Production Diary, Day 8: Filming With, Not At

Today we shot at the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center on Menchaca Road, and I want to get this post right, so bear with me if it reads more carefully than usual.

Sunrise is not a set. It is a real, working navigation center that serves Austinites experiencing homelessness every day of the week, including today, while we were there. The production designed this day around that fact: a deliberately low-footprint crew, a schedule coordinated closely with the Sunrise team so that filming never disrupted the actual services happening in the building. We shot Scenes 26 through 29, thirty-four takes, and every one of them happened inside an operating institution that had more important things going on than our movie.

That is exactly how Nick wanted it. Back in prep, he wrote something to the Sunrise team that has become a kind of thesis statement for this production: "Filming with you, not just at you, was always the version we wanted."

What "with" looks like

Here is what it looks like in practice. Sunrise is a formal production partner on ODIE, not a landlord. Through their Ambassador Program and community coordination, members of Austin's unhoused community are appearing in this film as paid background performers, dozens of them across the shoot. Not as set dressing. As collaborators who know this world better than anyone on the call sheet and are being compensated for their work like anyone else on it. The Sunrise staff, from Executive Director Mark Hilbelink to the community partnerships team, have been co-authors of how this world shows up on screen, with real say in how their community is represented.

The scenes themselves put Dean Stanfield's Odie inside the bureaucratic machinery the logline promises: the paperwork, the lines, the systems that are trying to help and are stretched thin doing it. Playing those scenes in the real place, alongside people with real experience of it, gave the material a weight no backlot could fake. Between setups the set was quieter than usual. People were paying attention, and not only to the monitor.

Rolls A015 and A016 are in. There are days you make a film and days a film makes you understand why you are making it. Today was the second kind.