Posted by SoGoProStreet.com on Jan 19, 2012 in Time @ Tree Hill, Tree Hill Talk | 0 comments

Kelly Tenney’s One Tree Hill Memories #2: Scouting

Every week for the next 12 weeks you can look forward to reading OTH Cast / Crew top memories Re: Our beloved One Tree Hill. Today we hear from our SoGoPro leader Kelly Tenney.

As mentioned in my previous post, One Tree Hill went on the road to Honey Grove, Texas. In fact, as you all know OTH went on the road for a few episodes. It sounds so simple, OTH went on the road… All I can say is that we had an amazing crew and between us we figured out all the details of getting 125 cast and crew from point A to point B, solving all of the problems that popped up (and there were a ton).

However before we ever moved the full company we got to go: Location Scouting

This is the beginning of figuring out where, how and what it is going to take to get this job done. I think this was one of my favorite parts of the job, flying around the country with Mark, Joe, Brooke Barnhill, Alan Hook, David Hartley and Greg Prange… and scouting possible locations, meeting other filmmakers and most of all, staying in 5 star hotels and eating at the best restaurants that could be found in the area… all on WB’s dollar. Of course, not every place that we stayed was top shelf but we made it fun anyway.

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Atlanta, GA, Park City, UT and Puerto Rico made up the rest of our “Big Trips”. We did move the company to Charlotte, NC a couple of times (Charlotte Motor Speedway and the NBA Bobcat’s Arena) and Fayet teville, NC several times over the years and then there is the really small trip to Kinston, NC this season. I begged out of that one and sent my trusty assistant, Karen Gardner… not sure she has forgiven me yet for that experience.You work long hours when scouting, time is precious and you want to see as many locations as possible, so you spend a lot of time in 15 passenger vans. I’ve seen quite a bit of rural America from this vantage point. A lot of it looks the same but some of it was just breath taking… and so different.

Guiding us around from location to location was usually a representative from the Film Office of whatever state we were scouting and every one of them was great. They worked tirelessly to make sure that we saw every possible location that fit our scenes and made sure that all of our questions were answered so that our filming experience would be positive.

For each episode, after deciding what location worked best (Schwahn deciding that is), my staff and I – along with other department heads – would get busy and start the ball rolling with airline schedules, shipping companies, local equipment rental houses, hotel accommodations, budgets, lists of who was going, crew and cast, finding available crew at the location and hiring a team on the location to help get a production office up and running. Details, details, details.

Many times we would have to do a Hail Mary.

For the Sunkist episode, we did a mini scout to Pennsylvania to see where the 2nd place contest winners lived as a back-up plan after scouting Honey Grove – just in case we couldn’t get the Texas locations to work.

For the Utah trip, we sent scouts up to West Virginia, we booked flights to Wyoming and also Utah. Again, Schwahn wanted to shoot Park City and at the end of the day that’s where we shot that episode. Again, 3 flights… preliminary scout, then back with department heads to do the tech scout (the guys figure out what they’ll need as far as special equipment and what Schwahn has planned since he was directing that episode to get the scenes shot) and then bringing the entire company out to actually shoot the scenes for the episode.