Here are some highlights from  production day 1.

Waking up and it being Day 1. People and gear pouring into the house.

Squishing under the canopy with Kelly to watch the monitor. It took us a long time to get here!

Listening to Geri Hall (Gifted Sarah) ad lib fortunes.

Lady’s book club with Geri (you’ll have to ask her)!

Watching Laura de Carteret (Lillian O’Shyte) take an expository scene and make it really funny.

Marvelling at how Jordan Prentice (Henry O’Henry) handles props. It is like a master class in acting.

Looking over Mike Reisacher’s shoulder to see the very first rough assembly.

Seeing a close up of Scott Beaudin (Edmund) in that very first assembly. Just saying.

And maybe best of all, watching Madison be the Rubiest Ruby we could have ever imagined.

Nine more to go.

Story2.OH Announces Start of Production For

Ruby Skye P.I.: The Haunted Library

Award-Winning Tween Web Series Returns for Second Season

With 12 More Cliffhanger Packed Episodes

Scott Beaudin, Rosemary Dunsmore and Geri Hall Join Cast

Toronto, ON [May 22, 2012] — Story2.OH announced today that principal photography has begun on The Haunted Library, an all new Ruby Skye P.I. mystery. The award-winning tween web series returns for a second season with 12 more cliffhanger packed episodes, reuniting Season 1 leads Madison Cheeatow (Ruby Skye), Marlee Maslove (Hailey Skye), Elena Gorgevska (Diana Naughton) and Kevin Gutierrez (Griffin). Joining the cast are Scott Beaudin (My Babysitter’s A Vampire, Haven), Laura DeCarteret (My Babysitter’s A Vampire), Rosemary Dunsmore (Road to Avonlea), Geri Hall (This Hour Has 22 Minutes), Jordan Prentice (American Pie 5, In Bruges) and Shaun Shetty (Call Me Fritz, Camp Rock 2). Production will take place in Toronto with The Emmanuel College Library at the University of Toronto serving as the primary location.

Created for 8 to 14 year olds, Ruby Skye, P.I. tells the story of 17-year-old would-be detective Ruby Skye. Season 2 finds Ruby tracking ghosts and hunting for a lost will in an attempt to save her favourite library from being torn down. Following on literacy themes established in Season 1, The Haunted Library weaves popular titles from young adult fiction into a contemporary whodunit where the dead use email and Nerdfighter symbols point the way to important clues.

One of the first dramatic web series to be funded by the Independent Production Fund (IPF), Ruby Skye P.I. is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2011 “Rockie”, a Parent’s Choice Silver Honour and a Youth Media Alliance Award of Excellence. Ruby Skye P.I. and executive producer Jill Golick have been featured in Variety, LA Times, Read Write Web, kidscreen, playback, Wired.com and other publications.

The 12-episode web series is produced by Jill Golick, Andrea Nevitt, Kelly Harms and Steven Golick. Julie Strassman-Cohn and Jill Golick were the writers with Kelly Harms returning as director. The behind-the-scenes team includes Nikhil D’Souza (Production), Anahita Dehbonehie (Production Design), James Hetmanek (Digital Lead) and Julie Giles (Marketing).

Ruby Skye P.I. is produced with the participation of the Canadian Media Fund (OMF) and the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC).

Season 1: The Spam Scam is currently available for viewing on multiple platforms, including Ameba TV, blip.tv, DigitalChickTV, Koldcast.TV and YouTube.

Quotes:
“We’ve had the good fortune to bring together great funding partners, an amazing cast, a gorgeous location and a tremendous production team to help us make The Haunted Library. We’re also excited to be bringing some cool interactive and transmedia elements into the mix.” — Jill Golick, Writer/Producer

Links:
Website — http://rubyskyepi.com
Facebook — http://www.facebook.com/Ruby-Skye-PI
Twitter — http://www.twitter.com/rubyskyepi/
YouTube — http://www.youtube.com/user/RubySkyePI

Tags:
#rubyskypi #story2oh #jillgolick #webseries

Media:
Ruby Skye P.I. Official Trailer

About:
Story2.OH is a Toronto-based production company. Stepping beyond the television model, Story2.OH combines video, photos, graphics, blogs and more to create the next generation of Web serial.
END –

Production starts for real today, although it feels like we’ve been working full out for weeks.

