What It Was Like to Film the Pilot for “Home Town” on HGTV

Since then they were asked to shoot a pilot for HGTV called “Home Town,” and it premieres January 24th.

Today they’re telling us how they got noticed by the network, the things they learned about taping a show, and what it was like to be mentored by Chip and Joanna Gaines!

Ben & Erin’s “Home Town” Story in Their Words:

You never expect to get an email at 10 pm at night from an HGTV executive that says “I’ve been stalking your Instagram for a long time, and I’m in love with your town, your business, and your love story. I think there’s a show there. Have you ever thought about doing TV?”

Well, no, we definitely hadn’t!

We’ve been involved in downtown revitalization and historic preservation efforts in our town since we finished college at Ole Miss, got married, and moved to my hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, in 2008.

We got her email in July of 2014 when my husband Ben was preparing to leave his 10-year career in student ministry to focus on his woodshop, Scotsman Co., and our company, Lucky Luxe.

Ben presides as our historic old lumber town’s larger-than-life mascot—the Loblolly Lumberjack, and I’m an artist who’s happy to do pro-bono design work for the city with vintage-inspired murals and banners. I’ve had fun sharing our journey on Instagram but certainly never thought the eyes of a network like HGTV might be watching!

They had seen the renovation of our 1925 craftsman (featured right here at Hooked on Houses in 2012!) and the 1910 flatiron loft we use as our work space.

We thought we were just documenting our newlywed life, but they saw the story of young people going home and doing their best to make a difference in their small Southern hometown.

Grateful doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of how we feel.

After months of Skype interviews with our production company, then creating a “sizzle” (a 5-minute mini-episode for the network to see and then decide if they like “the talent” enough to order a pilot), we got the phone call that HGTV was ordering one in December 2014. Then things started moving fast.

Pre-production began and in May we started the two-month adventure of filming our pilot, “Home Town,” a show about how you don’t have to leave your small town to make a big difference.

On the show we welcome a new family to town and help them find an old house. I do paintings to show them our design ideas, and then we gather a team of local expert craftsmen, architects and builders and make it their dream home while bringing them into the fold of our quirky, funny neighborhood.

It’s a renovation show on paper, but it’s a show about finding your place in a small town at its heart.

We quickly realized that there’s so much you don’t know as a viewer of a TV show. It takes an army to cover all the bases of filming a major network pilot, and we felt like we were in the absolute best hands from beginning to end with our production company, RTR Media out of Canada, and our crew, who were such pros and artists.

5 Things We Learned About Taping a TV Show:

1. There are a lot of wardrobe restrictions! You can’t wear clothes with thin stripes or small check patterns (because it creates a crazy psychedelic effect on film), words/logos (without permission from the business etc.), or white.

The “no white shirts” issue was the toughest for us during the Mississippi summer when literally the only thing in my closet is white linen and Ben only wears plain white v-neck t-shirts. It’s like his uniform. But they attach tiny little microphones to your body that can show through white, and you look super washed out on TV.

2. The microphones you wear record all. Day. Long.