Creating The Third Age: Part I: The Spark of An Idea

Our history begins now, with the current status of The Third Age. Right now, we are two days away from having all the material for the first four episodes of The Third Age. That is what is currently scripted. Everything that’s shot has been edited, so once these final pieces are shot, I’ll edit the rest together, cut everything into episode form and send it off to be scored. What that means is we can expect the premiere of the series in late March. I want to wait until there’s four episodes in the can, so we won’t have any delays once the series starts coming out.

It would probably be more interesting to hear all this after you’ve seen the first couple of episodes and have an idea of what the series is. However, I’m going to do my best to tell the behind the scenes story of The Third Age to date, without spoiling major plot points.

People say that every story begins with an idea, a spark of inspiration. I don’t know if that’s how it works for me, there’s usually not a spark, there’s a coalescence of images and moments in my brain. The first thing I saw on this project was a closeup on a woman’s face emerging in a series of brilliant flashbulbs. She was an operative from another dimension fighting for freedom, bringing change to our world. But, what world did she live in, and what brought her here? These are questions that floated around in my brain for a while, until I presented the idea to my friends Jordan Rennert and Steve Deluca.

We’ve known each other for years, and have worked on a number of films together. Hit up www.respectfilms.com for a full history of our past work. We went to high school together, and there, we always wanted to do film projects, but rarely wound up doing anything. However, Jordan and I have done a whole bunch of projects over the past five years or so, and now that we had both graduated, we had the opportunity to take on something bigger and more expansive than was possible before.

During the summer, we’d sit out on Steve’s porch and talk about ideas. It was a non-linear conceptual discussion that frequently strayed from the story into various aspects of our own lives, our memories and also the then airing TV series, John From Cincinnati. Though it’s less overt now than it was then, the DNA of John is ingrained on this project, it feels like a work that takes place in the same universe as Milch’s series.

What I loved about Milch’s series was the fact that he has all manner of crazy sci-fi concepts in the work, but doesn’t treat it as sci-fi, it’s just something that happens to people. Even as a huge fan of the genre, I can understand why people have issue with sci-fi. There’s frequently a distance from real emotion, an emphasis on cool concepts and action over characters. John is a very character centered show, and I’m hoping that The Third Age will feel the same way. Our structuring point in terms of the narrative isn’t so much a plot as it is the various character arcs, following these peoples’ lives and finding interesting ways for them to interact with each other.

The way we work, there’s not a clear line between real life and the movie. Discussion flows all around, and out of various tangents and digressions, a story slowly emerged, raw ideas evolved into specific charcters who got names and backstories as we went on. ‘Girl God’ became Morning, ‘The Han Solo character’ become Zinone, ‘Scientist leader guy’ became Jerrod, this was the process.

As we talked about the story, it became clear that it was a pretty big tale, at least feature film length. Looking at a project so large, I began to think about ways to make the project work. I didn’t want to labor for a year with no finished product. I also realized that most of the people who see my movies watch them on the web, so why not run with that? I came up with the concept of the webseries, serializing the work online in a series of five minute episodes and then putting out a collected feature version at the end.

With this structure in place, the project became a bit more manageable. It’s still a huge thing, but it’s easier to conceive when it’s broken up into episodes. The webseries concept gave a jumping off point, and by the end of the summer, we had a pretty solid conception of the whole story, as well as the various characters involved. But, there was still more work to do.

Next time, I’ll discuss our casting process, the character who fell out of the story and the process of creating the first scripts.