Filming: Full Speed Ahead!

Liz (Jennifer Koegler) and Rich (Erik Schark), Hailey (CrystalAnn) and Tabitha (Courtney Jenkins) work at Vanity Press.

After two relatively "easy" months of filming -- an average of a day or two each week -- STBD's filming schedule finally heats up.

Yesterday we descended upon WQED in Oakland, home to the fictitious WANT FM, where much of the series' action takes place. The building is also filled with offices, conference rooms and a green room, all of which lend themselves well to this season's expansion in an entirely new direction: Vanity Press.

As you may have glimpsed from our preview, there are plenty of new faces on STBD this season. Many of them can be found at Vanity Press, Caroline's new job away from Shout! Magazine and WANT. All of those faces were present at last night's shoot, which motored through three new scenes in an (almost) brief amount of time.

One of the biggest hurdles we have this season is scheduling, both in advance ("What do you mean you have a wedding this weekend?") and on the actual day of shooting. Normally, actors have the luxury of:

A) Getting the script well in advance,
B) Getting the whole script so they understand scenes in context, and
C) Arriving for makeup, rehearsing, filming and then taking breaks as necessary, preferably in an air-conditioned trailer.

Here at STBD, we do away with all of these formalities.

Instead, we traditionally film scripts that were written up to an hour in advance, we improvise half the dialogue* and then we break for vending machine food. Sexy? Not quite. Hectic? Absolutely. Magic?

We'll see when the season begins on September 4th...

* Interestingly, despite the strong improvisational backgrounds of many of our new cast members, very few of them are straying far from the script this season. Instead, they're loading the script with subtext. As a writer / director who's become accustomed to widespread improvisation among the cast, I find this adherence to the script unnerving... and fascinating.