Tuesday, March 17, 2009

And … rolling!

Our grand prize winners, the Agenas, had known for a week that they had won our Style My Room contest. No one can say grass grows under our feet: we started production on our one-hour Style My Room Makeover special yesterday, the very day The Honolulu Advertiser announced that the Agenas had won.

We set our call time for 9 a.m. Because we were invading a family’s home, we decided not to set a crazy-early call time like some of the days during production of our DVD last year. The Agenas do have four young kids, after all, and we didn’t want to cause too much commotion on a Sunday morning in their quiet neighborhood.

Our crew consisted of two video guys, our director, James, two grips (lighting guys), and of course Lissa, Kara, Melissa and myself—talk about a full house!

We shot the first segment outside on the sidewalk, and were probably the talk of the neighborhood. Cars slowed down to watch, neighbors came walking by, everyone wondered what all the commotion was about.


We shot the rest of the morning inside the house, which would have been a little bit cooler if not for all the lighting we had. The kids were great. Sarah, the youngest, was really cute. She kept going around yelling, “…and … Action!” I don’t know where she got that from, because James doesn’t say that! But it was very funny.

Once their part was done, Jo Ann’s mom and brother came to pick them up, because we knew they would soon get bored with our rigid schedule.


We are a low-budget production. There’s no hair and makeup person—well I guess there is: me! And we don’t have a great lunch table with all the fixins. Papa John’s had to suffice. Everyone ate on the fly, whenever they had a moment of down time.

The final shots of the day were done outside, by the infamous clothes line where we ambushed Jo Ann with the great news. This is where we filmed the “confessionals,” where Chris and Jo Ann got to share their thoughts on all the happenings. They were actually put up on little crates to get more of the background greenery into the shot. Lissa was just out of the shot, asking the questions, and we brought out diffuse lighting to make everybody look good.

Stay tuned—this is the first of my behind-the-scenes reports as we stay with the Agenas through their living room makeover.My, my, the things that go on behind the scenes!

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