Aug 24 - It's all happening so fast...

Ellen nailed down a complete cast and crew, completing the roster yesterday with an editor. Our producer, Ryan Westheimer, is like an angel that has descended on the project and made all the disparate, chaotic elements suddenly seem... doable! He is a calm, good-humored, knowledgeable professional with reams of experience, and an insistence on having fun with the project.

The cast met for a full read-through on the 20th, and they are incredibly great. We have these precociously skilled and talented 20-somethings, who are confident and professional way beyond their years. We are fortunate to have the awesome comedy skills and professionalism of Ashley Peldon, who started acting when she was four years old and hasn't stopped since. Ellen worked with her on The Mommies, and so it's great to have them back together on Girls Gone College. Ashley is paired with Jo Mei, who Ellen saw in the Ensemble Studio Theater Marathon of One-Acts last Spring in NYC. Ellen knew right away that she wanted to work with her. The day after shooting is complete, Jo wil be going back to the Juilliard School in New York.

The show takes place in college, so there are also some teachers. Ellen Gerstein, Carol Schlanger, and Phil Abrams play professors of Art, Spirituality, and Film, respectively. The aptly-named Erin Beaux is a professor of... we don't know. All we know is he's the hottest professor in the school. And, completing the middle-aged roster, I show up, barely clad, as a model in a "Drawing the Figure" class. Showing out-of-shape male flesh has become quite popular in Hollywood lately, so I've decided to follow the trend. I've had to not exercise for months to get in the right shape for this role.

I will be posting some video pretty soon, documenting the production, but there's so much of it to wade through, that it's hard to pick just a few interesting/funny minutes out of all the stuff that is going on.

Until later, Peter

Aug 1 - The Webisode Girls Gone College Is Under Way!

Girls Gone College is coming at us like a freight train! We've got a line-producer, we're looking for locations, we've got a costumer, a sound guy, cameraman (what we call a Director of Photography, or DP, in the trade), and actors coming at us from all directions.

First things first - who am I? I'm Peter Basch, Ellen Sandler's husband, CIO of Sandler Ink, and the blogger of Girls Gone College. This is my first entry.

Second things... Some general thoughts on webisodes. Go to YouTube, do a search on the word "funny cats". You'll find about a zillion cute little videos, some gussied up with titles and soundtracks. Those are bona fide webisodes. You could do that in one afternoon with a camcorder and a computer. Then there are the slightly produced ones, like the one Ellen and I put on YouTube (look up my name - BTW, the second one in the list that comes up is made up of photographs by my late father; very nicely done morphing). That one took about two days of shooting, and two weeks of animation, writing, and editing.

Then there's this - fully produced, professional cast and crew, money being spent... A really big project. The scripts are really funny and I think the final product is going to be hilarious.

I look forward to cluing you all in on the progress of this project. Goodbye for now, Peter