Oh, country music videos.

Yesterday was AWESOME.

And it was a circus.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve had the pleasure of working on a country music video shoot that was BYOB (if you can believe that, I suppose before I started working on these videos I assumed they all were). We weren’t sure if we would have enough extras, and the director was prepared to “fake” crowd shots using five crew members if necessary. Lo and behold, about sixty people show up, all with 12 packs of PBR, Miller Lite, Bud Lite, etc — and they’re tanked already.

Herding extras is a lot like herding cats anyway, but inebriated ones are especially stubborn. We were finally able to corral them in front of the stage, and they sang along with the artist, thrusting their bottles of beer into the air, splashing beer everywhere. We needed the fifteen passenger van for our final shot of the day, but actually keeping track of the van was a difficult task, as various rednecks took off in it during the shoot to make beer runs.

Even the art department tapped a keg by the end of the evening, and the whole warehouse smelled like stale beer by the end of it all.

The whole evening was hilarious, scary, and a little ridiculous.