The RV Spy Guys are back! That's right! My little viral marketing experiment from January has continued and a new episode has just gone live. See it for yourself at www.rvspyguys.com. We produced the video, now it's time to promote it which means I get to spend lots of time writing all about it.. what it's about, how we made it, etc. But there is a problem.. in all the writing I have to do to promote this, I have to be... Uh.. very PC. I have to put a nice little spin on the whole event, a little "ahhh isn't this nice, look at the little movie we made, how clever." Well.. no more. Yes, the first episode was a lot of fun to put together and was really a straight forward filming experience, as I blogged about here. But Mission 2 was a whole different story. And so now its finally time to write about this more openly, to tell the story I can't tell through the publicity channels. It's time for the E-Hollywood True Story.
Starting out this follow up episode was fairly straight forward. About a week after we released the last mission, I met with my Dean, my producer, and we began to brainstorm ideas of what we could do for a follow-up. The nice thing about this whole spy guys concept is that there is no shortage of ideas.. take all the spy movies... and spy cliches. There's a lot of material to pull from. Now combine it with Wylie Coyote and the Roadrunner cartoons, where poor Wylie went through countless attempts to get that darn roadrunner, and never succeeding, combine Spy movies with Roadrunner and you get endless possibilities of things we can do to these poor guys.
Finally, another lightbulb went off in my noggin, the plot of this episode came to me and I began to write the script. I turned in my copy to Dean and we began to plan out exactly how to accomplish filming my ideas. My script was.. clean... straightforward.. and simple. One day, I got an e-mail from Dean. Attached were the photos of a local actress that he had just found out about along with a note joking about we had to come up with some way to "write her in". I joked back. As part of the plot of the new episode deals with a coach, I said "Yeah.. ok.. we'll just make her the driver.. ha ha!" The problem is.. the idea stuck. Suddenly a whole new subplot emerged out of thin air.. one that I was seriously questioning it's appropriateness to a fun little RV story. Dean, seeing my reluctance to this addition went to our boss, who thinking just like most males, eagerly agreed to the new direction. Now came all the discussions in my office that I never thought I'd be having.. and secretly praying that the ladies outside the door were not hearing.. "what should she be wearing?" "How do we ramp up her sex appeal" "How much do we need to slow-mo her to create the right feel?". It was just not what I was expecting when the whole idea popped in. As a side note... While filming this episode, the following photo was taken. It seemed to just sum up this whole part of the experience: Me (attempting to direct), but stuck with my head in my hands, cringing.
Ok.. so plot disagreements aside, I was overruled.. but it's time to move on and get ready to film this thing. We got the date planned, all 3 actors booked, props produced and all the technological angles plotted out. The filming schedule was ambitious... in order to stay on budget, we had only 5 hours to film the whole thing. In that time, we had to film in 3 locations... at the factory, out in the countryside north of town and in a studio setting. We had it all planned to carefully take advantage of the light, knowing when the sun was setting, what had to be shot in the light, what needed to be filmed after dark. With such a short window of time, everything needed to go according to schedule or we'd have serious problems.. but it was planned. We were confident.. we had thought of everything, right? Not quite.
Day one: Filming day arrived and we were swamped.. making sure everything was perfectly ready to go. According to the schedule, the actors needed to check in at 2:30 so that we'd have time to get them in costume, have our briefing to review the schedule and get in place for the first shot. At 2:20, a polite 10 minutes early, Don (who plays Spy Guy Bill) and Tulce (the "girl") were both present and accounted for in my office with Tulce pulling various tops out of her bag to see which one we preferred. My reaction? See the photo above... I spent most of the day in that position... with Producer Dean grinning ear to ear.
2:30 came and the actor playing Ed was no where to be seen. 2:40.. no Ed. We quickly hit the phones calling the casting agent. 3:00.. no Ed.. We were suddenly in panic mode as we couldn't shoot anything without him, and there was no time for this. FINALLY, about 3:15.. 45 minutes late, Ed's car pulls up. We were still panicked, but as long as he was here, we could get back on schedule. Wrong!
Ed stepped out of the car. Now, what we had told the agent is this.. "He needs to be here prior to 2:30 wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a comfortable shirt and his lines need to be memorized." When Ed stepped out of the car... he looked as though he had just crawled out of a sewer. He was wearing FILTHY grey sweat pants.. complete with holes, pulled halfway up to his chest, a dirty half buttoned, shirt, and work boots without any laces. I was shocked and I think went 3 shades of pale. I asked him to go get changed into what he was supposed to be wearing and he admitted he that he didn't bring any other clothes. I could feel the little gray hairs sprouting out of my head as he spoke. One other problem.. he speech was slurred and not very clear. He was walking funny. It become clear very quickly that Ed.. was drunk.
