For those interested, the video was created with the Final Cut Pro 7 suite, mainly with Motion 4. The graphics were built in Photoshop.

The box graphic used in the video was designed in Blender by Ben over at bencreating.com. He does some neat stuff, so check him out, too.

Not because they ended too soon, but because there needed to be more. Let me explain what I mean with two specific examples.

The first movie I want to talk about is Flushed Away. It’s a fun little film filled with absolutely hilarious jokes that are pretty much non-stop. It’s also only 75 minutes long before the credits roll.

The problem with this film is that it attempts at various points to make the viewer feel emotion. We’re supposed to feel sorry for poor, lonely Roddy when he gets back to his empty house. We’re supposed to cry when Rita’s boat sinks. But both of these story beats are overshadowed almost immediately by throwaway gags.

Those are just two instances out of several where the movie could have used just a little bit of breathing space. And there’s no excuse not to have it! I mean, the movie is barely 75 minutes long! They had 15 minutes to play with before hitting 90, where most animated movies land nowadays. Even just an extra 5 minutes of room to process the emotional beats would have vastly improved the film.

The second movie I want to mention is The Last Airbender. I know, I know. The movie failed on a number of levels, in particular in its complete and blatant disregard for most of what made the original TV series great. Some of that could have been solved by making it longer.

See, the movie spends little or no time on character development, but it has so many characters running around that it needed to. It also skips important parts of the story with a short voiceover.

And yet, the movie was only 90 minutes long, even though it was an adaptation of 7.5 hours of TV series! Oops!

Come on, you’ve got license to add at least an extra half hour to this movie. Two hours would be a more proper length for the story it attempts to tell, and two and a half hours would be even better, considering the length of the material you’re adapting. You could get away with that, too… The show was big enough, both in fanbase and epicness, to merit an abnormally long movie.

Just think what you could do with an extra hour of wiggle-room! Dial in on the characters. Add real scenes to replace the voiceovers. Explain how bending works. And pronounce everybody’s name right into the bargain!

Now, I’m not saying that every movie needs to be longer, but seeing these two movies has gotten me thinking about how some stories do need more space to be told properly. So don’t always assume your script is overly long. Carefully consider the possibility that it may be too short!

While we were at it, I got to sit in a spiffy sound booth and record an audiobook for Simply Charlotte Mason. I found the sound booth experience so monumental that I asked Ruth to take a photo. She did, but she had to use the camera in her iMac because there wasn’t anything else handy at the time. Which is funny when you think about it…

We’re going to start editing both of these projects in the coming days. You could give them each a “coming soon” label. They certain are!

Establish a Feeling and Enforce It

This being a web series, we had six episodes to deal with. Six episodes written by six different writers, each with a different style. It was important to establish a feel and rules for the show to make sure the six episodes felt like they belonged to each other.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t room for individual personalities to shine through. The first episode is a hilarious take on the epic quest concept. It contains all the elements of that sort of thing, from unlikely heroes to important magical things. The fourth episode is a completely random series of one-liners with almost no reference to the quest. Both are great!

Each of the writers used our master document of guidelines to establish the feeling for their episode. Along with that, we had a story team overseeing the writers and telling them where things needed to change to integrate the scripts together. As a result, we have a cohesive whole with different riffs on the same concept.

Great Story Supervisors are Worth Their Weight in Gold

I have to give a huge shout-out to our story supervisor, Aubrey Hansen. She was fully awesome on this project.

When I was satisfied with a script, she pushed the writer to take it farther. When I thought something was good enough, she picked at small details and took things to the next level.

That’s exactly what a great story supervisor does. Story supervisors, I’ve learned, tell the director when he’s not thinking big enough. They act as a safety net and a green light.

You see, I went onto the set with the script for the first episode without any clear idea of how it would turn out. For each of the other episodes, I could see them in my head. I knew how they would be if I got what I wanted. But the first episode never gelled for me until I hit the set and shot it.

Way before that, though, Aubrey told me it was good. And she was right! So find someone with great story sense to supervise your writer(s), and then listen to what they tell you. You won’t be sorry.

Let Your Crew Members Do What They Do Bestest

This goes along with the part about story supervisors. Let your crew do what they do. Tell them what feeling or emotion you’re after, and then give them space to make it happen. On Month of the Novel, I most experienced this with the show’s composer, Benjamin Dawson.

Although I listen to a lot of film soundtracks and play a couple of instruments, I’m pretty clueless when it comes to scoring a film. But that’s okay. Benjamin would ask what I was after, I’d give him a feeling or emotion, and he’d come up with something that, nine times out of ten, I loved instantly.

Don’t think you get off with just sitting back and letting your crew work, though. Because Month of the Novel was six episodes, I had ample opportunity to learn about the scoring process and what ideas I wanted to use. By the time we got down to the last two or three episodes, I wasn’t just sitting back and watching Benjamin compose. Instead, I was actively pointing to previous music from the show and asking for themes to return, then letting him overrule me and write something new.

One Good Tweet Can Launch You

This one is pretty simple. The show is based on NaNoWriMo, so we made sure to follow them on Twitter and Facebook, and we let them know about Month of the Novel from the very start. Well, when they mentioned the first episode on Twitter, we practically had to duck to avoid being run over by the hoard of NaNo-ers heading to watch the show. I had to figure out how to stop my e-mail from alerting me every time we got a new follower!

Know your audience, then find the influentials in your audience and try to get their attention in a non-spammy way. We had an easy in because we had to e-mail NaNoWriMo to see if we could use their name in the show. You might have to jump through a few more hoops to get it done on your project, but it’s so worth it.

Posters are Easy

Go to Zazzle. Upload your artwork in the right size. Sell posters. We should have thought of that a long time ago.

You Don’t Brew Tea

Nope. You steep it. Who knew? Ruth Shafer (my editor and cinematographer) did, and when I had the Writer brew tea in the show opener, she let me know I had the wrong verb.

The lesson here is that you work with a passel of creative people, each with their own areas of expertise. Learn something new from each of them, no matter how small it is. At the very least, it might be on Jeopardy someday.

We’re already hard at work on the next one, so stay tuned!

And going back to Month of the Novel, did you know that the first episode will be online on Tuesday? Are you ready? It’s going to be great, so tell your friends! We’ve also been updating the web site with some new pages like a characters list (with pictures!) and an episode guide.