Living Big in my tiny house

A couple of months ago, I had a visit from tiny house royalty: the filmmaking couple behind the Living Big in a Tiny House channel on YouTube, Bryce Langston and Rasa Pescud. It was such an interesting experience - and the resulting video (below) is so beautiful - I thought I'd take you behind the scenes of the two-day shoot. Follow me...  

Living Big's tiny house videos might only be about 20 minutes long, but so much work and cleverness goes into creating visual joy and inspiration for their 4.6 million subscribers, most of them in the US. The process for my video started in February when Rasa did a callout on Facebook for tiny houses to film in northern NSW. I thought it might be fun - and I wanted to promote my Tiny book in America - so I applied, which involved sending pics and explaining how I came to live tiny. 

When she emailed me in March to say they'd love to film my tiny (yay!) she sent me a detailed run-sheet of exactly what I was signing up for: basically an intensive two-day shoot. 

We set a date, then I started prepping my tiny, which seemed to take weeks. I re-oiled some of the cedar cladding, cleaned EVERY ONE of my 13 windows (and screens), made new curtain ties, built a new raised vegetable garden, decluttered (and sneaked in a couple of new cushions) and generally cleaned and tidied every inch of my little house. I knew it had to be spick and span, because Rasa (the photographer half of the duo) would be zooming in on every nook and niche. 

Seeing them pull up in my driveway on Sunday 1 June was surreal. It was like crossing an invisible line between YouTube and real life. 

I'd been watching Bryce interview people about their tiny houses for years and now here he was on my doorstep! Fans, be reassured: in real life he's just as warm, effusive and friendly as he appears on screen. (And tall: six-foot-four I think he said.) Rasa is lovely too, in a quieter way, and I felt the pressure on her shoulders to get all the footage in two days, no do-overs, before they moved on to their next shoot. 

As soon as they parked the car, Rasa mic'ed me up straight away. Being winter, the days were short so there was no time to waste. Within minutes we were all standing outside my tiny and I was shaking hands with Bryce, on camera now, before he began asking me about my tiny house journey. 

They were super professional, but human as well. And despite the challenges of constant travel and working on the road they really seem to love what they do and care about sharing people's stories and showing their tiny homes in the best light. 

After the outside interview came the interior interview - which involved me standing in one place and talking with Bryce about various features in the tiny, without looking or moving around, which I found quite difficult! 

By then it was lunchtime but they didn't take a break. I scoffed a sandwich before Rasa filmed me, all afternoon, "living" in the tiny, i.e. reading, writing, cooking, eating... I felt like an actor in a silent movie, and very self-conscious, but Rasa put me at ease and is clearly good at what she does - not only does she shoot video on her DSLR camera but a bunch of still shots too. She's really the unsung hero of Living Big. 

I wasn't around for day 2 of the shoot - they asked me to leave them alone at my tiny for the whole day, which felt weird at first (in the four years I've lived in it, no one has ever been in my tiny without me being there!) but I trusted them. They filmed right up to last light that day. 

To complicate matters, both days were on-and-off rainy, which played havoc with the light. Fortunately the sun came out the next morning. They were due to drive to their next tiny house, but decided to spend a few hours getting the final drone shots and it was worth it. (I'd never seen my tiny from the air!) In the video you can't even tell that it rained for two-thirds of our shoot!

Huge thanks to Bryce and Rasa, and their editor back in New Zealand, for creating something I will treasure forever, a beautiful memento of this time in my life in the little house I love. (You can see more of Rasa's gorgeous pics - and more tiny houses - on the Living Big in a Tiny House website.)