The top of the day is a scene in which Ruby and her new friend Edmund (Scott Beaudin) meet Gifted Sarah (a psychic played by the very very funny Geri Hall).

Coming up later in the day, Ruby meets with her first-ever paying client, Henry O’Henry (Jordan Prentice).

Tech Scout coming up today. On the scout, we’ll visit each place we’ll be shooting and assess it from a technical point of view — and by we, here I mean the people who actually know what our tech needs are: director, DOP, first AD, grip, gaffer, sound department, production manager. I’m along to get a good look at each spot and hear what Kelly has planned so that I can adjust the script as needed.

We have many of the same crew members as first season, so it’s a good time to look back at our first tech scout as shot by Jennifer Liao.

We’re very excited about the locations and also how much production value we’ll get shooting outdoors at this time of year. With trees and flowers blooming, it should be absolutely gorgeous. Combine that with the beautiful architecture and landscaping of the University of Toronto’s campus and you’ve got killer production values.  Can’t wait till this afternoon to take it all in.  I hope to bring back some pictures.

Is it only Wednesday?

So much has happened this week. We locked our library location yesterday. That was huge. We’ll be shooting at a gorgeous old library at University of Toronto. It is a dream location. Waiting to hear back has been very difficult. We’re 13 days out from shooting and we don’t have a shooting schedule yet because we’ve been waiting to find out what location we would have and what days they can accommodate us. The pressure is on our first AD Jason Bourke now. Hopefully, we’ll have a schedule by the end of the weekend and that will make everything feel way more real.

The other big thing that happened yesterday was that I finished another draft of the script. It had ballooned up to 96 pages and I managed to whittle it back down to 85. The script has changed quite a bit in the last three weeks.  There is a time in the writing process, when the structure feels very rigid and everything seems to have only one possible place where it can happen.  That time is long past.  The story seems to be like Lego now.  I can take it apart and re-assemble it in any number of ways.  And I keep pulling it apart and trying new things which drives my writing partner Julie insane.

I will keep tweaking the script as we move toward production, playing with dialogue and emotional arcs and cut, cut, cutting where I can.  But I think we’re good structurally now.

Okay, that isn’t entirely true.  There are two scenes I want to try in new locations but that won’t affect production, really.

When it comes to script, today’s agenda includes going through the Clearance Report, annotating the script to show the flow of interactive elements and meeting with the director to talk.

I keep trying to blog about The Haunted Library – the second season of Ruby Skye P.I. but I get about two sentences in before I get distracted by some other task.

I do really want to share what’s going on. The project is kind of cool but also very ambitious — hence  my inability to get the blog.

So I’m going to try very short form updates.

Yesterday, we had the first production meeting. In attendance, Director Kelly Harms, P.M. Niko D’Souza, Production Designer Anahita Dehbonehie, Cinematographer Alex Dacev, A.D. Jason Bourke, Sean Van Delft (who did our sound first season and sadly, seems to have scheduling conflicts this time around), Cat Patrichi (Gaffer) and Andrew Tays (Grip). Jason lead us through the script scene by scene and we talked about special requirements. We haven’t nailed down our library location yet, so there is a lot up in the air about everything.

There is a lot of uncertainty in prep. Right now, we have a whole lot of pieces of paper — which I’m still rewriting, a team and not much else. Wish me luck staying sane between now and the end of May.

Also yesterday, Digital Lead James Hetmanuk showed us the first drafts of some of the world building sites he’s developing for the project. One of them is website for O’Deary Library – the library where the story is set. We plan to populate it with video book reviews submitted by people like you. Record yourself talking about a book you enjoyed (or one you hated), upload it to YouTube and we’ll put it on the O’Dearly Library site. We’ve got a couple of other neat book related things planned. I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to play with the fledgling sites, but it seeing them is pretty exciting.

We had a casting session today. Most of the roles are cast and we’re pretty darn excited about who is coming on to the project. Makes me grin just thinking about it. But two big parts haven’t been filled yet. We had a bowling alley room at Fraser Studios where the light was streaming in. Niko, Kelly and casting director Marjorie Lecker were there and from the first audition we knew it was going to be a great day. We saw so many great people that we decided to take the night to think about some of the options.

That’s the news.