Memory lane: Day 2 of the Daniel and the Lions shoot

June 23, 2006 -- After our brutally long day yesterday, we’re relieved to have a much lighter day today. On tap are the scenes that take place just outside the entrance to the lions den. We set it up this way to enable us to be able to use George Dyer as King Darius. We just loved George’s work as Nimrod, the leader of Zarahemla, in Vol. 8, which we actually shot prior to Vol. 7. We realized he would be ideal for the role of Darius, but when I contacted him to discuss it, he told me that, while he would love to do the role, he was in Arkansas doing the opera “Carmen.” In order for us to be able to use him, we would have to push our start date, never a thrilling prospect, and organize it such that we would need to have him record his song tracks and get him fitted with a costume on his first day of shooting. After thinking about it for about a second, we began working on exploring what it would take to adjust our schedule. It was painful at the time, but in retrospect, totally worth it.

George has such an incredible voice. We’ve long admired George’s talent, but had no idea how to use it, because he is known for his tremendous operatic voice, and opera voices can be a challenge for children to enjoy. But a few months ago, I attended a function commemorating the life accomplishments of a noted religious leader, and George was one of the invited performers. During the course of the evening, he sang a song called “Granada,” which played up the character’s pomposity. It really started my wheels turning. When it came time to put a face on the unnamed wicked people of Zarahemla, we created the character named Nimrod, and reached for the phone to see if we could entice George to take the role. I wasn’t sure how a performer of George’s stature would feel about playing a Gilderoy Lockhart-type of character named Nimrod. He was totally gracious about it and dug into the role with great enthusiasm.

Now, in Daniel, it was time to let George be a good guy.

The role of Daniel was played by a Liken newcomer, Casey Elliott. Casey was sent our way by Summer Naomi Smart, who starred with him in Hale Center Theater’s “Aida.” We are ever grateful to our talented alums who refer their talented colleagues our way.

Casey was another who showed up during the last couple of days of our audition period. Because we shot Vol. 8 just a few weeks prior to Vol. 7, our preproduction schedule was on the brisk side. We feel we were truly blessed to have Casey come our way right when we needed him.

Today, George and Casey sing a beautiful duet called “Peace.” It is my favorite song of the show. Very moving. Two great voices.

The set for this scene is tiny. It is built on a mezzanine level on the opposite side of the actual entrance to our lions den. It can handle maybe a dozen people comfortably. Counting the camera crew and actors, there are probably two times that. When it is time for me to get out and head on over to video village, I take advantage of a fun exit feature – the lions den slide – to get down in a hurry.

Memory lane: Esther and the Hamsters

For our fifth movie, "Esther and the King," there's a scene where the various maidens are trying to outdo one another in their preparations to see the king. One of them believes that hair and make-up are the answer to winning the king's affection, so she overdoes both. Another overdoes the jewelry. Another overdoes perfume. But the one that has impacted me personally the most is the one who believed that it was the clothes she wore that would make the difference.

She decides that she needs an over-the-top pink frilly gown, and to make it, she relies on a sewing machine powered by a hamster (called a "Hampster-Matic" in the movie). My daughters already have a hamster (a huge one called "Goliath"), but we determine that one is not enough -- in case it decides it's sleepy at the moment we need it do turn the sewing wheel. So Tom L, our props manager, goes to a local pet store and picks up five dwarf hamsters.

We end up shooting the scene, and before we're done with our two second shot, we've tried all five hamsters in an effort to find one who would keep moving (apparently, we've never heard the expression never work with children or animals, because we tend to do both much more than is sensible). But we finally get what we need.

My youngest daughter, Alexandra, finds out that Tom has "inelegant" plans for disposing of the hamsters, so she conspires with my wife to provide "temporary" housing for the hamsters. The hamsters are divided by gender into a couple of aquariums that will serve as their houses, and they are brought home, where they housed in our hallway linen closet.

A couple of months pass by, and I'm walking down the hallway, and I see these five pairs of eyes looking up at me from an aquarium, and I look into one of my daughters rooms, where I see my wife working on cleaning out another aquarium with little critters running around. Then I notice more aquariums. Now, I was no math major, but even I can clearly see that we have more hamsters now than we have had before. So I make an innocent inquiry, only to be told that there was some confusion during the gender separation process, and now in addition to the original five (plus Goliath), we are now the proud owners of more than a dozen additional hamsters. I'd been a little busy, so I had somehow managed to fail to notice the proliferation of aquariums, let alone hamsters.

To try to get a handle on the process, my wife had taken the hamsters to a local veterinarian for gender identification. Apparently, this is not easy on a hamster, because within a few weeks, our hamster population is up to 27.

