The view...

From up here, is pretty nice.

Wouldn't you say?

That's what you see looking out of my hotel room in Vancouver.

At least when it's not raining.

Back home now after 'the week of doom' last week basically working around the clock to get the first 25 episodes of THE DAILY: with mark & laura lynn shot and rough edited.

I feel like I'm still recovering.

I didn't really talk about how the shoot went, so here goes...

Monday to Thursday was non-stop editing, locked in a basement with my homee Russell Greene laboriously, and I do mean LABORIOUSLY going through every interview segment our on-location team had shot.  We had to decide what portions of each segment were useable (some more or less than others) then lock the time, decide on the theme, figure out how I was going to transition to and from said specifically-themed clip, makes sure all the clips fit the required time, the write all the intervening content to transition to and from the clips and create ancillary content to fill in the gaps where the interviews were too short.

Boring you yet?

Yes, that's how talk TV is made--slowly, painstakingly, laboriously.

Russell and I ate good pizza, lots of brownies, drank bottles and bottles of coke and occasionally spiked said coke with some whiskey he'd just gotten from his cousin.  Once the whiskey hit the system we cranked the 'snoop' to really get the mood into a more positive mode.

All to help us edit.

Then Friday hit--first shoot day.

I slept o.k the night before.  As I said many times to my wife on the phone in the days leading up, "I don't think (after directing my first feature-film) that anything will every really stress me out ever again..."  Didn't sleep GREAT though, just good enough to not be dead the next day.  I think I finished writing around 3am then slept 'till seven or seven thirty then hit the studio.

We only had a half day that first day and I had conservatively hoped we'd get five shows done allowing us to only (ONLY?) need to shoot twenty the next day.

We got one show.

ONE.

So, at the end of that day, before heading back to the edit suite then home to write again 'till 3 or 4am I called Niki to tell her I'd be staying longer.

Meaning she'd be home alone with four kids for an extra three days...  

The crew and cast and production team out there were kind enough to agree to come in on Sunday so that I wouldn't be stabbed by the Network bosses for screwing their new series before it had even begun.

Day two was light years better.  We got eight show done (I'd been hoping for nine) which left us only sixteen (16?) to do on Sunday.

I had been planning to keep things pretty 'loose' for the talent, preferring not to put them on teleprompter (a glass screen that goes in front of the camera lens off-which most TV people read things someone else has written for them so that they'll look smart/witty/funny/heartfelt/insightful, etc...) and allowing them to freestyle their lines for the most part with minimal direction from me.

My whole early career as a TV host, that's how I did it.  Freestyle.

Well, it didn't work.  At all.

So, Friday night I burned the mid-night oil and wrote all the segments for my hosts for Saturday and totally changed my 'freestyle' ideas to allow them some time to 'riff' (chat back and forth) with each other, based on their areas of interest/history/talent etc.

It was like night and day.

They were loose, able to focus on performance, not stressed.  Just 'on'.

So, I continued doing that, writing for them, bantering with them so that they'd have things to riff on, and generally working to their strengths instead of asking them to rise to mine.

Duh...

(I can be really stupid sometimes...)

Our staff (Shout out to Canadace, the Shaw team, Russell, Greg, Lynn, Lawrence, Geoff, Lindsday) just ripped it up, working their tails off to do their jobs to beyond the fullest extent to help make the whole thing happen.

And it did.

And it looked great.

And had substance and spirit to it.

The kind of 'mass media' my business partner and I are in the business of making.

I start editing tomorrow, and am very excited to deliver the first five episodes to the network on Monday.  I think they're going to lose their minds.

I'll make a point to pop some of our work up on youtube and post a link here in the coming days so you can see the stuff we're doing.

Peace,

T