Victor's R2D2 Building Diary

Back on December 18, 2012, R2 participated in a shoot for Nerdist.com to help raise funds for the International Wolf Center. Here's the "big picture" from the teaser I posted back then.



This was a bowling event between the folks at Nerdist.com, and The Clone Wars voice cast team members Dee Bradley Baker, Cat Taber and Ashley Eckstein, along with Director Dave Filoni. Clone troopers Michael Bender, Kevin Weir, Carlos Cano and Daniel Cano joined along in the event, which was held at Pinz Bowling Center in Studio City, CA.

Here's the video of the event from nerdist.com.



The call time was a reasonable 9:30am. I made my way through rain and traffic, and arrived a bit early. I unloaded the droid and met up with the production folks, who decided to have R2 double as a camera-droid. A GoPro Hero 3 camera holder was taped onto R2's dome, providing a droid's-eye view via the R2-cam, as seen in the video.



Lights!



Camera!



Aaannd action!



Our mission was to interact with the teams as they bowled, sometimes cheering a strike, sometimes lamenting a gutter ball, and at other times being obnoxious and distracting them.

At one point around the 5:35 mark in the video (hey, I see myself in the background!), R2 even blasted Nerdist team member Alex with the mist as he was approaching the lane (he was told to!). R2 also screamed at him to distract him, around the 4:02 mark.

Some pictures.



The Clone Wars team ended up winning, 466-431.

Afterward, I took a few pictures as the teams posed for the introduction shot.



Everyone did post-game interviews, although I wasn't able to get a picture of R2 since I was controlling him.



I had nice chats with The Clone Wars team, and Ashley Eckstein's husband David, a former major leaguer, was kind enough to take the picture at the top of this post. Again, everyone with The Clone Wars team have been the nicest, friendliest people to associate with every time I've been involved in an event with them. It was an enjoyable time.

The full photoset is here.

Today R2 was involved in yet another one of his famous mystery shoots.

As usual, all my pictures are too revealing, so I'll compromise and crop everything out of one of the pictures. That hairy arm on the very right of the photo does look like it could belong to me though.



I don't think it will take a ridiculously long time for this to be published, and I'll have more info to share at that time.

Today R2 joined many other characters from the Star Wars and other movie universes for Combat Radio's 2nd Annual Christmas Breakfast For Homeless Children, which combined a fundraiser and breakfast into a huge charity gathering. Lots of items were auctioned off, such as signed items by celebrities like Harrison Ford.

I hit the road at the tender hour of 5:30am for the 7:00am call time in Valencia, CA, some 75 miles north of me. Lest that sound like plenty of time, three of four freeway lanes were closed for a few miles, leading to lots of traffic. I arrived on time, and soon we had my R2-D2, Chris Romines' R2-A1 and Al Eisenmann's R2-D1 (and his Landspeeder and children/Ewoks), along with Michael McMaster's WALL•E set up.



Several members of the 501st also joined in.



The Marine Corps Reserve were on hand too, collecting lots of toys for Toys for Tots.



As the morning progressed, guests filed into the restaurant, and visited with the characters.



This dog named "Elvis" wasn't sure what to make of WALL•E (or Michael McMaster), but he kept a careful eye on him.



As the guests ate breakfast, the droids were left on the outside looking in.



A little later, Santa made an appearance, via fire engine rather than sleigh.



Toward the end of the event, all of the characters, including Merida, Rapunzel, Captain Jack and the Transformers, gathered for a group photo.



Lots of good work done for a good cause.

Tonight R2 helped Jennifer Newman celebrate a milestone birthday, with hundreds of her closest friends. By the end of the night there was no room left on this card.



Jennifer and her boyfriend Grant Imahara threw what was the largest birthday party I'd been to, in Hollywood.



Mike Senna was there will WALL•E as well.



The theme was Robots and Dinosaurs, and most of the guests were creatively dressed up.







R2 has never danced with so many people. Everyone had a great time.

We made it, 100,000 visits!



This was messy though. Sitemeter.com has been having a lot of problems tracking visits. The counter shown at the bottom of this web page is out of sync with the visit number shown when you click on the counter and view the details.

