Behind the Scenes: The Production of The Battle of the BOW

[Elliot Foley]

2/9/10


Well, I have finally made some time to get back on this blog and make an entry to update anyone who cares to read this about what is new at the "office." We just finished laying down the narration for the eighth episode of the season, which means we are now officially beyond the half way point of our 13 show series. Just a couple of minutes ago we were talking about how crazy it is to think that we are over the halfway point, but it did not take long for the reality of still having five shows yet to set in!

So what is new in the Battle of the BOW camp you may ask. Perhaps the latest news here is the launch of our newly revamped Battle of the BOW website. Every since the original site launched at the beginning of the show, Joey had wanted to make it more interactive and give visitors more content with a deeper look at the teams. So on top of spending ALL of his time editing and producing the show each week, he found time to develop this new website and concept; basically the entire thing from scratch. The dude is a machine, enough said!!

After Joey introduced the new site concept to the rest of us, we all sat down and tried to come up with ways to contribute to it and make it better than the original one. We came up with different tabs and links to add to the site without cluttering it all up, but at the same time not lacking content. Stories, news, videos, polls, social networking, team pictures and bios, maps of visitors and how they found the site. You name it, this site has it!

Most of this content we either had already or could easily access, with the exception of Latest Stories and Episode Recaps. I knew I could handle creating recaps as they are just a summary of the last show and pretty straight to the point. The latest stories, on the other hand, were something that I was worried about because we did not really know what we wanted for them. This is where I will introduce you to the newest member of our crew here at Battle of the BOW.

Mike "Tender Terry" Truttman had expressed an interest in using his writing talents to help out with the show for quite some time, and his call up to the 'Big Show' had finally arrived. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Mr. Truttman fairly well throughout the past few years while hanging out at the Brunner house, and I could not wait to see what he would be able to do to help out the team! His quick wit and dashing looks (even for a slightly older fellow) has always made him the life of any party, especially with the opposite gender.

So it was decided that he would come over on a Friday night, and while Mark and Joey were slaving away with cutting and editing, our job would be to write up these "stories." After a couple minutes of discussing our thoughts and watching segments of the previous episode we went to work. Within seconds I knew I was in for an adventure and by the end of the first paragraph he posed this question to me;

"What is a saying we can use for this that is kind of funny?"

Which he followed with;

"Well heck, we could just make up our own saying and coin it in these things! We have complete reign over them anyways!"

Needless to say that by the end of the night we had complied four stories that were pretty entertaining to read and that we all got a good laugh from! Although they are a little off the wall, so to say, we were pretty proud of our work and I invite everyone to take a read for themselves and see what they think....

http://battleofthebow.com/stories.html

Happy reading to all! We hope you continue to watch Battle of the BOW and we know you are going to really love the episodes to come!

Until next time,
EFO


1/7/10

After talking about this a bunch here at the "office" (or Brunner's homestead), we are finally taking the time to sit down and give everyone a peak at what goes on behind the scenes of the Battle of the BOW. First off I believe a little introduction is in order. My name is Elliot Foley and I am part of the production team working on the show. I help out with a little of everything around here, but mainly layout the episodes and write the narration along with Mark. Since I am on my winter break from classes right now, I find myself spending more and more time at the Brunner residence every week trying to find things to help out with.

Mark Brunner and I go way back to our days at St. Francis Elementary where we attended school together. Throughout the years we became close and he is the reason why I am a part of this project. Among all of the things he helps out with, Mark is our main guy in charge of the music and sound of the show. He also cuts and edits the transition sizzlers as well as the theme interview for each week. While in my case I have all this free time to put into the project right now, Mark works 40 hours a week and comes home after work to put in another five or six hours before he shuts it down for the night. The guy is a machine!

Mark's older brother Joey is the man that makes this all work. He is the so-called producer if you will of the Battle of the BOW, but he does everything. When you watch the show, it is all Joe. He envisioned this concept throughout his years as a hunter, and has brought it all together in this project. I can count on one hand the hours he sleeps at night, and yet he is still always on top of his game, pushing forward.

