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Behind the scenes of I Made America

Ok so our original plan was to film a Heartbeat per week in two shoot days. Well….ha yeah.

New plan.

So instead we are shooting three days a week and not filming just one heartbeat a week. We are filming whatever we can fit into a shoot day. As we started filming we realized that filming an episode a week wouldn’t fit based on our location availability and actor’s schedule. At the same time we have to film in episode order as much as possible because we have to be ready to launch the episodes in order as we are filming later ones. Oh did I also mention that not every episode is written… So now we are jumping around from episode to episode.

Although overwhelming at first, this process has turned out to work quite well. We have set up a method of sending out a weeks worth of the shooting schedule the day after our weekly producer’s meeting. This allows everyone to plan for the next week, keeps us from falling behind on call sheets, and allows the live events producers to plan immersions.

This whole process has so many moving parts that it gets crazy, but man is it fun to sort through.

~Erica

New Challenge: Find locations. On a normal production, we as producers would go into a location scouting with very specific information on our schedule and would be able to give all necessary information up front and wait hopefully for a positive response. For this production, we have to lock locations for unscheduled days sometimes within the next week, be able to use them for the next couple months and leave it open ended as to how many days we will need them because we are receiving new scripts daily. Oh and did I mention we have no budget for locations?  And people are actually saying yes! Local businesses have been so supportive of our small I Made America family and the project we are pitching that they are allowing us to invade their space and not asking for compensation or specific scheduling up front.  Luckily we do have some things to offer the business’s we use. We can give them exposure and direct business from us and our friends to them. Most recently, Moonshine Bar let us film at their location and even let our Thomas Jefferson perform a few times for the bar! They were so awesome! I hope we get to shoot there again for the rest of season 1, I can foresee there being more bar scenes for our founding fathers! On to more location hunting…so far its been good… keep your fingers crossed for our last few location hunts.

Your OneHalf of the ever powerful Video Production Duo,

Catherine

Here we go guys…. During the weekly production meeting this week we realized something crazy and amazing. We have to invent our own workflow and chain of communication. Producing a web series is one beast, but trying also coordinating with ? other producers about there departments at the same time. So Catherine and I have started to create a “Workflow Chart” to help organize all our departments by episode per week. Our hope is that this will keep us from falling behind or forgetting something important.

Since there are so many moving parts to coordinate we wanted to get a jump start on planing for them. Once we launch we will be constantly filming episodes, candid videos, having live events, and pumping out social media that if we neglect one area or double book our actors we could really screw ourselves.

In one week we could be prepping for Heartbeat #3, writing Heartbeat# 8, Filming Heartbeat #4, Posting Heartbeat #2, and having a live event.

Here is a screen grab of the chart we have been working on. It’s a work in progress but hopefully it will save us headache’s later.

~Erica

Take a look a t the I Made America Teaser! Please share and enjoy. Content for the show will start coming out in the next week or so. Please share and enjoy!