JUNE 25, 2006
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Hey! It's Shawn, again, for my second Producer's Blog ever.
I hope you enjoyed "Independence Day"!
We were all really happy about how this episode turned out. We were so happy, in fact, that we decided to move it up to the second week of the season to maximize the viewership. Originally, the episode was supposed to air on Fourth of July weekend but, since our ratings are usually lower on the Fourth of July weekend and we thought it was such a strong episode and wanted everyone to see it, we moved it.
For me, it's wonderful that Chris Bruno's directing debut also has his brother, Dylan, in it. That was something that we'd been trying to do for a long time and it was wonderful that his brother got to come up and be a part of Chris's episode.
Chris was actually supposed to direct a different episode but, because there was a lot of personal stuff going on in Chris's life with his mother just passing, we ended up moving him and he ended up directing this one.
I was not only proud about how the episode turned out, but particularly proud to find out that Chris Bruno was a natural born leader. He just has a lot of qualities in him that are fundamental to being what I think is a good director.
We had a lot of fun making this episode. I thought that Adam Targum and Tommy both did a really great job on the script. It was one of the biggest, most expensive episodes of The Dead Zone that we ever did. Production, I thought, really, really stepped up. Robert Petrovicz ended up directing some of the Second Unit, really helping pull that together, spending time with Chris's storyboards, and really making some of those action sequences sing.
Overall, I just thought it was a really ambitious episode to do, and I was just really stoked that Robert had the cojones to pull it off. At the end of the day, the network loved it and we all loved it, so it turned out to be a 100% complete success.
I hope the fans dig it as much as I did. And I just hope that the trailer we showed after the premiere wasn't a spoiler, giving away the secret of the episode, but maybe that's just me seeing it, already knowing the secret.
Until next week,
Shawn Piller
Executive Producer
Past Entries:
