Thursday, December 11, 2008

My second baby—it was worth the wait!

What pain, what joy, what relief! After all this time, my second baby, RSVPstyle’s Starter Set, is in the delivery room—whoops, I mean in the bookstores!

Just as when people say about a child—oh my goodness, yesterday you were a baby and now you’re all grown up!—today when I walked into Borders at Ward Centre and saw our Starter Set on the shelf, I was filled with so much emotion. People have no idea how long it actually took to film that 3½-hour DVD series and write the accompanying book. The whole time we were writing scripts, building sets, shooting, doing post-production, and writing and editing the book, we were also building a website, designing products, organizing full-day workshops and just building the foundation of our company. I flashed back to all the joy and pain of those lo-o-ong months.

It took so long that… sometimes when shooting was interrupted for weeks by other priorities, I’d show up to continue the same scene and James, our director, would say, don’t tell me you got a haircut! Other times my hair was suddenly lighter, or longer, or fluffier. It drove James crazy. But hey, there’s no budget for a hairstylist on set!

It took so long that… by the time someone caught a faux pas I made and we decided to reshoot, the house we’d been using as a set had been sold! But in addition to not being one to really follow rules (or scripts), I’m also a perfectionist. So we got permission, restaged the set, hauled in the truckload of equipment and the full crew, and reshot the segment. (What was the faux pas? I said Sir Isaac Newton first saw the spectrum of colors when he shot a beam of light through a prism. Hel-LO! No flashlights in the 17th century!)

It took so long that… well, instead of reliving every moment, let me just sum up by saying that those seven long months sure were worth it!

Standing in Borders today, looking at our Starter Set on the shelves, Lissa and I high-fived and whooped it up right there in the aisles. We truly felt like proud parents, our little baby standing all grown up with all the other books and DVDs at Borders (and Barnes and Noble too, by the way!).

Just don’t ask us when we’re doing this again!

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