple hours later What do you mean my alarm's going off? Someone's broken in my house. The first thing the cop asks them is Did you post your location and where you were today on social media? They're like, well, yeah I was working on the lake, you know, I posted office for the day. This is my you know thing This took just just an example. This took me about 10 minutes. I went on to Instagram and I found some some people use some some common hashtags Filmmaking hashtag first-day shooting and now I know some people that aren't going to be home for 12 hours today So I think studio should really really step up in enforcing their social media policies and making sure that They're because this protects their employees also it's not just about the IPs It's about the employees Because these guys are getting robbed while they're working for the studios because the studios aren't enforcing the social media policy Anyways, thank you guys very much. It's been a pleasure speaking with y'all and have a great night