Has It Really Been Two Months?

So really long time and no posts! Has this become another of those poor forlorn blogs that gets bought for Christmas, cherished for a couple of days, then dumped on the RSPCA or in a canal by the start of the new year?

Well never intentionally.

Other stuff has been a little higher on my agenda for the last couple of weeks (okay months) namely writing, shooting and editing another little production. Acute observers might already have noticed that I wrapped the tale of Lazarus up a bit quick (Well I did, I could have rambled on for ages about editing and pick ups and stuff) But I wanted to get the story done so I could move on to the next (which has largely been keeping me from updating this very blog by giving me evil looks and hissing) Anyway…

While writing for TAOSB was kind of fun, one was awfully restricted by the existing material and the series’ need to stay ‘family friendly’. In short there was a whole load of stuff that I wanted to do that I would never, ever, (ever, ever, ever!) be allowed to put in to an episode of SB.

So flash back a couple of months to when Lazarus was actually in production. During this period I’d spent quite a lot of time chatting with Pete and Sarah. Mostly pipe dreaming about all of the plot, content and effects we’d like to (Well actually could) do if we weren’t bound up in all of SB’s restrictions. Now while we had some really cool ideas, we had no real context to put them in until Pete, made a simple if dubious suggestion.

Way back when I’d written an original zombie movie (Not to be confused with the Stephen Brown zombie show) now it has to be said we didn’t have any intention of shooting my old zombie movie script. It was to put it bluntly a bit cack, overly complicated, and a little to silly; but that script had generated an idea that we could work with. For reasons that are far too long to type, the film featured references to a made up film franchise/computer game (I was a little to scared of getting sued to mention an existing franchise/game in the script so I’d made one up) Pete’s idea was simple. Let’s make the franchise/computer game into a show!

Now this opened up a whole motherlode of questions. The fake show hadn’t really been developed in the script. It had a name and it had bad, nasty things that liked to eat people’s brains, but that was it. What started was a series of conversations (Heaven forbid almost actual brain storming sessions) about what we actual wanted to do with the show, and how we could sling it all together in a vaguely cohesive manner. Not to mention how the hell we were going to shoot it.

Within a couple of months we had a framework to play with. We’d settled (More or less) on a format. We’d worked out the background of the setting and how the world worked. We had a solid idea for the over ridding story arc of our first ‘season’. Finally we’d had ideas for some lead characters and their own individual plots. We even had some of this written down! We were well on our way. In the end it turned out we’d only really taken one thing from the original script and that was the name…

Echoblack.