Another amazing day is (not quite) coming to a close. We had about 250 people show up at Capalano’s today for the auditions. Ended up starting a little early and ending a few hours later than usual.

Originally I was supposed to read with all of the girls coming in to read for the character of Sara, our lead female. Fortunately they recognized that my acting skills are not what they are, and got the main male lead to do the reading with her. From what I understand, there were quite a few that surprised the Director and everyone else with their talent. Kudos to you girls!

I spent the majority of the day in the sun outside, a little chilly, taking pictures of all of the extras who signed up. It felt like the whole town was there. Kids from the high school skipped class just to come down. While I am not in favor of skipping class, it certainly made me feel even more humbled that so many are behind this film.

I’d like to personally thank the following people for their work today:

Wade Fox, for helping keep everything in motion and running from front to back.

Ed Lorde, for running crowd control outside.

Gordon Woodlee, for your untiring work standing next to me and taking the info down for hours on end and never once losing your warm smile.

The President of the McMinnville Chamber of Commerce, for taking charge of the inside as a gatekeeper and somehow managing to keep the chaos from getting out of control.

Brad Kaplan, owner of Capalano’s, for letting us use your place for the auditions and putting up with 10 times the amount of customers you’re used to in 1 day.

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So, after all that, we went and had a nice dinner/production meeting at Ryan’s. I got to spend some time with Gene Witham, our special f/x guy. It was amazing, just from the little bit of time we spent talking, how much I learned and barely skimming the surface of the depths of his knowledge. We are truly blessed to have him aboard for this.

After dinner, we reconvened back at the hotel, where we looked at the sculpture of the new creature design, and everyone gave their feedback to Gene. The conversation went into discussing the various minutiae of the “look” for our guy. I feel re-energized just from sharing ideas back and forth with the team on how he should look and act.

So, now I am back here at the homestead, and I have a little bit of paperwork to get ready for tomorrow.

And tomorrow is: special f/x in the early morning, a few more locations to scout, and then we go over the various character and script breakdowns. And, time willing, we’ll look over some revised designs from Gene on our very naughty, bad boy.

Stay tuned, same bat-time, same bat-channel.