Week Four: Fan Base, Shmoozzing, Prioritizing

I'm starting off this week on a good note. First of all, I'm downsizing (yet again) pre-production on White Rabbit down to the bare necessities of writing and story. Much of pre-production is going to be housed in the Series Bible I'm creating. What's a Series Bible you ask? Well it's a nifty 50ish page document featuring everything major and somewhat minor about a television series someone wants to sell. I researched a bit of these and found that the Battlestar Galactica series bible is the best suited format for the sci-fi series I'm developing, so I'm taking its format and injecting my content.

Downsizing also means that I'm cutting out the Teaser Video I have been putting together for the past month. I was real excited about it, but after a week of deliberation I determined that I don't have a fan base established. At all. I have no background in web series and no major work under my belt to warrant someone to fork over any sponsorship money for a major giant series. Therefore! I'm going to create a new, very small web series by the end of the year. This will push back plans I've lain for White Rabbit, pushing back potential production of the pilot to May, but the bad far out weighs the good in that producing a smaller web series (sci-fi, mind you) I'll be able to build a fan base, recognition within the web community, make tons of inevitable mistakes on a lower profile production, and once I'm ready to talk to investors about White Rabbit I can hopefully show them a bunch of success statistics and figures from the previous or on-going smaller web series.

In all, down-sizing can be good. It'll help lighten the load for school, while allowing me to work on this smaller project that should help open some doors in the future. If nothing else it gives me and my friends just another reason to hang out, drink beers, and write bad-arse sci-fi stuff.

I Built Straw Towers

There was meaningful play in our straw tower exercise. The goal was clear: build a tall tower that is taller than the other teams' tall towers. We needed to work together, but had to adhere to the rules, which was only build your towers with straws and tape and joy. So already we have contest and cooperation to dominate enemies. The game was neat because we could look at the other players in the room and see what they were doing. Early on this would help us change our tower building tactics, helping us improve and build better groundwork. After we built the ground work it was up to us to build a better tower. This simple progression of group based ideas after laying the groundwork meant that our actions within the core of the game had meaning and could build upon the initial basis of the game, which was to build the best tower ever.

The discernability resulted from the us understanding what we were doing right near the end of the game and looking at other teams to determine what they were doing right or wrong and we would adapt our tactics accordingly. Most of the feedback throughout the game resulted from our observations of other teams to figure out what works and what doesn't. This helped us achieve our goal.

In conclusion, straw game was a game because players worked as a team to achieve a goal while competing against other teams working to achieve the same goal. The rules were simple and the feedback was based around our observations and less from the designer. It was fun.

Week Three: When to Fold

It's important to know what's important. My problem going into this project was that I gave myself an intensely unrealistic timetable. I realized that I was focused on selling the idea of a web series, and not developing it. I wasn't writing it and trying my darndest to make it the best it could possibly be. So I took a step back, thought about what was most important, and put the rest on the back-burner.

Listen: story is crucial. If White Rabbit isn't an amazing story, then I'm already lost. I might as well quit now, because no one wants to watch a great idea. They want a great story with great characters. Now what does it take to make these great stories and characters? That's the magic I hope to find over these next few months. I'm thinking that after I write the pilot episode, with all of it's many drafts and changes soon to come, I'll have a deep understanding of my characters and how I want them to develop. Of course they'll change every episode, but I won't have to mold an entirely new character by that point. I'll already have the groundwork.

Teaser video! Now here's where I'm extra excited. To accompany all my tons of pre-production material, I'll be shooting a teaser video for the series. It'll be the first five minutes of the pilot and be totally badass. Right now production looks to be set for late October. I hired on a DP last week and should be finished casting by the end of this week. All that's left is a sound guy and a grip crew. Both of which I have people in mind for. SO I'm slating that video for a late November release. Maybe a little... Rabbit for Thanksgiving? Oh?

Week Two: How to Sh*t Your Pants. Effectively.

