By Ben Crosbie
I’d be lying if I told you we had not thought about how we were going to get to Israel long before we started researching the film. But I’m not a liar, only a crazy kid trying to make it in this world. I knew, or had hoped from the get-go, that I could get a free trip to Israel via “Birthright Israel.” Being Jewish, I was able to apply to get on the free 10-day trip around Israel for young Jewish adults. After the trip ends, I could easily extend my return date to stay longer in the country to make the film.
Tessa couldn’t go on this trip because she wasn’t Jewish (no matter how much coaxing I provided, she just wouldn’t pretend to be Jewish for only ten days). Luckily I had a decent amount of American Airlines mileage, but still needed another 40,000 miles to get a free ticket to Israel. So naturally I signed up for two Citi AA advantage MasterCards at a bonus of 20,000 miles each (note well: this is an advanced low-budget filmmaking technique, apply at your own risk.) and earned enough miles to get Tessa a free ticket to Israel. I know this plan won’t work for everyone because most people probably won’t be making their first film on the other side of the world, but you can apply the same creativity to all of your travel problems! You just have to be willing to damage your credit score slightly…
With our travel plans out of the way, we also had to sublet our apartment. I won’t go into detail on this because there is plenty of internet info out there – but good lord, what is wrong with people on craigslist? We had people asking if they could move in a month ahead of the dates we posted that the apartment would be available, or if they could pay 50% of the rent we were asking for. Did these people smoke crack right before replying to our post? In the end, the craigslist posting worked out, and we found some nice people (knock on wood) to sublet our apartment to while we were away.
Now we just had to get all of our equipment. In the next post I’ll take you along on the massive shopping spree we had. This is where things start to get fun!
