New Blog

To go with our new redesigned site, we unfortunately have to move the blog from this site to one located on the new site. Update your RSS feed accordingly! This blog is going to be updated at least three times a week, as we get closer and closer to the launch. Stay tuned there for all the latest info! Sorry about the inconvenience!

T3A Launch: November 17th

At long last, we've got a release date for The Third Age. It's going to be out on November 17th, on Blip TV. Visit The Third Age channel on Blip and bookmark it to get more info on the release. New video content will be posted soon, as well as a relaunch of The Third Age site. Look for that soon!

The Third Age Premiere!

At long last, The Third Age is going public. Not to the internet yet, that will be happening shortly. But, if you're in New York City, head on down to the Industry Power Play "Out of this World" screening event, and get an exclusive look at the first three episodes of the series.

7pm @ People Lounge - 163 Allen Street, NYC

Check Industry Power Play or Facebook for more details.

I will be there, as will some of the cast and crew. Get ready to experience the psychedelic mythology remix that is The Third Age. And if you can't make it, stand by, the show will be online in the not too distant future.

New Web Presence

Progress on The Third Age continues slowly, but surely. We're starting up the process of pitching and securing distribution more seriously, even as we continue to shoot and shoot. The goal is to finish shooting on the whole project by the end of June, which could possibly be before an episode is even released. Crazy stuff, but you'll see it soon enough.

But, as part of that pitching process, I'm gradually expanding the web presence. The official site is now built and up and www.thethirdagebegins.com. It's mostly just links to content on the blog now, but I'll be building it up and fleshing it out over the next few weeks.

In addition, and more relevant for readers here, we've now got a Facebook page for T3A. Go here, and friend us to get the latest updates on the progress of The Third Age.

Also, I'll be at the New York Comicon this weekend, hanging out at the Sequart booth. I'm there to promote my forthcoming book on Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, called Our Sentence is Up. But, I'll have some T3A postcards there, they look great, so come by and grab one. Hopefully I'll see you there.

The October Update

Some time ago, I was discussing a February 2008 launch date for the series. Obviously that has come and gone long ago, but progress on the series continues. Rather than do a bi-weekly format as was originally planned, we're going to be putting out episodes weekly. The first season/volume has four shooting days remaining, one of which will happen on Sunday, hopefully we will be wrapped with the whole volume by November, one year after shooting commenced. Considering we'll have shot the equivalent of a feature in a year, working around full time jobs for nearly everyone involved, I think that's not too bad.

So, when will the show actually be released? Well, right now we're in talks with a distributor who's got some really interesting things going on. We're hoping to come to a deal soon, and will announce it here once things are official. And, after that we're looking at a launch date in the January 2009 range. Obviously all of this is theoretical since no one has actually seen the show, but things are happening, and soon you'll have an episode to look forward to every week for 13 weeks.

A New Look Site

I'm trying to consolidate all my web presence on to a blog format, hence the redesign here to make it more of an all in one resource, and not just a blog. There's not that much new content, but I'll be expanding the cast section and adding a crew section shortly.

As for a general update on the project, episode 1 is picture locked, and just needs some score to finish it. We're shooting more stuff, and will hopefully finish shooting Volume I by November, a year after we started this whole thing.

When will material be released? That's the big question now, we're looking into distribution options, so I don't want to just put anything out there. But, keep an eye out, once we know what's up, I'll post it here.

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.

Shoot Schedule

Six shooting days remain on the first Volume/Season of The Third Age. The Volume will be thirteen episodes, with the target length for each around seven minutes. However, two of the first three are hitting closer to nine, so the running time will vary. I'm hoping that each episode is a satisfying piece on its own, and contributes to the story. Jordan and I are working to make sure that each episode has some kind of interesting visual element within it, and so far I think we've been succeeding.

Working on the project is a bit schizophrenic. We've still got one scene left to shoot for the first episode, which has met all kinds of trouble on its journey to production. Hopefully we'll knock that out next week. However, after that, we added a sequence that's essentially Episode 1.5. It's a news report, should be about two to three minutes, but we've also got to shoot that before the first episode goes live. What I'm telling you is we're likely to not put the first episode online until June. I'm hoping this is a good thing in the long run, since it means we definitely won't have to delay episodes later in the volume. I've realized that it's impossible to write/shoot/edit an episode in two weeks, it's too much, and having all this lead time is great. I've got about 35 edited minutes done, so it's just a matter of filling in the gaps in the various episodes.

And even as we're still working on the first couple of episodes, we're writing and mapping out the end of the Volume. We knocked out a bunch of script, centering on the introduction of two new characters, who are going to really shake things up. I'm hoping they'll be like Spike and Dru were on Buffy, just walk in and screw with everyone, even as they become the viewers' favorite character. I'm really feeling the voice of the show now, it's a pop, fun story with a lot of darkness at the core. This stuff is more over the top, the end of the Volume will return us to the more subdued, emotional focus of the early episodes.

I realized while writing that we're basically structuring the series like Evangelion. The first few episodes are broody and atmospheric, then things will go to a bit more fun, crazy place, after the introduction of a charismatic red head, before sailing off into surreal mental states in the second half of the show, episodes 14-26. But, that's a way off.

Next week is a big shoot. It's a ritual sequence, in which the characters symbolically ascend the Tree of Life from the Kaballah. It's pretty exciting stuff, and will function as episode 7, the midpoint of the Volume, resolving a lot of questions from the start, and setting up the back half of the Volume. From there, the story really propels itself, and the characters get twisted up in awful knots until the last episode of the Volume.

