Director Christopher Guest discussing a scene with D.O.P. Mikhail Petrenko

Scott here!

If you haven’t seen our teaser episode, make sure you check out our previous post.

Wow! Things are moving fast.

We’ve been working on this series for over three years, and in the past couple of weeks we’ve shot one third of it, posted our teaser episode, started up our online and social networking pathways and in a little over a week from now the first real episodes will be up for you all to see!

It’s a little weird to think that things have taken form on their own, outside our imaginations, and are now (in a certain sense) over and done with. Those first sixty episodes are shot. And no matter how much we may want to go back and do the odd thing here and there differently, they are what they are.

We’re madly trying to get a bunch of things ready for our soft launch on October 15 (Beware October 15!) which includes polishing the videos and doing lots and lots of text for our sprawling web presence. Courtney is also hard at work organizing our opening into sequence shoot this weekend, at which we’re hoping to fit in some glamour shots of our cast in costume. And, we have a special surprise coming tomorrow, to help keep you interested in all the zany Tights and Fights: Ashes action to come.

But I also wanted to take a second and respond to all the requests for some shoot stories. Every production has it’s moments – whether they are moments of hilarity or sheer terror. All in all, this shoot went rather smoothly. It was designed to be very constrained – mostly one camera angle and one character so we could shoot 15 episodes per day! We shot The Plumber on Saturday, Evil Trojan Borscht on Sunday, Fantabulous Gal on Tuesday and finished up with both Major Faultline and Leopard Woman on Thursday.

We thought we’d start with The Plumber, which was in the basement of our friend and producer on sister web series Ruby Skye: PI, Kerry Young. It was a tight fit – perfect for the poor Plumber, who was forced to move into his Mom’s basement, but not a lot of room for a film crew – even one as small as ours. Mikhail and Christopher were jammed into the corner behind the camera, while the rest of us who wanted to keep an eye on how it was going (like, oh say… our Art Director or Hair and Make Up) had a choice of either camping out in the tiny on suite bathroom or on the very steep stairs leading to the main level. Like many sets, we ran on coffee and by the end of the day that tiny bathroom was home to dozens of (mostly finished) coffee cups that had accumulated through out the day.

For lunch, Courtney got us a pretty good deal on a Middle Eastern platter. When our PA returned with the food – there was so much that for a while we were convinced that we had accidentally gotten someone else’s order. There was chicken, a plate of dips, endless Greek salad… and after a very brief conversation we quickly decided that if this was the wrong order, they were going to have to pry this food from our cold, dead hands.

At the end of the day, we realized we had to do something that I have never encountered before on a set – we were going to have to store twenty or so empty, cardboard boxes. Let me explain. Kerry’s basement did not come with the number of cardboard boxes that we pictured The Plumber having to share his old bedroom with, so Sarah our Art Director combed the city and our nearby No Frills for boxes put out for recycling. At the end of the day, we remembered that we were going to have recreate this whole set in a couple of months when we shoot our part 2. And that meant – we would need these same boxes again! So, after we loaded up the gear, the left over food and put Kerry’s basement back to normal, we all headed to Christopher’s building to store collapsed and tied up cardboard boxes in his lock up. As we made the long trip from the parking garage to the subterranean cages, we passed some kind of wild party in the condo’s activity room – with lots of strongly perfumed middle aged people coming and going from the garage where they smoked a little pot and then trooped back in to the sounds of a Micheal Jackson party mix.

That’s all for now, I’m late for a Writer’s Guild of Canada gathering. Someday I’ll do a post about what great things the Guild (my Guild) is doing to encourage web series in Canada. In the meantime, I’ll try to find time to keep posting more stories from the shoot. (And I haven’t forgotten about my promise for more info on the writing sessions!)

In the meantime, post some comments on YouTube for us and Beware October 15!