Another part of the crew is the oldest of the Brunner family, the Don Man. Donny created the look of the show with his graphics and treatments, such as the team's name tags and the color schemes. His full time job as an art director in the cities keeps him more than busy, but he always manages to pull through in the time of need.

Although this whole thing is new to all of us, we have somehow managed to pool our experience and skill sets together to create a pretty awesome show. We are constantly learning new things about the production process and keep looking for ways to make our project more successful. When I think back on all the hours we spend together, I cannot imagine doing it with anyone else.

EFO

1/8/10

I'm back at the "office" waiting to lay down some of the narration while Mark and Joey are working away at editing, so I figured I might as well write a little something to help pass the time. As of present we are working on wrapping up episode 04 to hopefully get sent in to The Sportsman Channel by tomorrow, but it will take an all-nighter tonight to pull off this feat. Since only a handful of people close to us really know how all of this came about, I will help fill everyone in on the how the Battle of the Bow has arrived to this point.

The first time I was introduced to this project was back in January 2009 when Mark called me up and asked if I would come to a meeting about a hunting project he and his brothers were trying to get off the ground. I remember being puzzled as to why he would call me, a guy with no hunting background, to help out with a hunting project. But he insisted that they needed me to help them get their project going, so I figured the least I could do was show up to a meeting for a couple of hours and listen to what they had in mind.

The following day I rolled up to the local establishment where the meeting was being held and met up with a handful of other guys. It was a little before noon and having had a rough night previous, being in a bar was the last place I wanted to be at the moment. But I battled through it and by the time we were all settled in and things got underway I realized I had made a good decision. This concept they were working on was unique and sounded like a good thing to get in on. I was pumped to be on board.

Their original idea was to get 30 teams from around our area to go out and film their hunts with their partners. It was going to be setup in such a way that it would be a competition with teams being eliminated throughout the season through online voting. We talked through all the minor details like recruiting teams, scoring deer kills, the elimination process; any and everything we could think of at the time. The ultimate goal was to put together a DVD at the end of the season that captured the entire contest that we would offer to the public in an effort to put our area on the map in the hunting world. Our biggest excitement at the time was the idea of putting together a commercial to help advertise the DVD and get the word out about the project.

Over the course of the next few months we spent our meeting hours trying to smooth out the competition and coming up with ways to make it all happen. We took road trips throughout the surrounding areas to pass out pamphlets we had made to try and recruit teams and get the competition out to the public. I cannot even begin to explain how weird it is to go into a bar full of locals and be an outsider trying to get them to sign up for some hunting competition thing! What an experience!

During this time Joey really started to overhaul the website he had created a while back to help use as a way to network with hunters around the area. He had created the Wisconsin Outdoors Network to help share his hunting experiences with his family and friends. As Joe continued to change the site to get it to feel just right, interest began to rise slowly and the network started to show promise. It was somewhere around March, and we were in for a surprise of a lifetime.

But it is time to get back to work, which is probably a good thing since this post has already become way too lengthy. I will get back to finish this up later, thanks for reading:)

EFO

1/9/10

While Mark and I are waiting for the recording program we use to finish fixing itself, I'll get back to the story.

So it was sometime during the month of March when Joey got a call from a lady at The Sportsman Channel. She explained to him how she had come across the Wisconsin Outdoors Network and saw the Battle of the BOW competition. She loved the concept of the whole thing and asked if we had ever thought about making a TV series out of it. Joey told her the idea we initially had in mind, but we were always interested in making it better. She suggested that we put together a pilot episode and turn it in to their board to get rated. Of course Joey jumped at the opportunity and before we knew it we were producing a pilot for a possible spot on national television! We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into!

