The Velawesomeraptor Production Blog

Cross country plane flights are the bestest thing in the world for getting stuff done.  I got several sketches done for different characters, and also got over the hump that had been slowing me down on Episode 3.

I can't draw for crap

The current game plan is to start pulling stuff together in preparation for a presentation for Kickstarter.  That means Budget for puppet construction, rough timeline, some sample renders, and an intro video with Stanley.  I’m hunting for someone to serve as “line producer” to help put some of the numbers stuff together.  Hopefully someone will actually be interested in doing it.

No, honestly, I’m still alive and kicking, as is the project.

I found that I hit a wall in terms of writing, and I couldn’t get past the mid-point of the third episode.  It was the first scene without George in it, and I just COULD. NOT. WRITE. IT.  Starting a new job didn’t help matters, as I spent most of January and February completely exhausted.  By the time March rolled around, I started realizing I’d adapted to the new schedule, but when I looked up, there was that wall again.

So I started procrastinating in every way possible.  Even to the point of re-skinning the production bible wiki so it looked cooler.  That’s how bad it was.

So then, I got the bright idea to start a time line.  To see how the different sketchy back stories I’d fleshed out fit together.  And that’s when I started seeing BIG GAPING HOLES and inconsistencies.  So project “re-write everybody’s history” happened.

A snippet in time...

This may have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done and will ever do.  It fleshed out SO much in terms of character, and who knew whom and who COULD HAVE known whom.  It was like back story came flowing out of an excel spreadsheet.

So I knocked out as much of it as I could, then sat down with Linda and tore the thing apart and put it back together again.  And here we are.  I completely scrapped episode 3 and started again.

We’ve started planning for puppet construction.

Blender 2.5 is almost ready for use.

Movin’ right along. Dugga dug dugga dug.

Today, I finished the basic character outlines for the main cast.  They are, as with most Sci-Fi shows, mostly perfect hero types.  Everyone has something awesome in their past that they did, and there’s the requisite grumpy guy.

Now it’s time to take a second look at the character sketches and start to flesh them out.  To give them flaws and weaknesses.  To make them realistic people instead of portraits of perfection.  Since we’re doing this as a drama, there really NEEDS to be flaws to play off of, but not so many as to make the whole show an Emofest.

So tarnishing must be done with care.

The thing that amazes me the most out of all this is that, in telling the back story of each of these characters, story ideas come out of the woodwork and just lay themselves at my feet.  It’s pretty freakin’ cool.  My only fear is that there will be too many stories to tell in the format that we’re telling them.  Since each of our “seasons” will amount to the same time that two episodes of a normal hour long sci-fi show takes, it limits our storytelling a bit.

At least for now…

One of the reasons I love working with Linda so much is that she’s full of questions.  SHE thinks that she can be too anal with them, but honestly, they really help to flesh things out… for instance: We never would have come up with the wicked awesome propulsion system for the ship had it not been for her questions…

So anyway, as part of our building of this universe, she gives me homework questions to answer about anything and everything.  One of the questions in the first set inspired this answer, and may have sparked a title for the show:

In the late 20th century, after much campaigning and hard won political battles, puppets around the globe were given the right to form Independent Puppet Nations, much like the Native American Nations in North America. But instead of casinos, they dove into education and technology. In the mid 21nd century, they formed the United Puppet Nations as an advisory counsel made up of representatives from all of the IPNs. It was the UPN that was able to coordinate the Puppet Tech markets from all of the various IPNs to get them working together and focused on a new, singular goal: a puppet home world. And so the UPN is the controlling body of of the small fleet of IPVs that make up the para-military force known as Galaxy Scouts.