This was an interesting, yet labor intensive project, it took two days of shooting and weeks of photoshop. The concept was the brain child of the movie's director CB Harding. He explained to me in broad strokes and some pencil sketches his idea via email as CB and I had never met at this point. After I had an idea of the project the preperations that needed to be done in advance involved the building of a wooden horse for our stars to perform, we made arrangements and hired some trained animals for day two of the shoot and the two shoots would be cut together in the computer.

On shoot day one we started with setting up in the studio and lighting the set to match a background I had shot a couple years earlier, CB had flown in from LA and meets us at the studio with Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Ron White, and Bill Engvall that showed up in pickup trucks and spitting tobacco. Nancy Hancock did makeup, a wardrobe stylist had plenty of good cowboy gear on hand along with saddles and such. The guys were of course easy to shoot, they jumped on the horse and did their thing....... we lowered the camera angle to accommodate the fact that larry was on a pig and slightly rotated the wooden horse depending on where they would appear in the image..... Day two, we meet at a covered horse arena, the horses and pigs come down from Nashville for the shoot. Now it's just a matter of relighting the set on a larger scale but exactly the same to match the background and the riders involved ..... I set up a couple of orange cones and prefocused on this line. Then the rider repeatedly gallopped the horses toward me and the camera as they passed between the cones I click the shutter and they are sharp in focus, we do this over and over looking at the results on my mac when we decided we had the shot we moved on to the next one. Due to the concept one horse needed to rare up on command as you can see below the horse performed wonderfully, that shot down. Time for the pigs, well the pigs just kind of had to be shoo'd towards me over and over we used two because pigs don't have a lot of stamana but they did their job and that was a wrap..... the rest was me cutting out a lot of it by hand in photoshop because I didn't have the luxury of a solid background in any of the animal shots..... So there you have it..... I would have had hell getting this in camera in the old days........