Where in the Hell: Discovering a Road Movie Organically

When the pandemic closed the border on her original plans, writer and director Laramie Dennis rebuilt her feature from scratch in the California desert. She and a tiny crew shot it handheld on a camera light enough to live on a shoulder, then found its arthouse Western look deep in the grade. Dennis, cinematographer Marilyn Flores, editor Ricky de Laveaga, and colorist Mez Gebremeskel walk through how it came together.

“2020 was going to be my year,” says Laramie Dennis. She had a film ready to shoot on a remote island off the west coast of Canada, where her father lives, when the border closed. “Covid forced me to pivot. They weren’t letting anyone across.” So she started over. “I started from scratch, and dreamed up a road movie we could shoot in the US.”

That movie became “Where in the Hell,” an arthouse Western with a buddy comedy heart, about two defectors from the crumbling Los Angeles film world who hit the road to track down a vanished girlfriend. Dennis built it around desert places she already knew. Some she knew well. “Laramie and I are married and love to take road trips,” says producer and editor Ricky de Laveaga. “Some of the locations in ‘Where in the Hell’ are places we first visited in 2008 on our honeymoon.”

Scouting turned into the best part of pre-production. Meeting people in unexpected corners of California, who then pointed the couple toward their own secret spots, is what de Laveaga says made the film come alive. Dennis worked the schedule like a puzzle, shooting in four or five blocks across 2021 and 2022 so she could keep scouting and rewriting as locations locked. A mini golf course proved impossible. A ghost town in Calico squeaked into the budget.

Punk, raw, and a little shaky

Dennis knew the feeling she was after long before a camera arrived. She wanted it handheld, lit by the sun, and wide open. Flores, coming out of documentary and verite work, recognized the brief right away. “She wanted the film to feel raw, punk rock,” Flores says.

The reference images threw her at first. “The majority of her inspo for the look was film photographs that were very abstract and experimental, but they all featured reds, burns, oranges, and flaring,” Flores says. Translating that harshness into a comedy set in the desert took some conversation. They found a shared language through films like “Paris, Texas,” “American Honey,” and “Y Tu Mamá También,” with “Palm Springs” coming in later as a color touchstone. The goal was clear. “We didn’t want a Hallmark-looking movie. We wanted a modern classic look, and the landscapes to be a huge part of the story,” Flores says. “This film was not going to feel perfect, but rather realistic, raw, and even a bit shaky.”

A camera you can wear

The camera decision almost made itself. Flores had been shooting on her own Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K for years, and so had the film’s 1st AC and 2nd unit DP, Eddie Granillo. “From there it became an easy decision,” de Laveaga says. “Marilyn owning one offered our budgeting and scheduling process much-needed flexibility.”

For Flores, the appeal was pure practicality. There was no focus puller on this shoot, and no video village or wireless focus station either. “I proposed this knowing we were going to be outside traveling and walking, and I was not going to have a full camera team to help me with moving and handling equipment,” she says. A small body with a menu she could run in her sleep was exactly what a stripped-down crew needed. “Its advantages were weight, size, durability, and menu familiarity.”

She shot almost the whole film off her shoulder, no gimbal. Because you cannot see the top monitor with the camera in a shoulder rig, the shape can feel awkward, so she built around it. A rig with long rods let her bring a 5-inch Blackmagic monitor right in front of her eyes, with a V-mount battery on the back to balance the weight. Her glass was a set of Meike Cinema Lenses for Micro Four Thirds, compact and, to her surprise, sharp. “They had a pretty consistent look and specs across the line, which was helpful for matching,” she says. She carried NDs, a polarizer, and a careful plan for shooting in low light.

The size paid off everywhere. She mounted the camera on the roof of a car and hung it out the side of a window. It even went up a sixteen-foot ladder. Looking small had another benefit Dennis loved. “I think we just looked like a documentary crew,” she says. Out in the desert, nobody asked them for permits. At Mono Lake, where they did have one, the tiny footprint let them stay respectful of the place and the people around them. “This camera made us feel free,” Flores says. “It felt like making films with friends.”

De Laveaga handled DIT duty on set, redundantly backing up and reformatting cards between setups. The camera’s two card slots earned their keep. “We used both SD and CF cards, another great feature of the Pocket 4K steeped in pragmatism,” he says. “Being able to pick things up on CF when SD cards were full was a lifesaver.”

Choosing ProRes

The one technical debate that took real discussion was the codec. “When we got down to codecs, I initially assumed we would shoot Blackmagic RAW,” de Laveaga says. “But after talking it through at length with Marilyn and Eddie, and doing some testing, we shot ProRes, mostly for storage savings.” The choice paid off in a way he did not see coming. ProRes hardware acceleration on Apple Silicon, which DaVinci Resolve makes full use of, let the team cut the entire film on an M1 MacBook Pro. “At home and on the road, it was extremely liberating for our creative process and our budget,” he says.