The next couple of months flew by at an astonishing pace. Obviously, everyone here was wicked excited about the news, but we had a ton of things to accomplish before we could even start to work on the pilot. Not only were we still looking to fill all of the team slots, but we did not even have cameras for them to use yet! So we gathered all the teams and met with them to share the news about the TV show, and tried to fill the final couple of slots. The camera situation was resolved through some creative financing and somehow we pulled everything together just in time to give each team a week with the cameras in their hands before the season began.

Everyone was brought together right after we got the cameras in the mail and we started interviewing teams and getting footage to use for the pilot.

Ah, finally, the program has finished figuring itself out! Close call there as we are on a time crunch already! Back to work for this guy. Until next time...

EFO

1/12/10

First off I would like to thank everyone who has complimented me on my facial hair in the first picture of this blog post. I would like to clarify that no, that is not my usual look, and no, I am not serious with the mustache:) Now that I got that cleared up, back to our little adventure we call Battle of the BOW...

So we finally got the cameras in the hands of all the teams and they submit the footage we ask of them. Since it was not yet bow season, we had them each film 'mock hunts' where they pretended to be in the stand hunting a pretend deer. This had its pros and cons. It was a great learning experience for the teams as it allowed them to adjust to the cameras and get used to having them in the stand while they 'hunted.' That was amazing, don't get me wrong. But on our end of things it was a rather difficult task to put together a 24 minute episode with nothing but some interviews and a bunch of everyday hunters out in the woods acting like they were really hunting. They did a fabulous job, each and every team, and although we could not have asked for more from them, you could just tell it was not the real deal.

After all of the tapes were uploaded and Joe does this amazing job at making a lot out of a little, Mark and I took to writing a script for the narrator. This was a painful task as well since we had no real stories to tell. We went about making up all these corny, fake story lines about how this team played the wind right or whatever and half the time I am just staring at Mark going, "what the heck does that even mean?!?" Somehow we pulled something out of our hindquarters and it was ready to get recorded. Being that Joey and Donny had done a bunch of commercials and other things of the nature that had required 'voice talent' (as is the technical name among folks in the industry I guess), they were throwing around the idea of finding a person to hire to help us out when it came time to do the actual show. But in the meantime, being on a tight time schedule, we needed someone to step in and just talk into the microphone for us.

As we all sat around the office trying to come up with friends or family that could lay this down for us, Mark turned and looked at me with an almost evil type of smirk on his face. I remember thinking to myself, "Don't you even say it Mark, don't you do it!" And after the longest 10 seconds of my life he says exactly what I did not want to hear come out of his mouth.

"Why don't you do it Foley? All those years of your mom riding you to use correct English, you'd do great."

Seriously, I am tone deaf. I hate to hear my own voice in home videos and this so called 'friend' of mine just throws me to the wolves. I could not believe it! But of course, being the nice guy that I am, I gave in to the peer pressure thrust upon me and stepped up to the mic. Now if your like me and do not enjoy hearing the sound of your own voice, then you can only imagine how dreadful it is to hear it when you talk into a microphone that picks up even your fainest of breaths! It was like a dozen teachers were dragging their inch long nails across a chalkboard all at the same time!

After toughing out an hour or so of this brutal torture and hammering out every last line, I stepped out of the room to regain my composure. While I did this, Joey and Mark worked away at plugging in the lines where needed. When I had regained my strength and gathered up the courage to go back into the room, the three Brunner's turned to me and smiled. For some reason, they liked how my voice sounded and thought that I could actually be the 'voice talent' for the real show! I could not believe what I was hearing!

To keep an already long story from becoming any longer, I am now the narrator for Battle of the BOW. Over the past few months the task has become a little less painful for me and I am starting to get a hang of things. It still is not the most joyful thing for me to stand in front of that mic every week, but it has become tolerable;) I just hope everyone watching the show enjoys hearing my voice more than I do!! Until next time...

EFO
aka - "The Voice"


1/23/10

Jeez, its been over a week since I was last on here, I have been seriously slacking! The past few days have been pretty hectic around the office and just in general so I'll try to get you caught up with the happenings that have been going on. The biggest event took place in the form of a road trip and involved leaving early in the morning and a lot of windshield time!

