mike[space] dot net

Just thought I'd write a quick catch up on the last week or so ... I have finished the first series of the webseries. It has a working title of "Out of Office", which I veer from really liking to a real sense of indifference. Never outright hatred, but I would like to come up with something better. More importantly, I am fairly happy with the series, and am very excited about the next steps - completing casting, read thru, edits to the script, and then shooting! The writing process has been an interesting one. Some of the episodes flew off the keyboard with barely a pause, whilst others were more of a slog. The first 4 episodes were written very quickly, before coming up with another 4 that were much shorter. From there, it's now expanded into a 10 episode extravaganza, which I hope will continue to remain the case. I think all of the episodes have moved in the running order asides from the first episode. And even that one moved from being first before returning to its rightful place. The hardest episode to write was episode 8, which links from the rest of the series into the climax. I pretty much knew where the episode needed to start from, and where it had to end, and I think these restrictions made it tougher to be able to pull it together - at one point I was writing a couple of lines, and then procrastinating for a while, before I went back to produce another line. Not the most enjoyable way of writing, but I slogged through it over a couple of false starts and a period of 3 or 4 days ...

And of course, this is all before I've had the chance to sit down and go through it with the director, who may have entirely different ideas about how we go forward. I'm very aware of the fact that the material is about to become a lot less my own as we move into the early stages of production. I did a readthru with Ben and Sarah on Tuesday night, which was a lot of fun. I took it as a good sign that there were points when they failed to read their lines because they were laughing so hard. Only once or twice, but it still counts! The readthru revealed how long the episodes actually take, and it was interesting to get a rough feeling for this (between 6 and 8 minutes). As someone with little to no experience in running times from scripts (asides from the generic 1 minute per page) this was a bit of a surprise. I can't wait to see how it'll translate to the final version.

I went for another run on Tuesday, which was ridiculously hard work for the paltry 5km I ran. I really had to push myself to go past the 3km mark. Ideally I should be going again today, but I am about to head off to start a new course at City Lit - a screenwriting course. This may or may not be a good idea. I'm hoping to fill in any gaps in my knowledge more than anything else. I'm sure there's a bunch of useful tips I can get from it. But it does seem strange to be doing a level one course in something that I have now done quite a lot of work over the last couple of months. Guess we'll have to see.

And the other exciting news from this week was my attempt at the chicken escalope recipe I got from Jane. I'll write it up tomorrow, but overall it went very well - absolutely delicious!