On November 3, 2012, the counter on the web page clicked to 100,000, as seen above. However, the Sitemeter data showed only 99,369 visits. I was the winner on this visit.



It wasn't until November 14, 2012, that the Sitemeter data finally caught up. Congratulations go to a visitor from New Jersey, visiting from ups.com.



I am seriously considering abandoning Sitemeter for a different service. Tracking has been extremely spotty the last few months, and I know others have had even worse problems. Their support is non-existent as well.

Anyway, time for our roll-up on the stats. It took 1 year, 10 months and 24 days to get to 10,000. It took another 1 year and 17 days to get to 20,000. It took another 11 months and 19 days to get to 30,000 visits. It only took another 7 months and 15 days to get to 40,000. It took an additional 5 months and 1 week to get to 50,000. Slowing down, it took an additional 6 months and two days to get to 60,000. It took almost exactly 5 more months to get to 70,000. It took 5 months and 10 days to get to 80,000. It took an additional 4 months and 19 days to get to 90,000. Finally, it took 5 months and 1 day to cross the 100,000 mark, if you can believe the Sitemeter data.



Well, after four years of posting this data, I'll give it a rest, at least until we get to 200,000 hits (which may be never, who knows?).

As always, thank you for visiting!

-Victor

This evening R2 paid a surprise visit to a wedding reception, as a favor to a friend. He was an instant hit.



It turns out the bride is a big Star Wars fan, and even had a couple of young cousins participate in the wedding as Jedi Knights. She's been to the Star Wars Celebrations and has seen the club's R2s before, so she was very happy to have R2 pay a visit at the reception.



A quick picture with the family, and R2 was on his way back home.



Five events in ten days, I think R2 can use a break. His right foot shell took some damage from a jealous elevator at CHOC, so I have some minor repairs to do tomorrow.

Today R2 visited Frank & Sons Collectible Show for the creatively named "Nuke the Fridge Con," where many personalities were on hand to sign autographs, including Billy Dee Williams, Ray Park, Daniel Logan, Stan Lee and others. In the early going, the only two droids roaming about were my R2-D2 and Gene Arena's R2-A6.



A little while later, Mike Senna's WALL•E joined us as well.



It was very crowded, with people lining up hours before opening, and filling the building after.



This mini-Tusken was terrific, and had a voice amplifier so he could do the sand person yell. Quite menacing.



Just about every local Star Wars club was present and accounted for, and we squeezed everyone in for a group picture.



As for me, I had Billy Dee Williams sign my back panel. Mike also got his droid's back panel signed, thus filling out the last missing autograph for him. He's got pretty much everyone now.



Around noon we were joined by the Miyamoto family, and things wrapped up around 2:00pm with a group picture, with Daniel Logan standing in for Gene.



Crowded, but fun!

Today R2 made his quarterly visit to Childrens Hospital Orange County, and he brought that other Disney droid with him, WALL•E.



Mike Senna operated his WALL•E as I operated my R2. The droids roamed the corridors en route to their visits to both the patients' rooms, and the activity rooms on each floor of the hospital.



It was too tight of a squeeze in most of the rooms to get both droids in at the same time, so we usually took turns having our robots enter and visit the young patients.




R2 got some love once WALL•E was back in jail.



It was another great visit, and we hope to be back for the Winter 2012 quarter.

For the fourth time, R2 appeared at the Down Syndrome Buddy Walk at Angel Stadium in Anaheim CA, to support Trevor Henricks (and his dad, fellow R2 Builder Matthew Henricks), and Trevor's Troopers.



R2 was joined by members of the 501st and Rebel Legion (and a fire hydrant).



We were stationed out in front of the stadium. Around 11:30am the Buddy Walkers started to arrive, and were quite excited to stop and take pictures with R2 and the characters.





After the walk was done, we took a short break, and then headed for the field for a group picture. It was tent-city, as the various support teams set up booths in the outfield.



And the group picture, complete with Trevor himself, inspecting R2 just to the left of the droid.



It was over 90 degrees today, not bad for November 4. Another enjoyable outing.