STORIES FROM THE SET: ROUGHNECK RODEO

As far as photoshoots go, this was actually a pretty fun one. We made a new furry friend, debuted an unpaid extra, and got to film our first mini commercial. Now, that said – it wasn’t entirely free of hiccups.

“Well, the location was great,” shared Mitchell. “We were able to shoot multiple sections at one place, which always helps with logistics. Any time we don’t have to unload and reload and unload again saves a ton of time. Courtney and Leeann did a great job scouting this place, and extra shoutout to Courtney for getting it all lined out.”

“Ok, but it was in Penwell, Texas which is about the definition of ‘middle of nowhere’,” added Hedy. “We’d have to do a 20-minute caravan every time we needed a potty break. Like, we’d have to coordinate. Hold it until someone else has to go, too.”

While the pumpjacks and the flat, dusty West Texas landscape were integral to telling the style story of Roughneck Rodeo, the DDR billboard was certainly one of the main characters.

“I’ll be honest, I was initially against this idea,” Mitchell admitted. “But it ended up working really well, and then we were able to use it again at the Addiction Meetup on the exterior wall of the Mothership – it was the backdrop to our massive group photo.”

As it turns out, Claire’s husband works for a billboard company, and so not only was he able to facilitate this temporary billboard for us, but he also had a cute cameo in some of the images and reels – and he fully committed to the role.

“Having Daniel on set was such a fun part of the behind-the-scenes experience,” shared Claire. “He loved being part of the DDR crew for the day. Daniel is a huge supporter of all things Double D and is always asking for a men’s line. He wears DDR whenever he can make it work, so he was genuinely excited to join the shoot. And I am biased, but I definitely think he looked the part!”

Well, renting the billboard does not exactly grant you access to the land around it – as we learned. You may have heard this story during the live launch, but the landowners pulled up when we were all set up – models dressed and jewelry slung everywhere – and were none too pleased.

“We told them we had permission,” laughed Hedy. “And they said, ‘No you, don’t. We own this land.’ So ya know, we had to send Mitchell over to use his preacher voice on ‘em, because they did NOT want me over there. I’d be telling them, ‘Make me.’ while we shot as many pics as we could before they hauled us off. But they ended up letting us stay.”

(Y’all, if we had a dollar for every photoshoot we almost got kicked off, we could probably afford to pay for one.)

The dog, however, was much more welcoming. He belonged to the man who owned the camper we photographed. We fell in love with him; he fell in love with us. We fed him all sorts of goodies – beef rib bones, pizza crusts, ham and cheese, a sausage roll, canned dog food – and he even made it into the catalog!

Other wildlife was a little more shy.

“We had a snake wrangler with us the entire time, checking for snakes,” said Mitchell. “Did not see a one. I’m sure if we didn’t have him with us, we’d have seen 20.”

And, as always seems to be the case on shoots, Mother Nature missed the memo.

“We got rained out a couple times,” Mitchell said. “But honestly, it wasn’t so bad. We just went inside and waited it out. Actually, got in a pretty good nap during one of the showers!”

The other thing that was unique about this shoot is that we filmed our first mini commercial. It was a neat experience to be acting, directing, and filming a commercial rather than just capturing looks. But, the car was a bit of an issue.

“Well, aesthetically the car was really cool – from a distance,” said Mitchell. “But it was pretty rough on the inside – and it had no brakes. So it made filming that scene where she stops and reverses pretty difficult. There was a point where Claire was lying on the floorboard to help Kaylin brake and kind of coach her through it. Then, at another point, we had the owner of the car hiding in the leg area of the backseat, ready to jump out and take over driving and turning around because of the brakes.”

But you know what? We got the shot.