I was afraid that with the telling of last month’s story, my well had run dry. I thought I had no more stories to tell.

Then my mother called.

So now, a brainstorming session and a couple cups of coffee later, I diverge from my normal track of scout stories and tales of chance encounters to set in on one of the many mishaps I have experienced in my film making career. This is the story of how I made it rain.

In the spring of 2018, I was a sophomore in college and trying my damnedest to prove that I knew what I was doing. I was taking two film classes that required a shoot and it was the second of these – Production class – that my crew and I found ourselves further up the creek with each passing day.

Now normally on a student film set, I’m above the line, meaning that I’m usually one of the guys in charge. In the industry it’s denoted by who receives profit, meaning lead actors, directors, and producers. I usually shoulder the responsibility of the latter, and this project was no different. It all started around mid-terms. My classmates and I each went up and pitched a story, and we then voted on our favorites and split up from there. My story was not picked but I had no issues with that. I didn’t want the responsibility of directing. Instead, the project I signed up to produce was a 10-minute short film idea entitled “The Field.”

“The Field” was pitched by a guy named Sam and it was, in short, a forgiveness tale. It followed the story of a downtrodden young farm boy with an alcoholic, abusive father who gets his comeuppance at the climax and ultimately begs for forgiveness with his dying breath. It had non-invasive religious undertones, and a nice 3rd act where an older version of the main character finally finds it in his heart to forgive his father and lets go of his anger. Intriguing, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the story that we shot.

Throughout pre-production, it was clear that we would be dragging this project kicking and screaming the entire time, mostly due to our 5-week timeline to rush the story from the first draft to the final cut. We had a few big obstacles up front:

• First was the location. It was set in a rural farmhouse and its corresponding field – a far cry from the coastal city vibe where we live.
• Second, was the main vehicle. On-cam vehicles are always tough to work with, not only because of actor safety but also because of the numerous restrictions on where and how we can use university equipment. In addition to all this, the vehicle we were looking for was a working tractor from the 1940s-50s (ish). Naturally, the professor freaked out when we told him what we were planning.
• Third, the climax of the film was dependant upon a fierce thunderstorm, and the father subsequently being struck by lightning.

As the producer, it was my job to make sure all these things happened, and I had no clue where to start. Luckily a friend of a friend had parents with a connection to a farmhouse and a field an hour outside the city – not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but close enough that you could see the middle if you squinted. Not only that, but they were farmers themselves, and had a 1945 Ford tractor that only needed some fresh gas to get going.

This, of course, was a godsend, effectively knocking out two of our three major issues, leaving only the issue of the rain. We didn’t want to film while it was actually raining because we couldn’t control the water to keep it away from all the expensive equipment. The natural solution was to make the rain via a homemade rain machine.

The director and I took an afternoon and built it from scratch with PVC. Four 10′ x 3/4″ pipes with a 5′ radius sprinkler head positioned on each third, and a female garden hose adapter on one end.  It was a masterpiece. I later upgraded it so that I can break each section down into eight 5′ sections for ease of transport, and when we brought it back to my apartment, it worked like a charm. We ran one hose into a 4-way splitter and each sprinkler operated flawlessly. When the heads pointed upward, it genuinely looked like rain! Riding high on this success, it looked like this hair-brained idea was not only do-able but do-able on our budget. But as Murphy’s law prescribes, everything soon went wrong.

Our professor told us 10 days before cameras began rolling that our actor could not operate the tractor, even at low speeds. We had to have either a stunt double or the owner drive it, so naturally, to get around this we had the owner be our actor – kind of.

That friend of a friend who happened to have parents with a connection became our actor. Her name was Katie and while she did very well, she had a difficult time playing a boy, so we changed the main character to a girl. This was the first of many compromises that ultimately led to a weaker script including cutting the second half of the third act due to an inability to find another, older actress and relying heavily on narration. Individually, none of these were bad decisions but combined, they undercut the potential power of the narrative.

So then the weekend of our shoot came. We rented a truck, picked up all our equipment, and had all our ducks in a row. The first day, we left at 3:00 in the morning to drive the hour to location and shoot a few sunrise scenes. They turned out really well, and we had no issues on location. Later that night, however, as we dumped the audio files, we realized that the levels were too high, and our sound for the first half of the day was buzzy and obnoxious. Without a doubt, this was purely operator error – the operator being yours truly. It could’ve been a lot worse, though, and we decided we could replace the few lines of dialogue in post.

