Still writing…

Well can’t get into There.come again today. I did finish the script for the second episode of my new series I plan to shoot in there. Overall I think it turned out OK for a first draft. It has more humor than the first episode I wrote, but most of it is situational humor, and not actual jokes, which it really needs more of. Once I get these all sort of pounded out I hope to go back in and go over them a second time with an eye about making them more amusing. Right now I am concerned mostly with A) advancing the plot of the series B) making sure I can film the darn thing and that I don’t go too far overboard with making too many props, sets and costumes and C) Writing stories that have small casts in easy to divide up sequences.

Episode two ran about 31 pages in this first draft format, and I write with double spaces between characters talking, but I write the full width of the page. I am betting this works out to be about a 40-45 minute episode when finished. It was a lot of fun to write the final line of dialogune in the script today:

Corko: Yes giant rogue space moths.. dozens of them came through a space porthole someone had left open, or something, and ate.. holes.. in the uniforms. I had to fight them off. I really had no idea that doing the laundry could be so dangerous!

The characters in this series go way back, as in ‘Sherman, set the Way Back machine.’ Back when I was in 7th grade I started making movies with these very same characters. Of course back then it was on 8mm film and when we started some of them were silent. I kept using the same characters all through Jr. High and then high school, but when I went away to college, for some reason, I started working on other productions.

In 2009 I decided in the fall of that year to shoot an original series using the characters over the summer of 2010. Well there.com closed down so that went on hold. Still the characters are easy to work with and I have about 6 years of previous material I can draw upon. The characters were mostly created my by friends Daniel and Tom, and to a lesser extent others like ‘Fish’, Bob, and Dean. I leave off their last names, as I am not sure they would want to be associated with this sort of thing after some thirty years. Thirty years ago we barely had the technology to edit two bits of film together. If only I had had technology like There.com to make movies in back when I was younger. Ah the things I would have created!

I think my biggest challenge is that this show has five main characters. I know I said I would never do that again, but having that many characters seems to work better from a story standpoint. If I only had three characters it would be rather dull story wise.

Casting for this will be tricky as I need reliable people that can and will show up on a regular basis. That has been consistently my hardest issue to deal with in There.com so in point B above I have tried to divide the scripts up into scenes where only 2 or maybe three of the main characters are involved, however in each episode there are several scenes with the entire cast.

I am hoping to shoot the series in stages. Perhaps doing 3 or 4 of the episodes at a time. I don’t think I can pull off the entire series at once. I guess I could divide the series into two seasons. British seasons can run form 4-6 shows and people think nothing of that. I am hoping to keep them running from 40-50 minutes in length, but I don’t have to make allowances for commercials or anything so they can just work out to however long they are.

It’s great to see There.com come back to life and almost as much fun as seeing my childhood characters from The Gorgon Chronicles return to the screen. Not sure if I should called it something else though.

Next up is episode three, a completely ship bound adventure that adds a lot of character background through flashback like interview snippets. This is basically the only character background episode in the series, and probably will need the most re-writing of the bunch.

Episode 3: The Inspector
Due to the publicity over the previous battle, a special inspector is dispatched to investigate the crew. This episode adds background to the characters through interviews. At the end Witzen ends up loosing his cramped quarters for a small broom closet like room next to the bathroom.

The treatment for this episode is one of the longer ones I wrote. It basically has the entire ending situation written out already. The treatment is a bit more than two pages. I just have to add in some more dialogue to make that part work. The series outline runs about 12 pages of single spaced gunk.

In the end this series is the exact sort of thing I would like to watch, and that’s the best reason for making it at all!