Yesterday we went over how I came to write a movie script, and how we got it actually filmed, produced and "released". I will talk about the next two projects in the it's-someone's-birthday-soon-so-we'll-use-that-to-get-people-to-participate-in-our nonsense saga.
Lucas helmed the documentary about me, organized basically everything around the movie shoot and did the whole cutting by himself. So I thought it was only fair for him to be the next victim/recipient of whatever we could cook up. Since we absolutely could not pull off the miracle of getting the band back together for another movie shoot, nevermind the fact that I could not do half the things Lucas did on the technical side, I had to look for alternatives that did not require all of our physical presence.
I made a grave mistake.
To this day, it's the one project that we keep hidden and stored in a safe place where it can't hurt anyone, like a barrel full of radioactive material in a deep, dark cave. An unholy amalgamation of cringe and madness that drives anyone insane who comes into contact with it. Should anyone ever get ahold of it, their soul shall be forever tainted, excluding them from ascending to paradise or descending to hell. Forever trapped in purgatory, forced to relive the cringe time and time again.
What could possibly be so powerful as to cause this curse upon mortal and immortal beings alike?
We made a mixtape with covers sung by us.
I cannot and do not want to go into more detail, for the mere sight of the zip file on my hard drive sends ice-cold shivers down my back.
But let this be known: there are at least three physical CD copies that we gave to random people in a bar on the evening of the release. If these cursed artifacts are still around or have since been destroyed, I do not know. I pray for anyone who might stumble upon them.
If you happen to find them:
Do not under any circumstances listen to it.
Do not look upon your reflection on the disc.
Find your nearest active volcano and cast the disc into it.
Let us try to forget, and continue.
We wanted to do another project. But we still had the issue that it was basically impossible to find a schedule for a dozen people for another movie shoot. We really caught lightning in a bottle the first time around.
We had also tried to include some special effects in the movie and ended up cutting the scenes completely. It was too ambitious; we did not have the space to film in front of a proper green screen, nor did we have the skills to pull it off and make it look at least good enough.
Still, I wanted the next project to be bigger in scope. Leaving behind the mundane streets of the city where we studied and taking the protagonists of the next story for a grander adventure.
Filming everything in rooms of our parents' places, around the uni campus and in the city itself was fun, and it was practical to save time. It gave everything a recognizable charm for us. It also made some scenes very absurd, like the detective's office basically being a children's bedroom converted to an office. Why did we choose that? Because it had a lot of books in the background, which seemed like somthing a private investigator would have in his office, and we didn't have better alternatives.
We wanted bigger, did not have the tools for that, and we still wanted loads of people to participate. We needed a way to expand the scope without relying on visuals, and a way for everyone to contribute regardless of physical presence.
And thus, we found the medium for the next three projects: audio dramas.
It was perfect. It gave me complete creative freedom because we only had to describe the situations, have the characters react to them, throw in some sound effects and music, and the listeners' imagination would fill in the blanks.
It also did not require the actors to be physically present. If they could record scenes together, that would be great, but we could have everyone record their lines and put them together afterwards.
We were initially a bit worried that the dialogue would sound unnatural that way. But once we got the first recordings in, and the scenes ready, all our worries were lifted. Everyone seemed to have loads of fun with it, putting their own little spin on the characters I wrote and giving it their all. I had an idea and an image of the characters in my mind when I wrote it, but this made them really come to life!
As far as I remember, this was the last time Lucas wrote any scenes directly instead of just giving general input. I think at that time we really found our rhythm and understood each other's boundaries in the process.
I didn't mention it in the last post, but after three days of filming, running around and me being the annoying goofball I can be, we needed space and did not talk or communicate for a week before we started on the cut of the movie. We just needed the space.
We released it on the evening of the birthday celebration. It was a bit weirder sitting in a circle and listening to an audio drama than it was to watch a movie together, but we enjoyed ourselves.
We had found it. The perfect medium for us. So we made another two. Each one substantially bigger and longer than the one before.
There is a good reason I am not getting into the plots much: I have recovered the original scripts from my Keeper of Backups, and am really tackling the task of transcribing them into proper little novellas.
I will add some commentary to each chapter, and I'll be posting about it here whenever I have some work done on it. Which could be very, very soon.
The good thing about the stories being complete is that I can release them chapter by chapter without worrying about planning anything out. Not like I did that in the first place. I am 100% a pantser. This led to me writing myself into a dead end a few times, but the sheer absurdity of where I took the stories really forgave the deus ex machinas I pulled out of my ass a few times.
In the next and final part, we will look into the last two projects, and talk a bit about the ambitions I had for them.
-- Cass