filming for The Quilt Show in denver, co

Last week I hopped a plane and several hours later walked into a gorgeous big beautiful sky and MY mountains over there in the distance. Denver isn’t quite the same as growing up in the Salt Lake Valley with the Rocky Mountains right there in your back yard. Denver feels like it is in Kansas and the mountains are waaaaaay over there. But they are beautiful all the same. And the dry air compared to the steamy sauna that passes for summer here in NC can’t be beat.

I had the serious honor (well – one can never be too serious when Alex and Ricky are in the room!) of being invited back to The Quilt Show; this time to their studio rather than out on location. For those of you who missed it the first time I filmed in Charleston and Asheville. I’ll stick in a links list at the bottom of this post… I had too much fun revisiting those travels and you might enjoy them as well.

This was my first time on set with a “LIVE STUDIO AUDIENCE!!!” That was a hoot. Yes the audience is there – and it is alive and breathing. But they have to hold still and breathe quietly while actual filming is happening. And there are a bank of huge cameras between what is going on set and the people watching – so they actually only see what you are doing on the big screen TV’s that are on either side. I like to ham it up and play with people so I did a lot of pretending that I could see them.

It was funny that after the filming is all done, they turn the cameras around and film the audience having different responses to what happened previously on set. They would be directed to belly laugh or nod or chuckle or simply “look really attentively” at – something – usually something silly in Justin’s hand, like a marker.

What was just as fascinating to me was sitting in the control room for a few segments – watching various people do invisible jobs that make the show look great. There are sound and lighting engineers with ranks and ranks of buttons. A Camera engineer who watches the action and tries to keep up with which shot will best show what is going on. I’m told I move a little to quickly on camera and I tried, really I did, to slow down. Shelley, the producer watches closely to make sure everything makes sense and flows and a note taker writes as fast as she can so that they can shoot all the right pick-ups and put them in all the right places. It’s really cool to see what is going on behind the scenes to make those things all work out seamlessly as you watch the screen.

For those of you who wish to further procrastinate whatever it is you really should be doing right now….

Charleston, SC – The Angel Oak
Charleston, SC – Architecture
The Quilt Show – Magnolia Plantation History
The Quilt Show – behind the scenes at the Magnolia Plantation and Pt 2
The Quilt Show – on location at Magnolia Plantation
The Quilt Show – prep time and the art of slogging