The first episode of any big reality show is an insane soup of long hours, last minute details, and impending disaster. As the executive producers and lead creative voices of the show, it’s your job to pretend you believe everything will be okay.
Overly Ambitious?
So, somehow we convinced VH1 and Lionsgate that, in the course of this episode, on time and on our tiny reality TV budget, we could:
- Have a boogey man crash through the ceiling, shattering glass everywhere.
- Center John’s acting class around smashing pumpkins with a baseball bat (and clean up fast enough to shoot our next scenes 15 minutes later.)
- Sneak a “little person” into a fake table without letting our ladies catch on, so we could scare them with a phantom hand.
- Build three sets from scratch in order to shoot 10 versions of a fake movie teaser starring each of our 10 actresses.
- Edit those together in time to choose a winner for elimination.
Oh, and do all that in just three days.
Pressure Was On
But, as mentioned above, we’d convinced ourselves, and everyone else, things would all work out. Thus, judges John Homa and Tim Sullivan both seemed chipper on day 1:
Crashing Through a Ceiling (Without Killing Anyone)
For our night one acting challenge, we wanted to create a grand entrance for our surprise acting partner. Having chopped through a wall with an axe season 1, we weighed our options for something even more startling.
I really wanted to do an explosion, will full-on pyro, and blow up a whole wall. It wasn’t meant to be. (Peter Spoerri, our Head of Production, almost shot me.) Joke consoled me and said I could blow something up on another show.
Once we came up with crashing through the ceiling as our big reveal, we all got really excited. Could we do it?
What we came up with was to build a rig on the roof (see photo to left) which would support our stunt man, Chase Rivera. He’d be dangling from a wire, through an open, existing skylight. A tinted glass light-box was built to conceal him and look like part of the ceiling.
However, break-away glass is REALLY expensive (on our tiny reality show budget.) We could only afford three panels. 1 for rehearsal, 1 for the shoot, and 1 more just in case. Hey, no guts, no glory, right?
The first rehearsal was awful. We had no choice but to blow another panel and try to get it right. 2nd time around looked much better. So just one piece of glass left to get it right in front of our ladies.
In the control room, we were all freaking out. If we didn’t pull the scare off, it would be a lot of wasted resources, and I was going to be really cranky the rest of the season. Most importantly, we didn’t want to ruin the whole point of the exercise: for our girls to experience real fear before their first acting challenge.
It didn’t help that our stunt man had to dangle above the fake glass the entire time our ladies were entering and meeting the judges. One false move, one bump, too much noise…and the scare would be blown. So Chase Rivera hung, suspended above the glass, silently, for nearly 45 minutes waiting to crash through. Here’s how it went:
Little Larry
Our scare in the kitchen (used as a fun way to announce script delivery) entailed a hand shooting up out of a bowl of gum-balls. This meant putting a monster hand on Larry Lawrence, AKA “Little Larry” and shoving him into a fake table.
We had to do it quickly, and while the girls were in the next room, so poor Little Larry wouldn’t pass out in there! Way to go, little Larry. Scare worked great.
Shooting 10 Movie Teasers in 8 Hours
The idea for the first director’s challenge was to have each actress star in a short teaser for a fake film. To pull it off, we built three sets on a local stage, and ran our girls through each one at a rapid-fire pace. For the final shot of the teaser, a demon hand punches through the wall and grabs our ladies.
Here’s a little flip video of us acting like kids in a candy store, getting ready to test things out. The video stars our Supervising Challenge Producer, Matt Laesch, and our Head of Production, Peter Spoerri, who agreed to stand in for the 4’9″ Rosanna.
Jessica Ortiz was this week’s leading lady. She did a great job in the teaser, considering she only had a couple of takes o each set-up. Most movie teasers are put together from hours of footage of great takes. Of course, she had a grand total of about 2 minutes to choose from.
I cut this trailer together on my laptop on set, and this is pretty much how it stayed (that whole time/money thing.) While certainly not as polished as a real Hollywood teaser, we were all proud of how it turned out no shoot time and about 4 hours of laptop editing and some quickie Final Cut Pro titles. Major credit to DP Adam Sampson, who shot this on his RED (same camera used on features like District 9.)
Stay Tuned for More Behind-the-Scenes Action
We’ve got more videos coming from episode one, interviews with John Homa, Tim Sullivan, and Jaime King, and lots to say about each ep. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, swing by our Facebook Page, or Subscribe via RSS to keep up with all the Scream Queens Behind-the-Scenes action.
And of course, if you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you below!