Unless you're willing to utilize one of the inelegant hamster reduction techniques (such as snakes), it's not that easy to get rid of hamsters. Their proliferate nature makes most pet stores less than eager to accept bundles delivered to their door stops. Their sometimes less-than-cuddly natures makes giving them away to other loving households a little tricky, too. But, over time, we are able to find homes for a number of them, and a pet store agrees to take a litter. A couple of them have succumbed to early demises due to their somewhat fragile constitutions. But, now, about nine months later, we still have about 10 that live with us, and I think those will probably live out the remainder of their golden years (I believe their expected lifespan is about 2 years) with us. That is, unless somebody expresses an interest. (Hint, hint -- anyone?)

We haven't had a litter in several months, so we feel like we have a handle on the gender issue.

Still, next time, should I, in a weak moment, decide we need animals in a movie again, I must pay closer attention to the complete plan of what to do with them afterwards.

Daniel Premiere

Last night, we premiered Daniel to an audience of about 1,000 at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah.

It's always an anxious evening -- partly because of concern about how the audience will respond, partly because of concern that the technical side (blowing the only bulb we could find for our projector) might not hold up, partly because I might mess up my brief little speech, and partly because I'm still not that comfortable in a tux.

But everything held up just fine, and it was a wonderful evening of celebration of what we are blessed to be a part of and to celebrate the results of the hard work and devotion of a lot of people.

Ken (Agle, my brother/producer) did a pre-show that was a "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" type game show using Liken trivia. Then Dan Beck did a fun opening number where he sang a fast-paced tribute to Likens 1 to 7. That was followed by bringing a few of us on stage to introduce the new Liken management team and my aforementioned speechlet, which I managed to get through without botching it too badly. Then Lauren, who played Amelia in the past three Likens, came up and introduced the new imaginer child, Devin, played by a delightful 6-year-old named isaiah Smith. After that, it was house lights down and start the movie.

The audience responded well, laughing in the right places, applauding at the end of songs where appropriate, and afterwards, many people came up to me and thanked us for the work we are doing.

All in all, a wonderful night of celebration. Would love to savor it for awhile, but there is a huge workload piled up, so I'll try to enjoy the feeling for another day or so, then we're back at it with Samuel come the crack of dawn on Monday.

Daniel is wrapped wrapped

After more than a few sleepless nights, "Daniel and the Lions" is off to the replicator. It seems like no matter how many times we go through the process and vow to never let it happen like that again, it always seems to happen like that again. "Like that" means that we are working on it feverishly through the night up until the morning comes. Then, somebody picks up the master DVD first thing in the morning and races up to the replicator.

It's a teeny bit nerve-wracking, but I must admit, I am pleased with the way the movie has turned out. How far it has come from the first rough cut. Despite watching it many times over the past few weeks in varying stages of progress, it hasn't seemed to get old. Lots of wonderful performances, great music. We're now a few days away from the premiere. I know it is cutting it close, but I'm reminded of our first installment in the series, when we pulled the all-nighter on the eve of the premiere. That was too scary.

Unfortunately, there is little time to rest. We have an amazingly short turn-around needed for Samuel. We had a meeting on Friday, the day after we shipped off Daniel, on how in the world we could finish Samuel in the timeframe we have available to us. To make it even slightly possible, we'll need to pull in some additional resources, plus a miracle or two.

Meantime, I'm still trying to catch up on some sleep and trying to stay healthy.

Memory lane: Day 1 of the Daniel and the Lions shoot

Production diary: Thursday, June 22, 2006

We start this shoot off with a bang: the lions den scenes. Because our production schedules need to run at a fairly brisk pace, we typically allow about half a day to shoot a song. Sometimes less. Seldom more. There are two and a half songs that take place in the lions den. We knew in the planning stages that getting the lions to look the way they do would be a painstaking process, starting ridiculously early in the morning (I think call time started at about 4 a.m. for some of them). So we wanted to do our best to not to have to bring everybody back for a second day. But we also knew that to get it done in a day would make for a long, long day.

The lions den looks amazing. Ken Eklof (set designer) and his team have created the immense structure out of this foam material sprayed over a structure of plywood and 2 by 4s. Tom Larsen (props manager) and his team have likewise done an incredible job decorating the place with cobwebs and bones.

Our cast of lions is a delight to work with. Most of them are Liken veterans. We decided it would be fun to give the lions distinct characters. Rex, the lions’ alpha male, is played by our good pal Dan Beck. Max, the gluttonous over-sized lion, is played by Dave Larsen, who played a wicked priest in Vol. 4 and a Philistine soldier in Vol. 3. His counterpart was Priscilla, the vain and prissy lion, played by a newcomer to the series, Valerie Walker. We found Valerie only a few days before we started shooting (by the way, her husband, Cody Walker, plays the angel that appears to shut the lion’s snouts).

