When we delivered the pilot to BBC Worldwide in July 2010 they wasted no time in finding MyDamnChannel.com as a partner to launch an entire season. Rob Barnett, owner of MyDamnChannel, proved to be an amazing visionary in the online world and saw great potential in this character. So a 10-episode season was ordered up, and we got to work scripting.
We'd been brainstorming several situations for Gigi to find himself in, so we each choose our favorite and split off in order to pen them individually. We found that the more extravagant the situation (ie. Gigi joins a cult, Gigi goes to jail) the least we felt it showed Gigi in the proper light. The simpler the situation was, the easier is it was for Gigi to slip up. We wanted the people he encountered to be normal and real, only to have their buttons pushed by the ignorance of Gigi and do something they might not normally do.
Episode 2, "Donate Good Cause" was the first that we felt hit the right tone. As the rest of us grappled to get inside Gigi's head, Josh turned in a spectacular script that would highlight the physicality of the character. Only problem - it involved spraying blood all over the hospital set.
I balked. Here we were, working with a decent amount of money to get through two episodes a day and he goes and does this to me. Let's get some fake blood that may or may not come off your skin between takes and spray it all over a set that we may have to paint over afterwards. He assured me that whatever we had to go through it would be worth it. And although I kept trying to put it in the "Let's save this for season two" pile, Josh's constant encouragement that it was doable won me over.
On the day we were getting along pretty good, knocked out everything we could from every angle before we let any blood fly. Then our VFX guy Paul hooked Josh up to a compression tank via a clear tube that would feed from under his shirt and out his rolled up sleeve. We made sure our blocking was such that he could pull the tube from the blood bag and stay seated while the blood flowed. Our first take was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Everyone executed perfectly and I yelped out a sigh of relief rather than "cut." The second take, however, would not go over so well.
We only had one take per lens, so we moved from the medium to the close and did the wide shot last so he could really let loose on the wide take. Except during the close up Josh got blood all over his face, so we had to stop the take right in the middle, wait to clean him up, and then start over with a second take - schedule be damned!! We ended up getting three great blood flowing takes, although the closeup had an immense amount of blood in it - continuity be damned!!
For the exterior we had precious little minutes as the sun went down, and unfortunately I couldn't give Josh and Kevin enough time as I wanted to for them to play around with the Bum and Gigi interaction. All in, for the amount of production headache it could have been, I was really happy with the result. And if it wasn't for Josh's passion for this episode, this tremendous lead-off to our season would have never happened.
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