Pre-Production:
Our production team worked with the city of Savannah to get our permits in order over a month in advance. Savannah is a pretty big film hub, so they have very straightforward guidelines and steps you need to register your project and get permits.
Much of our shooting in Savannah was outside in the city’s many Squares. To be able to film here we had two permits- one was a “blanket permit” that allowed us access to film in any of Savannah’s public areas. As long as we weren’t impeding any public walkways, and didn’t have any extravagant setups, we were good to go. The other, which we used for only one day, was a “location permit”. We used this to basically take over a full square for an entire day of filming (which was well worth the extra cost).
The other major locations were on a tour bus, at Abe’s on Lincoln bar, a suburban home exterior, and Bonaventure Cemetery- for all of these we worked directly with businesses to pay to film there.
Day -2:
Chris and I got into Savannah a little after midnight, and checked into our hotel.
Every hotel in the city was packed because people were evacuating from Florida bracing for Hurricane Milton, which was due to hit Florida two days from then, or three days from then in Savannah (October 10th) and could possibly really mess things up for us.
Day -1:
Chris and I obsessively checked the weather to see the latest news about Milton, as we scouted on-foot all of our locations for the week. Hurricane Helene had ripped through Savannah a week prior, and certain areas of the city were blocked off due to damage or had huge piles of debris still in piles.
We had a pretty concrete idea of our locations based on all of our previous location scouting visits, but we needed to make sure all of our locations read as “SUMMER” (which is when the story takes place) and not “mid-October” just hit by a hurricane (which it actually was).
We double checked all of our blocking. Besides some piles of felled tree branches we ended up moving, and one square that had loud construction nearby we weren’t aware of, most of our locations were miraculously good to go. Our blanket permit allowed us to just move to another area.
