October is a fabulous month

Our friend and website designer extraordinaire, Lauren Cole, has worked tiredlessly with us (well, mostly with one of us, the other two of us trust his judgement) to create our beautiful, newly redesigned website. We love it. If you need and want some web design help, we highly recommend Lauren. You can check out her work at www.laurencole.net. She's easy to work with, affordable, very fast, and has a great eye. Thank you, Lauren, for making our October an even better month than usual!

I love October. The weather cools, chili and stews simmer, the NFL is in full swing, and Halloween infiltrates all the southern California theme parks. What's not to love? My fellow producers love October, too. So much so, that we planned two October Life From the Inside releases!

Our first release is available now, it's our fifth episode, our scary episode, entitled *side effects may include night terrors. We think this might be our best episode yet. Which is comforting, because that's our goal - get better with each episode.

Episode 5 has some interesting stories behind it. (Interesting to me, at least.) The episode was originally written by our head writer back in May of 2006. It was a favorite from the start. It sat untouched for a year during our production of the first four episodes. When we looked at it again in the spring of 2007, we still loved it. Which was kind of rare. Robb did one rewrite based on all the things we had learned producing and writing the other episodes, and then it was ready to shoot.

After having an outside director for the first time on episode 4, we knew we wanted to do that again. Working with Thor on ep. 4 was an all-around wonderful experience. Thor wasn't available for five, so we started brainstorming. And we decided to shoot for the moon. I had met Geoffrey through a wonderful producer/director friend of mine. Not only is Geoffrey well-known for his acting, but he is a highly-respected east coast director who had recently relocated to L.A. We approached him about directing 5, knowing he was booked with acting and directing gigs for months. But we were shooting for the moon, so we went for it. And Geoffrey said yes! He made a huge difference in the episode for us and we are grateful he took the time to work with our little show.

Besides the script that flowed easily, and the reknowned director, and the fact that it was shot entirely at night, there was one other thing that made this episode unique. It was the first time we had three guest stars in the apartment for the majority of the shoot. We've had three guest stars before, but they were in different locations filmed at different times. To have eight actors, plus the crew and our director, in a one bedroom apartment for a two day night shoot - well, it was a challenge and very fun.

We loved having Joel back reprising his role of Eric. Besides Joel's appearance in LFTI, he has some small, silly movie opening this month with some guy named Ben Stiller in the lead. Joel is great to have on set. He stays in the moment so well that some of his ad libs make the main cast, especially the producers, start laughing. Great for us, bad for the take.

Father Timothy is played by the talented David Boyd. And yes, that's his real accent. David is an actor who supplements his income by being a tennis pro. We made many a joke about middle aged woman taking numerous lessons. We first met David because he used to be roommates with Jimmy Bopp, who is the recurring (and starring in his own short) Grocery Delivery Dude.

And finally, Sid, brought to life by the uncomparable Stephen William Moore. We've known Stephen for years. His day-job is a very corporate gig where two of the producers also work. Doesn't look corporate, does he?

So that's a few behind-the-scenes tidbits of episode 5. But I mentioned two October releases. The second release I can't tell you much about, it's super-secret. I can tell you it will appear in a few weeks, and it will be worth the wait. It's different than anything we've done at LFTI so far. And we're very excited about it. Stay tuned.

Kathy