Happy Time Fun Hour

We started shooting "The Tie that Binds" today. For those of you out of the loop with my day to day academic career (don't worry, I'm pretty much in that category as well) "The Tie that Binds" is a soap opera I wrote with Tess Waldburger. It's a project for our studio production class, and our team of 7 is creating it from scratch. Kamal is even composing original music. It's kind of hard to explain... it's a show within a show. The soap opera follows the crew of a children's TV show named Happy Time Fun Hour, as they struggle to finish the pilot episode and their lives fall apart, all because of one mysterious force, the tie that binds them to each other. It's being heralded as "an emotional tour de force," and "the most suspenseful series since Dallas."

Today we shot a scene with Mike and Kate. Mike plays the silly dentist on the kid's show whose continuous struggle with drug addiction brings his producer and sister, Kate, to her last nerve. It went great.

I've never finished up an initial day of shooting and been excited. Everyone was really into it and we got more done than we expected. I have my fingers crossed that the next 7 days of shooting will turn out as well.

At the end of the day, I had everyone put their hand in for a classic "dugout" moment, like you see in emotional sports movies... didn't turn out quite how I expected.