The Day One Letter: Prepping a Crew for ODIE

The day ODIE started shooting, every crew member got a short letter from Nick. It is headed simply “DAY 1. Welcome to ODIE,” and it does two jobs.

The Grand Lawn at Zilker Park in downtown Austin Texas plays backdrop to a portion of Odie's trip.

The first job is philosophy. It opens with thanks, “for the patience, for the enthusiasm, for rolling with us through the weather and everything else this week threw at us,” and then gets to the point: “Now we make the movie.” A few lines down comes the part that reads like the whole production’s operating principle. “Time is the most precious thing we have on set,” it says. “Show up prepared. On time. Ready to work. That’s the deal.” And on what a film actually is: “A movie doesn’t make itself. It’s a group of artists trusting the director has a picture of what we’re painting.”

The second job is traffic control. Scheduling, and anything past the day’s pages, goes to Michelle Ragay, the first AD, or Georgia Irons, the UPM. “They’re running the machine,” the letter says. A welcome note that tells you exactly where to send your questions is worth ten that tell you to dream big.

The last instruction in the letter is the one that matters most for this film. ODIE is a story about a man living on the street, shot in shared public spaces around Austin. Nick’s note lands there and stops: “We’re in shared spaces. City streets. Real people who didn’t sign up for any of this. Be mindful. Of the crew, of them, of the gear.” Then, plainly: “See you on set.”

That instinct, respect for the people and places this story is borrowed from, ran through the whole of prep. It is the same thread as the scene-by-scene walkthrough and the premortem from earlier in this series: a small film that refused to be casual about what it was doing. The picture is in post now. More from the edit soon.