Ten Episodes Video Taped!

A week ago today, my friends Brian and Mel drove from Seattle to Spokane and transformed my living room into a video set.  Together, we filmed ten, full episodes of KELLY'S CURIOSITIES for MSN on Thursday, August 29 and Friday, August 30, 2013.

Our biggest challenge -- I thought -- would be my dogs.  Abbey is a 4-year-old Great Dane and Pug is a 14 year old pug, as you might have guessed.  I thought Abbey would be like a bull in a china closet with all that expensive equipment -- cameras, monitors, lights, reflectors, boom mikes, the whole nine yards.  But thanks to my daughter Vanessa's skill with animals, they became our calm studio audience.  Pug's snoring as she slept was the biggest hurdle.  She is still wondering why we kept waking her up, I'm sure.   Abbey was totally zen.

What turned out to be hard was pronouncing several Russian, Chinese and Japanese names.  The fact that I had to trip over those pronunciations really distracted me from telling the stories associated with the names.  It surprised me that the worry over those three or four words slowed me down so much.  But once we got those episodes complete, it was a little easier.

Easier.  That's a relative term.  It was never entirely easy, because it's a fun and complicated process.  My job was to give the producer and camera person the bits and pieces they needed to go back to Seattle, to their computers and animators and musicians and jigsaw the videos together.

So I did the same stories again and again and again -- as many times as it took.  Then I recreated different motions I made in each re-telling so the camera could zoom in for close ups on the items I was holding.

It was hard at times, but always fascinating and mind blowing.  Videos staring me?  A plump, aging writer of things weird?  It's like an old lady Cinderella story, and I know it.

I am so grateful for this opportunity.  I hope people like them so much we'll get to do another ten episodes...then another ten...then another ten.  I hope they are so much fun, they go viral so we can travel to locations to shoot the stories where they unfold.  But even if that doesn't happen, color me delighted!

I got to be a video star for two days in my living room.  It doesn't get too much better than that!