Greetings over your interweb devices
“We love to laugh
Loud and long and clear
We love to laugh
So everybody can hear
The more you laugh
The more you fill with glee
And the more the glee
The more we’re a merrier we.”
Even if you are going to have a live studio audience, particularly with a kids show, nowadays it is smart to bank a lot of material by pre-shooting it. With a pilot, often the entire show is pre-shot for “safety.” The decision will be made later which scenes will be done before the live audience, but for the rest, especially for those scenes with effects or dependent on editing tricks, rough edits are assembled to show to the audience. Of course no audience is better than an in-house one — and here you see the producers, director, some of the crew, and two of the actors watching and enjoying a playback scene.
The pilot was called “Arwin,” then later “House Broken,” and featured a spin-off character from “Suite Life,” handyman and awkward genius, Arwin Hochauser (played brilliantly by Brian Stepanek who is the smiling gent at frame left). It was one of two pilots shot during the same month, both of which featured Disney’s latest star-to-be, Selena Gomez. (Of absolutely no bearing, when she first came to LA from Texas to do a guest shot on “Suite Life,” I drew the lucky straw to direct that episode and so was her first Disney director.) While our pilot went pretty smoothly and was greatly enjoyed as evidenced here (ironically, three of the people who are pictured laughing hardest are the network execs), the other pilot was met with major rewrite issues and went both overtime and over-budget in shooting. But, there was the faint whiff of a Harry Potter-esque premise, and so the powers-that-be chose “The Wizards of Waverly Place” to be picked up instead.
Once again, That’s Hollywood.
To one and all, Be Safe-Stay Healthy