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.

It took longer than we’d expected because a group of curious horses wanted to investigate our equipment.

Eventually we came to an understanding with them and they let us shoot the episode.

Yesterday was our final day of shooting for Month of the Novel. We had been scrambling to find a good place to shoot an episode involving an imposing brick wall, and in a whirlwind of activity, we both found the wall and shot at it yesterday.

First, Rebekah, Ruth, and I went out to scout the wall. We were thrilled by the location, so we made plans to return later in the afternoon with the cast and crew in tow.

That afternoon, we headed out to the set, only to discover that some key equipment had been left behind. While Ruth went back for it, we raked leaves and did various setup things.

And then things pretty much went smoothly after that. Our opening shot used a camera stabilizer rig, so it took us a little bit to get the coordination right, and we were interrupted by a barking dog a couple times, but we finally got it right and it couldn’t be better!

We did the rest of the shooting and headed back to import the footage before we called it a wrap. Ruth and I got the footage in, I geeked out over how cool it was, and we happily declared shooting wrapped.

Monday was a half day, but it felt like a whole day. We shot the first episode in the hot, hot, hot sun. Some of us roasted, I think. But we got it all shot and it turned out better than we’d planned (this is a plus). That put us at three episodes shot in two shooting days.

Then came Tuesday. It started with the arrival of one of the writers from the show. She got to hang out on the set for the day! That was loads of fun.

We spent the first half of our shoot on one episode, which turned out really well. There was a chance of rain for the afternoon, so we looked at the sky, looked at the time, and decided we would try to shoot one more episode.

We set off for the location and found it to be a perfect spot. We started shooting.

It started dripping. Luckily, this script called for storm clouds, so we grabbed that shot while we were able. The rain was really light, only a few drips here and there, so we kept on shooting.

And then… With only two or three shots left to go, BOOM! Lightning, thunder, torrential downpour! And there we were in the middle of a pasture rolling camera and getting drenched!

We packed up in record time and dashed back to a building on the property. But not before everybody was soaked.

So we dried off as best we could, waited for the rain to let up a bit, then ran for the car and went home with those couple of shots still left to do.

The happy ending to this story is that our visiting writer was unperturbed by all this and stayed on for some of Wednesday, too.

And none of the equipment or costumes got ruined by the downpour. As for the people… You’ll just have to make up your own ending for that one.

We got out to the location this morning and all piled into that bumpy vehicle that we used to scout on Wednesday. Actually, we did that in shifts. And some of us managed to get lost when some people decided to walk to location when the vehicle driver was delayed. But I won’t say who. You can guess.

Anyway, the vehicle finally cooperated and we piled into it to head out to the first location.

Then we shot a lot of video of the first episode planned for the day. This thing is really coming together, let me tell you! We had some great performances and got some really good takes. I always love shooting the script and getting to see it go beyond what was in my head.

After a break for lunch, we did the whole two shifts in the vehicle thing again (this time without the getting lost part) and headed out to shoot the second episode for the day.

It took us a bit to figure out exactly how to frame it around various modern elements and an uncooperative camera, but we finally got something we were happy with.

Once that episode had been safely shot, we drove back to home base and had yummy falafels to eat. And then crashed with a movie, which is the best way to end a long, successful day of filmmaking, if you ask me.