Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Nerdist/Clone Wars Charity Bowling Event

Back on December 18, 2012, R2 participated in a shoot for Nerdist.com to help raise funds for the International Wolf Center. Here's the "big picture" from the teaser I posted back then.



This was a bowling event between the folks at Nerdist.com, and The Clone Wars voice cast team members Dee Bradley Baker, Cat Taber and Ashley Eckstein, along with Director Dave Filoni. Clone troopers Michael Bender, Kevin Weir, Carlos Cano and Daniel Cano joined along in the event, which was held at Pinz Bowling Center in Studio City, CA.

Here's the video of the event from nerdist.com.



The call time was a reasonable 9:30am. I made my way through rain and traffic, and arrived a bit early. I unloaded the droid and met up with the production folks, who decided to have R2 double as a camera-droid. A GoPro Hero 3 camera holder was taped onto R2's dome, providing a droid's-eye view via the R2-cam, as seen in the video.



Lights!



Camera!



Aaannd action!



Our mission was to interact with the teams as they bowled, sometimes cheering a strike, sometimes lamenting a gutter ball, and at other times being obnoxious and distracting them.

At one point around the 5:35 mark in the video (hey, I see myself in the background!), R2 even blasted Nerdist team member Alex with the mist as he was approaching the lane (he was told to!). R2 also screamed at him to distract him, around the 4:02 mark.

Some pictures.



The Clone Wars team ended up winning, 466-431.

Afterward, I took a few pictures as the teams posed for the introduction shot.



Everyone did post-game interviews, although I wasn't able to get a picture of R2 since I was controlling him.



I had nice chats with The Clone Wars team, and Ashley Eckstein's husband David, a former major leaguer, was kind enough to take the picture at the top of this post. Again, everyone with The Clone Wars team have been the nicest, friendliest people to associate with every time I've been involved in an event with them. It was an enjoyable time.

The full photoset is here.