Of course, you'd probably care more about all this if you'd actually seen an episode. I can't do that for you yet, but I can show you some more behind the scenes photos, these are from the shoot for what will be the first episode's opening sequence:


(Alex Berger [Mark] looks over the script)


(Jordan and I prepare the set)


(Jordan frames a shot)


(Jon Cimmino [Scientist] takes his place)

The Latest on T3A

The release date for The Third Age looms ahead next month. In the mean time, we’ve been shooting some cool stuff. Last Sunday, we shot out at Larchmont Reservoir, where they’ve got a giant wall, which looks like something out of an old Kung Fu movie. So, our shooting style was The Seventh Seal meets a Touch of Zen. A couple of weeks ago, we shot some crazy car footage. A night car scene is the menace of low budget cinema, but I think we pulled it off in a dynamic and exciting way. Judge for yourself when episode two is released.

In other news, we lost an actress from the project. Rather than recast, we decided to ditch that whole plot line. It’s weird because we were kind of feeling that there wasn’t that much of a place for her in the project, she was a relic of old storylines, old ideas, and after inventing new characters and situations, she proved herself inessential. So, perhaps she did us a favor. There were pieces I’d have liked to use with her arc, but we’ll do okay without her.

When the Hell Does it Begin?

The initial release date of February 2008 has come and gone, and we're rapidly moving past April. When will you actually get The Third Age? Well, the primary reason for the delay is that we don't have episode one done. We've been shooting the first seven episodes or so out of sequence, so despite having over a half hour of edited material in the can, we're still missing one scene from the first episode. That's the problem with working on a low budget, it's hard to schedule people when you're not paying them.

But, we should be shooting that scene on April 20th. If that happens, the first episode will be done shortly after, and online by May. In the long run, it's good. We can store up six or seven complete episodes, and have a lead on producing new ones. It's going to be tough to keep episodes coming out at a reasonable pace, but this way, we should be able to put out ten, and complete 'Volume I' before having to take a hiatus.

I'm working on a more plot-oriented trailer now, that will likely be online by the weekend, and give you a better idea of the project. I think it's coming out great, visually we're doing a lot with essentially no budget, and the acting is stellar all around. Hopefully you'll like it, once it does finally begin.

An Update on The Third Age

The blog may be called "The Third Age Begins," but we're sure taking our time getting to that beginning part. There's a number of reasons for that. The primary one is my desire to have a bunch of material in the can before we start releasing it. Both Jordan and I work full time, so it's going to be tough to do even five minutes of content every other week, and, now each episode is coming in longer than five minutes, so there's a lot to process.

So, I'm hoping to have four episodes completely done before we go live with one, that way we'll be able to keep up the biweekly release pace until the first Volume of the series is complete. The series is structured in three volumes, of about ten episodes each. There'll be a month or two break between each volume to let us get ahead of the release schedule again.

The good news is, almost all the first four episodes are shot. We're shooting the last of those episode next Sunday. Almost everything that's been shot has been edited, there are twenty-one edited minutes, and another five or so that have been shot, but not edited yet. We may end up restructuring the episodes a bit since they're coming out closer to ten minutes than five, but we'll see. Ten minutes would certainly be a more substantial viewing experience, but keeping up that release pace would be near impossible.

We shot some great stuff last weekend, three scenes. One featured Jerrod Wolf, the head of a pharmaceutical company which features heavily in one side of the plot. The other two scenes focused on Christopher Zinone. As the film begins, he is a 'white collar' drug dealer, disappointed and bored with his life. So, there's a couple of scenes depicting his daily routine. We shot one of the scenes outside a laundromat in Park Slope and it was a fantastic location. The glowing lights against the dark of the night reminded me of a Wong Kar-Wai film, and he's pretty much the standard as far as visuals go. I can only hope to even approach what he can do.

When will the series actually premiere? I'm thinking April will give us enough lead time, perhaps tied into the New York Comicon. I won't have a booth or anything there, but it could be a good spot to pass out some fliers and hopefully get some chatter going about the series.

What is The Third Age?

"The old age believed in magic, this age believes in science, but we are on the precipice of a third age, a fusion of everything that's come before." - Jerrod

The Third Age is a webseries about an ensemble of characters caught up in this fusion of magic and science, of people on the frontlines of the war to shape humanity's future. It begins with a ritual, the calling down of a spirit into a man, and from there goes on to chronicle an ever expanding web of lives caught up in a battle between gods.

The series is masterminded by me, Patrick Meaney, and Jordan Rennert. Our goal is to tell a story that uses science fiction as a way to explore the world we live in, and the conflicts that everyone faces. The gods in the story represent eternal forces that change humanity, progress, stasis, imprisonment and freedom. The story isn't so much about the larger conflict as it is about the individual lives affected in its wake.

Throw the RSS feed for this blog in your feed reader to stay updated on the progress of the project. Each episode of the series will be about five minutes, and a new one will be posted every two weeks. They'll be available as direct downloads, and on Youtube. It will run about a year before wrapping up the story.

We've shot about four episodes of material, but it's still being processed. For now, enjoy this teaser, focusing on Milton, the entrapped spirit. The Youtube is available for easy viewing, but download it if you want higher quality.



Higher Quality Download

The Official Third Age Site