Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne shares his experience at a day of shooting for the Knights of the Dinner Table: Live Action Series.
 
Ken Whitman of d20 Entertainment, which produced last year's Brothers Barbarian web series, invited the store down to Brandenburg, Kentucky this past weekend to vend at the d20 Expo, a one-day game day designed to help with shooting the upcoming Knights of the Dinner Table: Live Action Series.  Since part of the series takes place at Gary Con, the gaming convention that has appeared several times over the years in the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, I assumed they planned to shoot part of the series at the game day and wanted a dealer there to serve as part of the film background and lend verisimilitude to the series.  After some initial hesitation, given the time commitment and distance the store would have to travel (approximately four hours from Carbondale to Brandenburg), I decided to go.  Since I had backed the series on Kickstarter in return for a store listing on a page in the Knights of the Dinner Table monthly book, I was rather curious to see what my money had helped buy.

When I arrived (since I had not followed the Kickstarter campaign that closely), I learned that the original plan for a 60 minute KODT movie, drawing inspiration from characters and situations in the comic but incorporating new material, had morphed into three 22-minute episodes covering the Knights planning for Gary Con and their departure from Muncie, ergo no convention scenes needed.  The crew would do no filming at the game day and, while the eponymous kitchen table of the title was on display, it got used for a meet and greet/autograph session later in the day, as well as allowing opportunities for attendees to game on it.  Game Day attendees could hang out at the hotel and several games of HackMaster, AD&D and Lords of Waterdeep were played, but no filming took place there.

Instead, filming took place at other locales in the Brandenburg area, including the characters Bob and Sheila's apartment, an outside shot with two of the characters on a scooter, and a scene shot at Weird Pete’s Games Pit, with Hard Knox Games of Elizabethtown Ky standing in for the Games Pit.  One of the perks of backing the KODT Kickstarter was the opportunity to appear as an extra in a scene, which meant that those attendees wanting to avail themselves of the opportunity to appear as an extra had to travel to one of those locales.  Attendees arriving early enough on Friday got the opportunity to appear in the Games Pit shoot, while the crew filmed later arrivals walking along the street during the scooter scene.

I took advantage of the opportunity to watch the shooting of and appear in the Games Pit scene (if you happen to see the series, I am in a scene in which Weird Pete yells at a customer to "get his Cheetos-stained fingers" off a book) and was interested to see that it does take as long to shoot a short movie scene as I had always heard (but did not believe).  The crew started shooting the five-minute segment about 8 p.m. and did not finish until almost eleven, even with only three takes per scene.

During the meet & greet, actors and crew signed comics, posters, Hacker Jack boxes (a prop used in the movie, copies of which, along with SpaceHack dice, went to every Game Day attendee) posed for pictures and answered as many questions as the assembled group had.  According to Whitman, expect to see the series released by December of this year, with another Kickstarter campaign launched next year to fund the second three episode arc, scheduled to shoot in summer 2015.  HoodyHoo!
 
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.