I start off my mornings now checking the Talent Show site to see who made it into the "Our Faves" category and who has been featured in the intro video. All day I refresh Ian's profile to watch the total views on the video increment slowly (at last check he was at 242). "Spyder" might be a little more obsessed, taking to heart all comments, both negative and positive. "Why are people wasting their time trying to snipe our video?" he asks. "It's the freaking internet," I say. "It's what they do."
We may have been a little cocky when production started. After taking the necessary workshop I needed at school in order to check out equipment (a light kit and microphones), we convened back at my house where we started to prepare for the shoot starting later that day (Monday the 20th). Our plan was thus: get done with shooting Monday and Tuesday, edit Wednesday and Thursday, upload by Friday. That would give us the weekend for people to vote on it and still an extra week for it to be on the site.
That's when Dad's Garage fell through. I'm not sure what happened but Dana came back and essentially told me it wasn't going to happen since no one was there. So the people that were going to come over for the shoot instead came over for a rehearsal of the "Backstage" scene and I determined I would just find another location by the following night.
By not shooting those scenes at the theatre (almost half the entire content of the video), however, we had to condense all our production time to Tuesday. At the time, we didn't really sweat it. The length of the video had to come under ten minutes and most of the videos we were spoofing were no longer than thirty seconds. How long could these shoots take?
Oh, was I ever so young?
Filming began at 11am at the home of Sean Kiskel, who was to star in our version of the Catch 22 song, a little ditty about the stats one can find about the book Catch 22 on Amazon. The concept: Sean is trying to find the next hit Catch 22 song, stopping in frustration. Ian comes into the room, claiming the song to be old, tired and dead (by his hands). Ian then shows him "something new," leading into a short music video about The Count of Monte Cristo. That shoot went awesome. I got all kinds of coverage, I got to watch Sean fall down a lot and the stuff we shot for the music video was pretty killer. We finished a little behind on time but we still felt good.
Then we headed up to Alpharetta/Roswell for shoots at Rich's house and a local hotel. Rich's place was the site for our parody of Everybody Wants a Panda, featuring Trackside's favorite bartender, Jonathan. The point here was to interrupt Jonathan in his extolling of the non-bears with Ian's claims that he loves pandas more. Then Ian would dive into Brian's collection of stuffed pandas in nothing but a robe and sparkly boxers (that Katie picked out), rolling around and seductively singing the same song. I started running into audio problems here, mostly because I stopped directing and became a spectator. You can barely hear Ian for most of the later part of the segment, not to mention also the light changes for part of it. Stupid sun.
After that it was a wait until 7pm before our actor for the Breakdance scene was off work. Suddenly, I realized the crunch we were going to be in.
[to be continued ... ]
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