It was Wednesday the 20th of January and I had just finished playing some hoops at the local open gym, with the hopes of getting a little exercise in this body. Of course I made it up and down the court twice before I was spent, but that's another story for a different blog! After my "workout" I spun over to the office to get some stuff done. I pulled in and Wade and Nick from Bow Brothers were sitting in the chairs giving an interview so I sat down to listen in on their thoughts. They wrapped up the session and Mike and Zimmer from Hotter Plummer took the seats next.

We usually like to get these interviews done quickly so Joey can upload the video and get back to work, but Joey had stepped out of the room and did not come back for some 40 odd minutes. This was unusual and Mark and I kind of figured something was up at that point.

As it turned out, there was a snafu on the Sportsman Channel's production end of things and for some reason the audio was not syncing up with the video on the episode we sent in to them. Since it was so late in the week we had only two options to correct this problem: 1. We could have them run a rerun of a previous episode, or 2. we could drive our hard drive down to them so they could pull the video from the original file. After a short discussion we realized that we could not afford to play a rerun at this point in time, so a road trip to Milwaukee was in order. The video needed to be in their hands before 10 AM and after initially planning on leaving at 5 in the morning, Joey and I opted to leave at that moment. I drove back to my place in River Falls quick to get cleaned up, then came back to the office to make our departure.

The drive down was about 3 Monster Energy drinks long (around 4 and a half hours) and was pretty brutal in the dark. We switched about half way their and I brought us into Milwaukee sometime around 7:30. The Sportsman Channel Office did not open until 8, so we grabbed a bite to eat down the road and blew some time.

We were met at the front desk by Dave, one of the head production members at the channel. He was a nice guy, somewhere in his early thirties, and gave us a tour of the facilities on the way back to their production studio. The place was pretty unbelievable and it was neat to see where it all goes down. We met the rest of the production crew, which was nice to put faces to names and show them all that we cared about our show enough to drive across the state at 3 o'clock in the morning! After all of the introductions we came to find out that they had fixed the glitch with the audio and that we had basically just driven all that way for nothing! I can only imagine the look on my face when I heard this because the news absolutely caught me off guard! "Really, you are really telling us that we did not even have to take this trip" is all that kept running through my mind.

After about an hour of chatting with the crew and getting to know them all a little better, we climbed back in the truck and started our voyage homeward. Looking back on the whole thing, I guess it was a pretty good time and I think it will help us out in the long run knowing that their crew has an idea of who we are and what we are all about. So even though the ten hours behind the windshield was not the most enjoyable of times, it was a good trip overall. I just hope we never have to do it again!!!

EFO

[Mike Truttman]

That is one devilishly handsome individual. I should have that picture on my passport….heading to Mexico in two weeks. Love the blog buddy! Episode 9 stories on Tuesday night???

[Mark Brunner]

No seriously.... Go back and look.

[Mark Brunner]

I'm more concerned about the side-burns!!

[Nick Johnson]

Foley, you have a perfect voice as narrator of the show. Keep up the great work!

[Nick Johnson]

How can you not be serious rockin that media-stache?!

[Jake Flett]

Hey Elliot I actually had no idea that was you talking on the show until someone else told me!! I think you really have the voice for this kinda stuff. It really sounds good on the episodes. Me and Renae both couldn't believe that was you on there. Keep up the good work bud. You gonna be at Joey's place when me and Vada come over? Let me know im not sure when its gonna be cause that's Joey's call.

[Bow Brothers]

God EFO you're cute.....keep rockin' the stash

[Jake Hinrichs]

Yea you guys kick ass!! Wouldn't have wanted to do it with anyone else. Thanks for the oppertunity!!
Let the Battle Begin

[Bill Bergo]

This puts everything in perspective. Thanks for your effort and hard work. You guys deserve some kind or reward or prize. You have my VOTE!!!

[Hotter Tax. / Plummer Concrete]

You guys ROCK