Another Larsen, Levi, plays the role of Chill, the laid-back lion from California. Levi played Moron in Vol. 2 and was the puppeteer behind the jaguars in Vol. 4. Chill’s counterpart was Nell, the nervous lioness, played by Erin Sacks, who played Chanel, the perfume-obsessed maiden in Vol. 6. Then there was Norm, the depressed lion, played by our very own Josh Tenney, who has been in maybe more Likens than we’ve even made. Norm’s opposite was Ray, the optimistic lion, played by another Liken newcomer, Bryan Madsen. Bryan was a last-minute fill-in for an actor who had to drop out at the last minute. He was cast as a prince for his dancing skills. We subsequently discovered that he had an amazing voice as well. I’ve since discovered that a number of our dancing princes were not just amazing dancers, they are excellent singers as well. All around performers.

But today is about the lions, and not only are they talented performers, they are true troopers. In addition to enduring a long day, they spend it in huge wigs and fur. We can’t run the A/C at full strength, because we’ve filled the studio with atmosphere to create cool-looking shafts of light slicing through the cave.
Aaron’s songs for these scenes are terrific. “Meat’s on the Menu Tonight” is the song the lions sing when we first meet them, as they anticipate the arrival of Daniel. It’s an a cappella piece, and we have some very expressive performers who willingly give it their all. The second song, “I’m a Vegetarian Now,” is a hoot. Aaron came up with the idea that the way the angel might shut the lions’ mouths was to turn their carnivorous ways to vegetarian ways.

Pretty fun day, but by the time it is done, our lions are pretty much dead. (Maybe they should eat more meat.) They can pretty much wring out their costumes, which is another good reason why going to a second day might have been unpleasant for our actors.

Can’t wrap up today’s write-up without giving kudos to Janna Larsen (key hair and make-up) and Carla Summers (costume designer). Thought we might have tested their limits with the maiden scene from “Esther,” but I think this might have topped that.

Memory lane: The episode 1 funding miracle

I think it probably takes a lot of faith to make any movie, but especially if you've never made one before.

Back in early 2003, Ken, Aaron and I were sitting around a table in Ruby's Diner in Pasadena at lunch. We decided to stop talking about it and actually pull the trigger on making our movie. We put together a rough budget, and set about raising funds. In a perfect world, we'd wait until we had all of our funding before moving forward. But because it is necessary to put a number of wheels in motion in the hopes that something will actually come of all of it, you sort of just have to plunge in and hope that it all comes together at roughly the right time.

We sought funding from a number of different sources. We had a good start that came via a friend of Aaron's up in Salt Lake City, where Aaron was living most of the time now. But we knew we needed more -- much more. It is a delicate matter discussing funding with family and friends. Certainly out of my comfort zone, but sometimes, when you know it is important, you go outside your comfort zone. And you ask. We put together an investors kit as best we could, but any savvy investor would look at what we were trying to do (make a movie that was somewhere between a short and a feature -- a musical based on a scripture story, no less), who was trying to do it (three inexperienced guys with little more than passion for a project), and probably run the other way.

But many of the people we approached were like-minded. They wanted to actually get involved in making something of good report. So investments came in small amounts. Sometimes $1000, sometimes a couple thousand, occasionally a little more. It takes awhile to raise funds this way, but it was the only way we it was coming.

Still, there comes a point when your scheduled shooting date is looming and you know you don't have enough money to fund the production and you realize that to start the production without enough to finish it would be throwing all the money down the drain. So we set a go/no-go date. This was the date that the money had to be in or we would pull the plug.

On that date, we had two people come forward seemingly out of nowhere with funds. One was an investment of $9,000. The other was an investment from my mother-in-law for $3,000. Both were unexpected. At that stage, we didn't actually know how short we were in being fully funded for the production effort. I think that was because we knew we were so far shy of our mark that we didn't want to know exactly how far. But I remember when we received these two checks, Ken dug in to figure out where we stood. It turns out he calculated that we were precisely $12,000 short until that day -- the precise amount that had come in.

It was one of those miracles that I didn't even realize at the time, but a couple days later, it hit me how amazing the timing was. And it further convinced me that we were participants in something larger than just ourselves, and I felt blessed, as I still do, to be able to be part of this effort.

A couple of weeks later, we began shooting our first Liken movie, which would become "I Will Go and Do," which would later become "Nephi and Laban."