Another Update

After completing casting, we started shooting back in November, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. There's two approaches to shooting an indie film, where you don't pay the cast much and you're not being paid much to shoot it. One is to shoot everything at once, just take two weeks, crank out the scenes and finish it then. The other is to shoot sporadically, considering we haven't even posted episode one yet, you can probably guess the approach we took. For the past six months, we've been shooting roughly once every two weeks, always on the weekends.

This is good creatively because it makes it easier to see how things are developing. After seeing what the actors could do on the first day, we were able to tailor the script to their strengths on our next days of shooting. And, it helps make it easier to conceptualize the overall development of the story. Watching the footage we've got cut together now, you can see where another scene is needed to clarify something, or where there's too many scenes of one type in a row. I like working like that a lot better than writing a whole script in advance and slavishly clinging to it. Writing a script for a movie and not adjusting it when you shoot is like writing a piece of music on paper and not hearing it played until you're already performing it live. It's a lot better to work in film itself, to adjust and change as you go. This story still has the same core concepts as it had at the beginning, but it's evolved in many different ways as we've been shooting.

Last Sunday, we shot some more stuff, filling in gaps in the first couple of episodes. Basically, we've got one scene left to shoot in episode 1, and a couple of pickups for episode 1.5, a news report about one of the main characters. After that stuff is shot, we'll finally be ready to release episodes. We've got a big backlog of material now, five episode's worth, but just need to fill in those last few gaps.

In addition, we've been in talks with a couple of producers about getting the series some kind of distribution. So, stay tuned for that, hopefully it will work out and we'll get a bigger platform for the work. Either way, you'll see it in the not too distant future.