This week I started loading my cannon. In three weeks the website for the series is going to launch along with social media, a new production company site, and everything in between. I also still do freelance work and go to school. In response to all of this mounting up, I decided that shitting my pants isn't such a deplorable act. It's actually quite nice.

Right now everything is running on schedule. First batch of concept art will be done in a week. I'm meeting with my web designers throughout the week, making and signing boring contracts, and am still finding and scheduling networking opportunities all around. Casting began this weekend for the teaser video and I'm about to sign on a DP for the shoot too. All I need now is a thirty year old man and two ten year old boys. And a line producer, lighting/electric crew, a sound guy who magically has lots of recording equipment, and a house out in the middle of a field. All with time, all with time.

The real progress, however, came when I decided not to kill of one of the main characters in the pilot within three minutes of meeting him. This came to me when I realized the simple truth that killing is easy, and also kind of cheating. This character also became the third type of person who is "unstuck" from time (as Vonnegut would say). He can stand on a spot and see anything that has happened around that spot by warping the present around him into the past. He's also learning how to warp in the future too, but it's a bit more difficult. It's pretty neat, but now this adds one more person I need as crew: a special effects wizard. All with time, all with time.

Week One: Developing a Monster

I can't write simple things anymore. It's a curse. A really expensive curse. All I wanted was for a guy who time-traveled to go and save his wife from death. A death that he causes and needs to fix. All I wanted was a journey of redemption, or something simple like that. Something that lasted maybe ten or twenty minutes then was over and everyone felt satisfied. I began writing it out during a flight in late May. One month later I've outlined a four season television series comprising seven episodes a season with each episode lasting 40 minutes. What the hell is wrong with me?

A simple short film about a dude trying to save his wife turned into a television series about a dude trying to save his wife in the past while trying to save his son in the future while trying to make his dead wife fall in love with him while still trying to save her from being a dead wife in the first place. It questions fate and time and if one can change an event even when they've already been living in its aftermath. One guy trying to do stuff has turned into three generations of a family all trying to change the fates of one another and essentially trying to erase the sins of the father, over and over again for nearly forty years. I also threw in people who are immortal, which I threw in after an unwritten vampire film I started developing suddenly became relevant when I decided immortal people could walk around in this time-altering universe.

Never before has a story vomited out of my brain faster than I could react. After a solid month of constant writing, thinking, and writing again, I decided that this has to become reality. So now I'm on a mission to create web series. God help us all.

Rethinking Interaction

Some would call me a nerd. Others, a savant. Since the ripe age of five I have been playing video games. The first time buttons acted as extensions of my mind was when I picked up an X-Men game for the Sega Genesis. Since then, like millions of other people, I have played hundreds of games, some good, most bad. When I was five, video games were just ending their Freshman year in the entertainment market. Now, they've graduated with top-honors, filling our culture with twirling man-foxes, blue rodents who run fast, and some of the best stories that I dare say have been written in the past two decades. With this evolution, we must begin thinking about where this industry will go next, and what can we do as players to help designers create a future fresh with ideas.

I believe this question of direction begins with the simple principle behind video games and games in general: invention. Today, the most popular video games rely on our fingers to press switches that transmit messages to a virtual world reactive of our mind's interpretation of it. What the world throws at us we must react to throw back in a manner we deem fit to progress within it, thus inventing new avenues to walk down within each world. If we fail to react in the way that the world would like us to, we must try and try again, rewinding time and learning that failure is simply not an option. This is the very basic concept behind most popular video games of today and, more importantly, was the blue print for which video games were designed. With knowing this I pose a new question. What's next?

In taking this course I hope to build upon my knowledge of game design and apply it to a concept I've been curious about: interactive video. This essentially brings together the cinematic qualities of live-action film and the choices one must make throughout the course of a video game. What I wonder is how can this marriage of design principles be crafted flawlessly so that the player doesn't just choose path A or B and watch an actor perform the result of said choice. How can the player feel that the character on screen is an extension of themselves and that they as a player can shape the world around this character and not simply watch this person existing only as a machine responding accordingly to prompts? Herein lies the journey I wish to take throughout the course.