-I spent the first 3 weeks or so of the new year coming to that conclusion, and while it may not say anything specific about the plot, story, or characters, (which are still in development) it definitely defines The Caves. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to nail that down, but I now have a 3-page document outlining exactly what The Caves is, my goals for the project, and the Genre.
I’m not quite ready to say anything less vague than that at the moment. My writing process is somewhat unique in that the actual plot is one of the last things I design. I come up with situations, lines, characters, ideas for plots and jot them down (I have folders full of these). From a storytelling standpoint there is no 3-Act or 5-Act structure or anything like that -The story is just a juxtaposition of vignettes -snippets of plot here and there that the audience has to either piece together on their own or just sit back and enjoy the story until the characters figure it out.
It’s a variation of a method of storytelling proposed by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, writers of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, on their website http://wordplayer.com. The idea is that you’re seeing the story from the perspective of the characters -so there could be all sorts of awesome cool stuff happening, but you’re only going to get to see the things that are along the side of a road the characters happen to be taking. This idea of a highly detailed, yet incomplete universe that embraces the reality of the unknown is a lot like Christopher Nolan’s Batman-universe in The Dark Knight. I don’t know if he was directly inspired by Ted and Terry, but The Dark Knight is a perfect example of this type of storytelling at its best.
Basically just juxtaposing different ideas. In The Caves the goal is sort of to take obscure, outlandish, sensationalized concepts like Sci-fi B-Movies of the 1940′s-50′s and Anomalee-of-the-Week Pulp Gothic Horror stories like THE THING FROM THE SWAMP and THEY CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, and juxtapose them with sort of A-list production values and grounding them in real/hard science. A-Movies of that era were kind of like Film Noir, Murder Mystery, and Classic Romance movies -with a lot of humor and cultural themes and dramatic sophistication.
So The Caves is sort of like a merger of those (The exotic/mysterious with the classic/familiar) presented in a serialized episodic format.
To do Hard Science -to live up to that goal of accuracy and believability requires a LOT of extra research though, especially with a story that has so many different facets like this, so I’ve spent a good year and a half just researching a lot of basic things, and I’ve still got at least 4 weeks worth of story research left before there will be anything resembling a plot.
I also spent a lot of time watching old movies, obscure by today’s standards from that era, in addition to all the classics, to get a really clear idea of what the tone and mood of The Caves will be. I think it will be immensely helpful when I go to write, to have a guide that lets me sort of control the tone and mood the scenes take in addition to the actual content, basically so I can change any scene at will to be within the realm of a different genre (I could take an action scene and make it suspenseful instead or take a horrorific scene and make it funny) Because the characters are the focus of the story, the plot isn’t restricted to any particular genre, so I’m basically free to take the plot wherever the story wants to go, which is going to be a real help.
I broke one of my New Years Resolutions which was to make a blog post at least once a week, while working on this Genre Definition as it took longer than I expected.
I sent an email to Paul Caggegi which he read on his podcast, The Process Diary, in his 100th episode this week. (You can click the link to go listen to it if you’d like) The episode was a feedback episode, but he started by providing a really insightful commentary on the process of creating art. After listening to it I became inspired to share here on my own blog some of the process I’ve gone through over the past year and a half with The Caves. I’m planning to be a little more open with my process since a lot of my time is spent in a tiny little room just working on story development, so it’s kind of unrealistic to expect to be able to post awesome, cool finished professional looking concepts and artwork every week. I think, if you’re interested in how the creative process works it will be really interesting (if not, well I’ll try and promise pictures lol) It’ll definitely help me with my New Years Resolution, and perhaps get some early feedback.
I’m finally shifting gears now though, as I want The Caves to be as much a visual experience as it is a literary achievement, so I’m going to be spending the last week of the month learning to paint.
I’m not aiming for any particular style, but in the realm of digital painting I tend to like the look of speed painting and sort of concept art style… which are also not too elaborate to do, but I want to also try at least one really sort of high quality image per episode if I can. It all depends on where my skills are at and also sort of, what the focus of a particular scene really needs to be -some scenes are going to be pretty simple while others may actually need to showcase some kind of highly detailed object or character as a sort of visual component of the narrative, but I’m going to just sort of experiment with different styles and the episodes will probably contain a collection of artwork with various influences. I’ve got a whole list of tutorials and online workshops/ pdfs to go through -probably enough for a lifetime, so I’ll be following those and just honing my skills.
There’s also a new contest at CGSociety called The B-Movie CGChallenge which I was really psyched to read about because it fits so perfectly with the type of work I was planning to do. So I’m going to enter that. I don’t plan to win, but to get some feedback on my art skills as a learning experience will be really helpful.
I’ve also still got a lot of notes to sort out… (The notes never really end). I’m hoping to be able to reveal some kind of actual synopsis by the end of the month, and possibly some teaser images to go with it, but we’ll see how things go. For now, I’ll just show you my To-Do List:
- Learn to Paint/ Draw
- Plot Arrangement/ “Soft” Outline
- Visual Design/ Begin Blog Setup
- Finish Story Research
- Concepts
- Hard Outline
- Write Pilot
- Illustrations
- Blog Optimization +Launch
So… I still can’t really determine an official launch date. Ideally I’d like to get it up before the end of February. Mid to lateish-March might be more realistic, but the end of February is my working target for the moment, so February 28th give or take 2 weeks, but probably sometime in March.
In the meantime I’ll be making posts… every few days or so, at least once or twice a week, with updates on my progress. And I will be divulging more and more information regarding the plot as time draws nearer to the launch so look forward to that.
For now, I’ve scattered some of the drawing studies I’ve been doing about this post. These are all from a few months ago, but it was the first time I had really drawn anything in many years, so it’ll be a good check to see how much progress I make with my skills over the next month and a half or so before The Caves launch. (If all goes well, these long posts will get shorter and filled with more and more images of better and better quality instead lol.)
