Micah On Location News   •   July  2, 2016

We arrived the night before at a motel 8 at midnight and slept in the parking lot in the rv.  We woke up and started early our journey at 4am on day 8.  After 2 hours we stopped and filmed a running scenes with Horton and Sergei along the roadside as the sun came up.  From there we headed toward las Vegas.  About 50 miles out side of Las Vegas (on the east side) our trailer blew a tire.  The down side was that it was memorial weekend so there were no services open.  We pulled over at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and made the decision to pull the essentials.  Director, Actor, myself and our drone operator Jeramiah.  We hopped into our Xterra and drove like madmen.  Well it was less impressive than that.  If you have ever driven through barstow you would know what I mean.

We arrived at Air Hollywood at 5:15 PM, 10 minutes late.  They were very gracious in letting us shoot on Sunday as they are typically closed on that day.  They gave a tour of their facilities in which most interiors of air plane scenes are filmed.  We filmed for an hour and and jumped in the car and again drove fast down to Huntington Beach to film a shot of our main actor on the beach.  The difficult part was that Huntington beach was over an hour away and we were running out of daylight.  We raced down and arrived just as the sun dipped behind the horizon.  I set up the camera and Scotty, Leland and I rand down to the shore line and filmed.  It turned out to be an amazing shot.  Just what we needed.  We then headed over to the Cheese Cake Factory for a victory dinner.

After we ate lunch and dinner at the Factory we jumped back into the car and drove back to Las Vegas.  We had a shot planned to shoot at 6 am the next morning and we left LA at 11pm.  Jeramiah drove and I sat shotgun to keep him awake.  It was very tiring but we made it to Las Vegas and went to scout the location.  We filmed the scene of Leland coming into Las Vegas with the iconic sign of Welcome to Las Vegas in the background.  The photo below is of Leland trying to stretch his legs and sleep on while we waited for the sun to rise.

We finished filming and headed to the hotel and was able to get 4 hours of sleep.  We woke up and connected with the rest of the crew and set off to film the scene that opens the film.  We drove to the area that we thought was going to work based on photos but had to find another location.  We found a road about an hour outside of Las Vegas and filmed for 2 to 3 hours until the sun set.

After filming at the dam we started our main stint towards Mt. Rushmore.  We stopped for the night in a small RV park in the photo below somewhere in Wyoming.

We woke the next morning and at breakfast (photo above) and asked the waitress where we could find a quite long stretch of road.  She recommended the area where the photo below was taken.  We drove out side of town and found another area with a long stretch of road and filmed.  We also shot a few pick-ups at this location as well.

From there we drove to Mount Rushmore.  We arrived at an RV park a half hour or so from our destination around 12:30am.  We quickly set up camp (slid the sides our on our RV) and passed out as quickly as possible.  We woke around 4:30 am and drove to Mt. Rushmore.  We arrived and met our contact and started filming.  We filmed for 3 hours packed up and had a final group photo as this was the last location that we needed to film on our grand adventure across the United States.  Scotty and Leland took plane rides to their next destinations and the rest of us took the Xterra and RV back to Virginia making a few stops along the way.

The photo below is of Alexander at the badlands.  A gorgeous side tour on the way back.

A big thank you to Scotty for heading up this crazy trip and giving great direction for Extraordinary. To Leland, you are an awesome actor and an incredible person.  To Drew, Ian, Alexander, Jeramiah, James and Austin thanks for your hard work and great memories.  I could not have done it without everyone of you. I feel that we all have bonded tremendously over this grand adventure.  I am glad we made it back alive.