Horse Master 2011

Julie Goodnight, Heidi (Producer/Director), Cheryl (Wardrobe Wrangler), Petra (Cast Member, adopted Crew Member), Sharon (Key Grip), me (Grip), Lucy (Assistant Instructor) and Steve (Videographer)

Last week before High Country Rendezvous, I had the privilege of working with the Horse Master with Julie Goodnight crew again.  It was like a family reunioun to see everyone again.  Last year, Heidi tried to kill us by shooting eight episodes in four days.  Since she failed in her mission to kill us last year, she upped the ante to ten episodes and a DVD in four days this year.

We were completely blessed last year - pretty much everything went perfectly and we finished up early every day.  This year.  Not so much.  We actually cheered when we had a "short" day - only 11.5 hours.  However, we got some great episodes.

This is Christy and Jessie - their episode is about trail obstacles, specifically gate opening/closing, but the biting flies were so bad that they took a dip in the pond to chase off the flies.

Francine and Hero with Julie and Dale Myler - a bitting episode to help Francine with her reining horse.

Heidi, besides being the Director/Producer for Horse Master is also an accomplished equine photographer and owns The Whole Picture.

Joli and her horse Katrina - Katrina had a bit of an issue with canter departure.

Julie and Dually taking a dip in the pond to hide from the flies.  All I could think was, "Ugh, I hate the feeling of wet jeans".  Good thing it was Julie, not me.

Petra and her horse Maximus - the coolest thing about them is that Petra has trained Maximus by herself, using all of Julie's methods.  Maximus was a delight and so wonderfully trained - Petra's done an amazing job with him.

This is Chaco - he and I had a little equine love affair.  Beel Bill called me an equi-slut for cheating on Estes while I was away at Horse Master.  Whatever.  Even Estes would fall in love with this seven year-old BLM mustang.  Thursday was a rough day; we were all exhausted and I had reached the breaking point.  Chaco gave me all sorts of horsey hugs and greatly improved my mood.

Rachel and Rooster - one of the two bitting episodes with Dale Myler.  Rooster's a young 'un, four years old, and Rachel's hoping to run barrels on him in the future.  He just needed some help to relax.

Our daily rain delay.  This did not help shorten our days at all.  We did get pretty good at tearing down and setting up between rain storms.

Tony and Chaco - this episode was supposed to be about a spooky horse, but Chaco was anything but spooky.  So much for a fire-breathing scary mustang.  He did have some basic skills to learn that a dead-broke horse like he is should have.  Being a mustang, he picked it up quickly.











We also taped four episodes of colt-starting, but I was far too enthralled with the process to think to take any pictures.  The colt-starting episodes will be turned into part of Julie's "From the Ground" DVD series (a lot more goes into the DVD than what will be seen on the TV show).  Sadly, I had to leave for RomCon before I got to see help with the final episode - teaching cues.