He has no regrets about leaving RAW for another day. Shooting ProRes DCI 4K at 24 frames, he says, the Pocket 4K “was capable in mind-bending ways I never would have expected.” What stuck with him was the thinking behind the gear. “The pragmatic approach of Blackmagic’s product and software engineering delights me.”

An editor’s editor

De Laveaga is not a casual editor. He learned AVID when the systems filled entire rooms, later taught Final Cut Pro, cut on Premiere, and even won an award from Adobe along the way. That history is why his read on Resolve carries weight. “I love how Resolve respects the craft, the art form, of movie editing,” he says. “Its interface sensibly reflects the history and tradition of both film and video editing.” He also writes software, which makes the compliment a considered one. “This is the highest praise I can offer. Resolve makes sense to me.”

His favorite scene to cut was the ending. He built it under the spell of “Village of the Watermills,” the final section of Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams.” The result is a montage of Kasey among the quaking aspens and the water that audiences keep telling him moved them. “Cam’s performance was raw beauty and Marilyn captured it perfectly,” he says. The hardest material was the bar. Finding the right coverage and audio was a fight at the time, but the moment the bartender Melanie drops Sadurn’s “Golden Arm” on the jukebox while Kasey opens up to Alan became one of his favorites in the film, and a hook that pulls the audience in at a key beat.

Finding the Western in post

Color was on everyone’s mind from pre-production, but the look found its final form at Point360, where post producer Trish Hadley brought in colorist Mez Gebremeskel. The brief was to keep the photography honest while letting the desert sing. “The majority of the photography needed to stay in a realistic place, but to also enhance and beautify the desert landscape of California,” Gebremeskel says. “Each location they filmed at became an additional character to the story.”

He started from a foundation of his own custom Kodak negative and print LUTs, then reached for something with more character. “The secret sauce ended up being the three-strip Technicolor look,” he says. “I carefully mixed the three-strip look with the Kodak neg and print LUT and blended everything until we were getting a lot of beautiful and unique colors that ended up paying homage to old Westerns.” Nobody set out to make a Western in the grade. It arrived on its own. “The more that we sat with it, the more we loved what we were seeing,” he says.

Dennis and Flores steered it away from anything too pretty. Early sessions turned up gorgeous pinks and purples in the skies, and they pulled them back on purpose. Dennis wanted the film to feel harsh and desolate, not dreamy. Flores layered in a little film grain and a touch of halation to lean further into the filmic quality already in the image.

Two DaVinci Resolve Studio tools carried a lot of the load. Magic Mask handled isolation work Gebremeskel would once have tracked by hand. “It has been a lifesaver across all types of projects, from commercials to episodic to features,” he says. Node Layers reshaped his setup, letting him build a PreGrade layer that ripples a base grade across an entire scene without the slow work of grouping shots one by one. The camera gave him the latitude to work. “The dynamic range and sensor latitude helped the grade in terms of keeping as much detail from the sky to the ground as possible,” he says.

His favorite scene to grade was the one at the lake near the end, with the mountains and the giant trees framed against the water. “It was overstimulating in a good way,” he says.

Dennis had not expected any of it to register with viewers. “I didn’t expect our audiences to notice the color particularly, but so many people have raved about it,” she says. When she first sent Gebremeskel a few comps, he understood the assignment at once. “It was so cool to see him take the ball and run with it,” she says.

The long way around

For Flores, the camera and the film are inseparable. “I took the risk and challenge of shooting my first feature on my own Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to capture the punk, indie, raw, free-spirited feeling of the movie,” she says. “‘Where in the Hell’ wouldn’t have felt the same without it. The camera gave us the best of both worlds, a filmic look and a budget-friendly, lightweight package.”

De Laveaga puts the same idea in his own terms, thinking about every tiny studio trying to make something out of very little. Good gear, built with pragmatism, he says, “truly empowers tiny movie studios like ours to keep reaching for new heights.”

“Where in the Hell” premiered at the St. Louis International Film Festival and took awards including Best Comedy Feature at Poppy Jasper, Best Screenplay and Best Narrative Feature at Queens World, and the She’s On Fire Award at the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin. It is now streaming for free on Tubi, and available to buy or rent on Amazon.

 

Production Credits

CREW
Screenplay	Laramie Dennis
Producer	Laramie Dennis, Ricky de Laveaga, Hector Ceballos
Director	Laramie Dennis
Cinematographer	Marilyn Flores
Editor	Ricky de Laveaga
Colorist	Mez Gebremeskel
GEAR
Primary Camera	Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K
Primary Lenses	Meike Cinema Lenses for Micro Four Thirds
Editorial Software	DaVinci Resolve Studio
Color Software	DaVinci Resolve Studio