So.. now what... We could fire him. But then we'd lose the whole day and the other 2 actors that we were paying to be there.. who, trying to re-coordinate schedules with could be a nightmare. We had no choice but to press forward and attempt to film. First things first, Ed had to change. We immediately sent him home even though it was about a 90 minute round trip. (In hindsight.. we should have never let him get back behind the wheel, but we weren't thinking clearly at that moment..) We then had to take our script and tear it apart. It was no longer about shooting each scene. We had to plot out each shot to figure out which individual shots could be filmed without Ed there, and then where to shoot those in the immediate area around us. Soon we had a plan in place and cameras rolled even with the setbacks.
90 minutes later, Ed reappeared still looking out of it, but at least he was in jeans. Quickly we grabbed him and set up for the first shot featuring the two together. That's when we discovered our next issue... Ed hadn't memorized anything.. HE HADN'T EVEN READ THE SCRIPT!! So much for the tricky dialogue.. hence the reasons we had sent out the scripts a week in advance to give the guys plenty of time to get ready. I think I just about had a grey pony tail by this point.
Again, we worked to make the best out of the situation... quickly working to film what we could before all the light went away. Towards the end of the day, our production assistant snapped the following photo of me.. My look said it all about the day we just had.
And Dean's look back to me....
At 8:00 that night, the actors had gone home. I sat in my chair with my head on my desk, banging. This was supposed to be a SIMPLE little web video, not a nightmare. Dean was pacing back and forth, concocting stories out loud as to how to viciously kill off Ed's character in the next episode (run over by a combine in Kansas seemed to be a popular solution). We went home discouraged, not knowing how this could ever be resolved.
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Day 2: It became obvious to me after decompressing, that there was just no way to salvage the shoot. Rather than coming up with a way to kill of the Ed character for the next episode, we'd have to just edit him out of THIS episode. Luckily when we reported all of this to the casting agent, she got angry enough to work overtime to help us out. By noon that day, we had a line up of actors to audition for the role of a new Spy Guy and we spent Tuesday afternoon holding auditions so that this would not happen again. Finally, we had a more experienced actor.. without a drinking problem, who was willing to do what it takes to make this all work.
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Day 3: Wait.. wasn't this all supposed to be done the day before yesterday?! Ug. Oh well. Luckily, Bill was so frustrated from his experience of acting next to Ed 2 days previously, he agreed to do whatever he needed to do to clear his schedule to come back and film this correctly. We had managed to complete the Tulce scenes on Monday (the one successful thing we did that day) so she didn't have to come back. And, also luckily, the weather managed to perfectly match the conditions of Monday, allowing us to mix and match shots from both days.
By 2:30, BOTH actors were in position for their first shots and cameras rolled as planned. All I can say is this.. what a wonderful experience it is to work with actors who can.. Act.. who can deliver lines... We completed shots.. quickly! We actually laughed! What was a nightmare, suddenly became the fun filming we had hoped for all along. NOW, the spy guys were back!
With all the footage now shot, it was time to edit the episode. This is where yet another problem hit. This one was simple.. people in the company realized that these videos were POPULAR! Meaning, that lots of people would be seeing it. So if lots of people are watching, what should we be doing? Selling motorhomes of course! Our goal in creating these was to simply entertain.. create a video to generate buzz, make people laugh and then give them a desire to see what the big deal was themselves. But the sales approach was to insert heavy handed dialogue throughout the video to help sell. My opinion.. if people felt like they were being manipulated with heavy handed dialogue, they'd never return. But the debate raged, making the edit process a big bureaucracy challenge. "Take that scene out.. put that back in.. no, take it out, make it funny, sell more coaches". Ug.
So the fact that this thing went live today, feels like a miracle to me. It took a lot of work to De-Edit Ed from the video, the website, the publicity shots, etc. But it is all now done. Overall, I like the new Spy Guy. I think we are better off than before and the future looks bright for the spy guys. And our next episode is already written!
But, trust me.. this was NOT the story I was telling in the publicity. In fact, I think I summarized it down like this:
" Filming the new episode felt almost as complicated as what happens to the Spy Guys. Whereas the first episode came together without delay, the second took some new creative energy thanks to scheduling conflicts causing parts of the episode to be re-written and re-filmed. As a result, audiences are introduced to a new Spy Guy named "Al", a character that was alluded to, but never shown in the first installment. "
But here.. on my blog, you get the whole story. Not the PC approach. Go RV Spy Guys!!!
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