GHOTI: Trailer Shoot Update

What a crazy day. Got up this morning at 6:30 to make final preparations for the arriving hordes to film my trailer for GHOTI. Thanks to my wonderful, thoughtful, amazing wife, we all had plenty of drinks, pastries, muffins, English muffins, bagels, juice, and Snapple. Oh, and she did the dishes. Yeaaaaahhhhh boyyyyyyeeeeeee!!! My wife rocks.

The shoot went like a dream: we had seven SWAT Team guys in all—2 with kick arse riffle weapons, five with sidearms, and only two of the seven weapons were fake. With so much potential for bad juju on set, I was a little nervous until I gave my come to Jesus speech. But everything went great. One of the guys even worked for the government and gave superb advice on SWAT Team tactical attacks. The raw footage looked great... I can't wait to see what it's like after it goes through Magic Bullet.

The final set design looked good, too: 3 laptops, 4 desktops, 3 monitors, 4 keyboards & mice, 1 VCR, 1 DVD player, 2 external hard drives, 1 non-functional phone, 1 fax machine... On a $250K budget, we could do 100 times better but for a volunteer effort, this looked good enough for me.

My thanks goes out to an amazing cast & crew for today. The day could not have happened without all their time and energies, in no particular order:

Scott Chema, who opted to spend time on my set rather than on the last day of his job.
Lacie Oakley, who drove all the way from Ukiah!
Tyler Thompson, who came directly from his night job.
Rob Granados, who also came from his night job.
Richard Gross, who drive from Grass Valley.
Max Maxwell (my producer & DP), who hates waking up early and punched his alarm clock this morning uttering the words, "Fuck Ross Pruden!"
Rick Mischke, who stepped in to fill a role I hadn't yet cast and did a great job.
Rob Thomas, whose expertise made a qualitative difference in the SWAT Team filming
Brian Dahl & Adam Neeley, who sweat profusely playing SWAT team guys and never complained once!
Mike Sheldon, who never hesitated in helping out whenever needed. (Plus, he can do a great vomit imitation.)
And my wife, Tracie, Harris, without whom we would all have been very grumpy for lack of food.

Today's shoot was fun and the footage looks great. Stay tuned for pics, everyone!