What Is “Pre-Production,” Anyway?

Quite a few cats (and people) have asked me what exactly it is the 50/50 team has been up to since our Kickstarter ended. Simply put, we’ve been in pre-production. Could we be more nebulous? Not really. Let’s unpack that a bit.

Pre-production basically means that we’re doing everything humanly possible to have a smooth(ish) trip across the country. Our days are spent at the production studio, sitting behind desks with our laptops and doing things like writing emails seeking sponsorships/partnerships, making phone calls with the same intent, enlisting photography gurus to help Megan figure out the best angles for the Go-Pros, and finding venues for Alicia to get her writing out. But that’s not all!

It’s been really surprising how long this all takes. In an ideal world, we’d send an email and someone would respond right away. Unfortunately, that illusion was shattered on day one. We search for the right email addresses and person to direct our inquiry to. We pen the email. We send. Repeat. It can take 30 minutes to send one email. And then…we wait for a response.

See, once our email goes off into the mysterious cloud, it then hopefully gets passed to the right person (or the right person shares it with the right people). This can take a long time. People are out of town. People are busy. So it all takes time and patience. Lots and lots and lots of patience.

Of course, we’re also planning the route, making a budget, and finally, this week, starting the daunting task of reaching out to potential dates online. We’ve also interviewed interns and hopefully have a kick-ass recent graduate on lock to assist us in all things Final Cut Pro and social media (plus anything else she’s interested in).

We’ve also been packing up our houses, discussing what we’ll take (camping gear or no camping gear?), getting the roof rack on Huckleberry Fit, making lists, finding musicians who will let us use their music (imagine the same email process, but with also visiting their shows to bug them), collecting podcasts, starting to load our bags (we’re leaving in a week!), and saying goodbye to friends and family.

And meetings with the web designer. Trying to coordinate schedules to get interviews we want while we’re in town, and again while we’re out of town. Meetings with the graphic designer. Singing to whatever music comes on Pandora to keep ourselves from going too bonkers. Running errands. And lunch. We tend to eat lunch and drink espresso.

Oh right. And we’re and teaching Megan to drive a stick shift!!

Phew! And that’s pre-production for you, folks.

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