American Barn Reality Show Teaser

Fun with Barns Across the Heartland

American Barn is a reality show concept originally brought to us by former super-agent Ty Kilinc, who had moved to the wilds of Ft. Smith, Arkansas and begun a new business reclaiming antique barns and reselling the wood, tin, and anything else he could find and salvage. Happily, this ended up developing out into a truly excellent reality show concept!

The multiple interesting aspects of this show allow us to cover many different reality activities... finding the barns, negotiating with the owners, dismantling the barns, searching in and around them for buried treasure, learning about and finding the value of the treasures they find, transportation of the materials and more negotiating, and even the final reveal of how the materials are used.

On top of this, we ended up with a really good cast, as Ty is really legitimately nuts (general concensous of everyone: "Oh, he's crazy. But he always backs it up.")... his kids are funny and charismatic, we've got a sassy female lawyer as a business partner and a sassy black mountain of a man as his "deconstruction supervisor."  Plus, the work is interesting and attracts interesting people... including ex-cons and wackjobs of all stripes... and provides endless opportunities for workplace shenanigans. 

Then you throw in the added bonus of being set in Ft. Smith, Arkansas... a place with a fascinating history that's absolutely filled with crazy, crazy characters. Now people say that sort of thing a lot... "oh, everyone there is CRAZY!" ... but in Arkansas, it's more true than you could ever imagine. Seriously. So, of course, the potential for hilarious reality hijinks is truly awesome. 

These barns really are beautiful artifacts of Americana, and Ty and his crew really, really love and respect these things... they take them down lovingly, and use every part of the barnffalo to bring new life to these legitimately awesome structures. Then they break out the metal detectors and find all kinds of weird stuff buried underneath them... guns, knives, car parts, signs, and antiques of all kinds.

I really like this show a lot, and I think the trailer ends up being pretty much exactly what I envisioned. This is one of the first projects where I was directly involved through the entire process... developing, writing, directing, shooting, and editing the 6 minute "teaser trailer." Humongous fun, lots of work, tons of learning... it's not perfect, but it's not bad. Next one will be better.

Teaser Highlights

• The Runaway Loader
• Taking Down the Skeletal Barn
• Lamont Dangling from the Sky
• Safe Explosion!
• Machine Gun Nastaaja
• Cool Civil War Pistol