The second day, we filmed all our interior scenes. It went off without a hitch, except we broke a taxidermy fish in the old farmhouse. I glued it back together, and I haven’t heard anything from the owner so I’m not sure he knows.

The third day, all hell broke loose. We got out there mid-afternoon so that we could shoot our evening/night scenes, including the big climax of the film. I immediately went to work on the rain machine, just to make sure that nothing had broken, and also admittedly so that I could show off my engineering feat. I rigged up all four rainmakers in a row just like I had at my apartment and yelled to my best boy to turn it on. I turned around to say a few words to the director and turned back. The water was taking quite a long time. I told my best boy to turn it on again, to which she replied,

“It is on.”

And thus, my long and tedious quest to find a way to make the rain machine work began. Realizing that my issue was water pressure, I started disconnecting pipes. Slowly, more and more water began to dribble out of the remaining sprinkler heads. When all but one were disconnected, I had a steady stream that spurted every once in a while and ran straight down in one line. We needed rain and this was definitely not it.

I resolved to go to the nearest town, 20 minutes east where I figured I could find something at the local Ace Hardware. It was one of two stores in that town, the other being a Piggly Wiggly with a shoddy gas station attached to the side. As I walked in, not really sure what I was looking for, I found an associate to whom I explained my situation. He recommended a fish tank pump. That was not going to suffice, so he pointed me towards the nearest Walmart 40 minutes north, where I might be able to find something bigger. It was barely a lead, but it was all I had, so I called my director and suggested they do everything that didn’t involve water first. He agreed.

On I went, up to Podunk, GA where the only Walmart between Macon and Savannah resides. I strolled around for a while looking for something – anything that could plausibly pump water uphill and create pressure on the end. I walked out of there defeated and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. That’s when I saw the sign for Lowes.

I barged in there expecting to find a fountain pump or something of the like but had zero luck. Having played all my cards I resigned myself to my fate: CG rain added in post. It wasn’t going to look good, and I knew that. As I was coming out of the gardening section, I passed the lawnmowers, and air compressors, and scripted what I would say to my crew. Next in the aisle came the powerwashers and the adaptors, and-

I stopped in my tracks.

$115 and 90 minutes later I pulled on set with a brand new electric powerwasher and the biggest variety pack of hose adapters I could find. It was just before the golden hour, and they were finishing up the few waterless scenes. I scrambled to connect a water hose to my new power washer, but once again, Murphy and his law stepped in to screw me. None of the eight or so couplings fit, and just as I was about bash my new washer in, the tractor broke down.

So now, we were losing daylight, with two crucial elements to our final scene out of commission. The attention turned to the tractor, the priority as rain can be more easily generated by a computer in post. Tractors are much more difficult. Knowing this, Katie made a call.

Katie’s father and owner of the antique machine soon pulled up in true southern fashion: In a big ass pickup with the windows down and the radio blaring. It’s still unclear to me what the issue was, but he fixed it right then and there. On his way out he happened to ask if we had any other issues, and the director and I mentioned that none of our hose adapters fit. Well, I’ll be damned if he didn’t walk off with the washer and all the accessories and came back 30 minutes later with a solution.

He had fashioned a home-made adapter with two of those we bought, a little bit of excess heater hose, and more than a few wire ties. When we stuck it on the end of the power washer, it looked like something out of a mad inventor’s sketchbook, but it worked. We hooked that thing up, and let her rip.

In the end, it was a shoddy power washer, with only enough juice to pump one pipe at a time, but one was enough. We always kept the single wall of rain in between the camera and the actors and essentially duct taped a single sprinkler head on the end of a long stick to get the actors wet. It genuinely didn’t look half bad.

Unfortunately, the film in total is a little rough. I’d like to re-shoot it knowing what I know now, and with enough time to find the right actors for a better version of the script. With all that said, I am still proud of all the work that went into it. We shot that movie the first weekend in March in a field, meaning that it was wet, muddy, and windy. Our actors and crew went through more than I would be comfortable asking of anybody, and they did it with minimal complaints. Everyone dealt with the chronic lack of crafty, the last minute changes, and hours of troubleshooting just to get three nobodies a decent grade, and that’s pretty damn cool. We ended up getting an A.

I’ve made some design improvements for my next rain machine model, and I can’t wait to get started. I just need to rustle up the money for parts and find somewhere to put the one I have now.

Speaking of, if anyone knows someone who’s in the market for a rain machine, I can give them a well-tested interchangeable set for about $100.00.

-Nickel