The Plan

Wow, time just disappears, but it’s okay, I’ve not gone anywhere! The plan, the plan, oh the plan.

Where to start, the plan like all good plans has changed many times over since the beginning so instead of setting out doomed to fail timelines. I’m gonna keep this plan loose, more focused on the plan of action in approximate order.

I’ve broken it down into a few chunks to make it a little more digestible and not overwhelm myself, we’ll start talking about the first miles stone I’ve outlined, a quick look at the midterm milestones, then a really really broad look at the longer-term plan, then finally where I am today, and what’s next!

The First Milestone –

As a very first milestone, I’m going to create a short promo clip, which will be a clip from the first episode. By having this as my first milestone I can use this to test and build the entire pipeline from script to clip (I’ll dedicate a whole blog post to the pipeline a bit later). This will also act as my first piece of finished content which will act as a guide for the style and look for the show, this first milestone will probably take a good while as I’m over a year in and not all that close. 

Midterm Milestones – 

After completing and releasing the first promo clip I’m going to focus on creating the whole first episode, in this step I hope to take everything I’ve learned from the promo and improve my workflow and tools to speed and simplify the process.

Longterm Milestones –

After the first episode, I want to evaluate the pipeline and workflow to see where I can speed things up, I need to make sure I’m not setting myself a Sisyphean task trying to create the whole first season on my own.

Once I’m happy enough with the pipeline I want to focus on the show a season at a time, each season is 8 episodes, each episode around 12 minutes, I’m not exactly sure if I’ll end up doing each simultaneously or sequentially, finishing one before the starting the next, this might help me sanity wise, as if I try to bash out say all the storyboards for the whole season before moving into the next stage I might get bored or distracted.  On the other hand, if I work on each episode one by one there might be huge gaps of times between episode releases which isn’t ideal either. But that’s a problem for future me!

Where we are today –

At the moment there is a lot in the works but nothing is finished, I’ve been exploring lots of ideas and different parts of the process as my interests dictate, most recently I’ve written rough scripts for the first season, and have lots of ideas for the following, I’ve rewritten the first episode a fair few times and am happy enough that I’ve been working my way through storyboarding it. As mentioned in the last post I’ve started designed and building the beginnings of my pipeline,  there’s a lot more work to do in this area, but I’m trying to identify the minimum viable pipeline that means I can start production. More on this later. 

Well that about covers it in a broad sense, I’m sure the plan will change again, but for now, it’s the direction I’m running.