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NICHOLAS HUMPHRIES: No children were harmed in the
making of this episode of "Written by a Kid."
[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
NICHOLAS HUMPHRIES: I've worked with
a lot of kids before.
That's one of the reasons I was so excited about getting
to direct for "Written by a Kid" was because I love
working with young actors.
I find that they don't have the same blocks that a lot of
adults have and they're able to sort of access emotions to
give a certain performance a lot easier.
It was an interesting process adapting the work of a kid.
And I think one of the first things that happened was I
really tried to think about what kinds of storytelling did
I really enjoy when I was a kid.
A lot of the movies that I liked to watch and the ones
that inspire me today are things that use a lot of
practical, sort of in-camera effects.
Miniatures, puppetry, stuff like that.
So I wanted to see if I can incorporate all
that in this piece.
LINDSEY MANN: When Nick told us about it, we just honestly
couldn't pass up making this thing happen.
We decided that we had the resources to do a lot of this
live action rather than animation.
So we kind of took a gamble and decided we were going to
take on this really ambitious shoot, do it in two days.
NICHOLAS HUMPHRIES: So it took a lot of prep and it took me
asking a lot of questions in pre-production to make sure
that we had everything to make sure it all came together.
We got to have an actual tarantula on set, which was
pretty awesome.
I had never seen one in real life, and then suddenly we're
working with one.
So not only do we have animals on set now, we have babies, we
have young actors, we've got prosthetic makeup, green
screen, miniatures, puppets.
Because of the team we have, we managed to pull it all
together pretty efficiently, I think.
The baby in this story, he's kind of my go-to baby.
And he was a lot of fun.
He sort of got kind of moody at some points and I really--
there's a balance with "Written by a Kid," because we
want this episode to be scary, but not to the point that it's
disturbing.
And so we really had to wait for the baby to stop crying
before we fed it to the spider because if the baby was crying
and getting eaten by a spider, I think that's not something
that I want to see.
So we had to wait until the baby was happy and hook him
with the legs.
But after a while just kind of rubbing the baby with the
legs, he kind of got used to them.
And I think he liked the fact that they were sort of fuzzy.
I think getting to poke the actors with the spider legs is
probably one of the most fun things that we got to do
during the shoot.
And the leg grips, I guess we could call them, had a lot of
fun with it, too.
It was just really neat to see what kind of comedic things
kind of happened organically once people were responsible
for those pieces.
LINDSEY MANN: Being the Halloween episode, we really
wanted to up the ante on this one.
So we just thought, being in the horror genre, this is what
we all love doing, let's put as much as we can into the
production value.
And the outcome has been this amazing episode.
And we are just super proud with the approach we took and
our crew made it happen so quickly and so
wonderfully, this set.
SAMANTHA JEWELL: And beautifully, as well.
LINDSEY MANN: It was a lot of fun.
Everybody had a really good time and everything went
really smooth.
NICHOLAS HUMPHRIES: Yeah, it's just been a really rewarding
experience and a huge learning opportunity for me.
So I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to make this
episode of "Written by a Kid" and get to try all of these
techniques that I've been a fan of since I was a child.
LINDSEY MANN: [SINGING THEME SONG]
[MUSIC PLAYING]