A Christmas Special... this December!
Hi there,
What a week! We’ve been hard at work planning for the taping of the Warmest Winter Holiday Special, which will rehearse on November 1 and tape on November 2 in Nashville, TN.
We continue to be blown away by all of your love and support and we are super excited for this special project to all come together. Because of you and your generosity, we get to create this awesome holiday special and celebrate the end of the ear together!
We’re excited to announce that some special guests will be sharing the stage with us!
Musical guests, Striking Matches and Rachel Wammack will join us to sing songs from our Warmest Winter album.
We’ll have friends from outside the music world join us too! Fantastic actors like Benny Elledge -- most known for his role as Cal in Waitress alongside Sara Bareilles, and Taylor C. Hays of hit TV shows including Blacklist, Person of Interest.
A few keynote crew members will be joining the team as well. Scott Scovill of Moo TV will join as Director. If you’ve ever turned into any large-scale Country music television event like the CMA Awards or the CMA Fest, you’ve likely seen his work. Scott is well-known for his production work with Brad Paisley and Garth Brooks. In addition to Scott, Andre Petrus will join as our Video and Lighting Director. He’s designed and produced light shows for major touring acts like Ariana Grande, Charlie Puth, Halsey, Shania Twain and many, many more. He’ll be programming the 40-foot video wall on set at the Steel Mill.
So with the team together, we’ve taken a look into the production schedules and more into our budgets. As you can imagine, a project of this massive and creative scale comes with some pretty hefty price-tags and we’re all heavily invested in bringing this to life. We talked about six figure expenses. Well, we were definitely right about that. We definitely underestimated some of the costs and in particular some of the costs of making a major production a completely safe environment for our crew, guests, and own selves in the COVID era. Everything takes a bit more time and space to complete safely.
We thought we’d share an update for you with the breakdown of how we are currently planning to use the money.
Production Labor: $42,500
Special Guests $28,000
Editing and Production Costs: $80,210
Music Licensing: $9,500
Rehearsal Space and Catering: $14,500
Travel: $12,250
Set and Lighting Designs: $13,000
That total of a minimum of $190,000 in expenses, so we are not yet home free in our work. So we thought we might take a moment to remind you of our stretch goals and to announce some new ones too!
1. If we reach $150,000, our pal Jeffrey East will graciously perform with us on the holiday special and record some new songs!
2. We’ve added another goal for everyone here. If we reach, $175,000, we’ll be joined by our friends The Oak Ridge Boys. We’re working on an arrangement for “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” that we think would be perfect for Oaks -- and maybe even Jeffrey -- to join on!
3. If we reach $200,000, we will still add an additional 15-20 minutes of music and comedy to this IndieGogo cut of the Holiday Special.
But now, we’re excited to add some serious sweeteners to this stretch goal. First of all, we’ll be excited to be joined by country music legends, Alabama, who will join us for “Christmas In Dixie”.
WHAT. IS. LIFE?
But even more. At $200k, we will release a corresponding IndieGogo Supporter-only Warmest Winter Holiday Special EP album. This digital download and physical add-on will be a 6-song EP of never-before released music.
This EP will only be released to IndieGogo supporters and the autographed physical copies will NEVER be made available to the general public.
So that’s it. The one chance to get some songs we know you all would really enjoy. Here they are:
- Let There Be Peace on Earth
- Holly Jolly Christmas
- Mary Did You Know?
- Walking in a Winter Wonderland
- Love Train
- Auld Lang Syne
Here is a reminder of the AWESOME perks lined up for our supporters.
- Invitations to attend the rehearsal and taping
- Virtual Meet and Greets with all of us
- Exclusive merchandise: t-shirts, mugs, and slippers
- Supporter-only campaign updates
- An exclusive behind-the-scenes video
Whew! Get ready! We are so close! Let’s have the Warmest Winter holiday Special together!
