Beware; tiredness may lead to bad spelling! ;)
Beavering away on Episode Three (just awaiting the final lines from 2 cast members now to embark on putting everything together so, provided they arrive in time, I can get it all completed next week while I'm off work :)).
WotW script completion next week, too (hopefully; need to get back into the rythm of that writing again, as it's different from my usual fare), and more work on my K4 collaboration project (stoked about that, as it should prove to be a very fun and interesting one to do!).
Decided that, once I have the sponds available, am gonna splash out and pick up the Moviestorm packs I need and launch into that for my previously mentioned horror/action/supernatural movie "Faithful Dawn" (based off the RPG campaign I mentioned a few posts back), purely as it will give me more scope to portray how the feel of the movie should be.
As good as iClone is, I just can't get into using it (and I simply don't have the available cash or time to pick up the stuff I'd need to do what I want with it; I find MS more intuitive for the way I tend to work. Horses for courses, I guess.)
Shadows of Albion is also something I'll get into properly at last once I have MS available (simply because TM can't handle the fighting sequences I'd need to do); not sure whether MS can handle it, either, at the moment, but am determined to give it a go once I'm fully into "fantasy" mode!
Season Two of Odyssey is naturally occupying my thoughts as my long-term focus; once Season One is well underway, am gonna throw the door open to submissions from other writers who fancy a crack at writing an episode or two (which will take the pressure off me slightly next season), provided I can get some good writers in who "get" the feel and direction of the show; by that point, the characters and situations will be well-established and therefore it should be easier for others to pick up the "feel" of the series and be able to script for it... hopefully!
I'm keen to get "fresh blood" in on the picture to prevent it getting stale and, also, to get some more character development on the characters from a different set of eyes. There is a lot still in the closet for the brave crew of the good ship Odyssey (especially what happens to them in the finale, which will really stir things up a bit!), and a lot of interesting history they each have, which is yet to be fully revealed (some hints have been dropped already in the Pilot and the two released episodes; can you spot them? :)).
Am working on the Season Two opener, which will develop the arc story a little more, expose a bit about certain character's pasts which have been alluded to, and rev the engines up for the new season (which will be a little darker in tone than the first, as the interstellar situation begins to change following the happenings at the end of season one). I have a definate idea about how the arc itself will develop, but there is always room for "one-offs" and character pieces are still going to be the main focus of the show, even with the "big picture" in mind and a definate end goal in sight, even though that end goal is still waaaaaay off in the distance.
I have an idea to eventually go back and examine what the crew and other characters were up to prior to them coming aboard the ship (which will hopefully fill in the blanks on some of their backstory), but that will be a way down the line (as the audience needs to find out a little more about them first before I start throwing out the revelations!)
I also toyed with the idea of doing a "spin-off" mini-series, examining other aspects of the Odyssey universe (a bit like K4 has done with Conquest), with a project under the working title of "War Stories", designed to look a bit more at how the Stellar War affected individuals we know and new characters (initially, the idea was to look at a ground-based military unit during the war and see how the conflict shaped them as people, based perhaps on one of the "resistance" groups behind Canis lines which I mentioned in the backstory posts on the TMU forums). I might get around to that at some point, or I might even hand it off to someone else to do, if there's any interest in it from a third party.
Alternatively, it might go onto the "slush pile" for sometime-never, yet... I have too many ideas, and not enough time to form them all into projects!!!
Well, the Allianceverse is a big place and there's plenty of room to spread wings in it, so you never know!
5 comments:
Dude - You amaze me! You are a prolific creative machine! I want to bottle-up your energy and sell it to people like me! LOL!
Yeah, I could do with a drop of that myself!
Oi! Who let you away from the keyboard, Wombat Boy?? Get back to it!!! Mush, mush!!! ;)
Seriously, it's all about being stoked to do the material; I'm very lucky that when I get an idea, I can usually rip out the roughs quickly then build on that later. If I wait, I tend to lose the impetus (which is the problem I had doing Episode Six... started great, got about 6 pages into it then stalled. Started again, stalled, binned what I'd written... then again... and again. I just couldn't get exactly what I wanted down on paper (other than the long dialogue scene about halfway through, which I did during the first attempt). Finally cracked it about 5 weeks into writing it (which is unlike me), when the Idea Cow wandered past and plopped in my Rosebush of Creativity (ok, less cheese before bedtime, methinks... even I did a double-take at that one!)
The best creativity assistant you can have is to carry a notepad or dictaphone around with you, as inspiration will strike at any time; if you try to remember that snatch of dialogue, scene you pictured or whatever later, 9 times out of 10 it's either gone or distorted by the time you write it down, so jot something down when it hits you to jog your memory once you're in a position to "flesh it out".
I don't necessarily write in chronological order, either. As I mentioned above, the big dialogue exchange in Ep6 was the first thing I wrote (based off a sudden flash of inspiration), then I had the musical interlude flash into my head; I went back and filled in the other two ends afterwards.
This method can also help to avoid writer's block (as you aren't constantly battering yourself against the same scene over and over; you are moving forward and can sweep back to the "sticking point" later once you have a bit more filled in).
I have notebooks, writing pads, Post-It notes and electronic documents all part-filled with ideas scattered all over the place. Some of them get recycled into scripts, some of them languish in "development hell" and some of them get mangled and regurgitated into something at some point, so none of it's wasted.
As an example, my next post consists of a dystopian background I wrote a while back for a tabletop roleplay game that never got started. I doubt that I will use it, so I'll post it as an example of what my mad mindset produces as a tableau to start from :)
Thylacine...
Told yah before; extinct marsupials don't count... if they did, I would trump both your wombat and Thylacine with Diprotodon... the aptly-named Giant Wombat... so meh...
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