World Domination - the preliminaries

Oooh, aren't I the bloggy one all of a sudden.

As Chris the Director said, over here, we had a meeting at the weekend. You know, like a business meeting. When I say "like" a business meeting I mean it, because we were sitting in the middle of the Cheshire countryside talking while wives and children were having fun.

This is not to say that we weren't having fun - talking about potential futures is always fun. And in this case we were discussing a new buzzword: transmedia stuff (you can look it up here).

It's all Chris's fault. We first met when he contacted me and asked if I'd read a script of his - he had read my scripts on Shooting People and particularly liked Air because it was possibly the only script on the entire 'verse that represents Live Action Role Playing accurately. Which is not surprising considering my history.

So I gave him some notes on his script and after chatting a bit we decided to film some of my script Monsters, the results of which is here. We got on well so decided we should do a web series and I wrote the first version of Winter. It was okay and would probably have been fine.

Then we talked more. Chris had been working on a Steampunk feature script and we both agreed it would be really cool if I re-wrote Winter in his Steampunk universe. So I did. And this confused a lot of people (including Jez. Hi Jez!). But with this came other problems, apart from the script, we don't have a lot of money and if Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow took $30M (knocking off $10M for distribution and promotion) to make and ours is a third the length but also has a completely digital backlot...

So we kind of hit the doldrums a bit. We knew it was possible to do but could we do it?

Of course we could. We just needed a plan. And that's what we did at the weekend, we made a plan. We started at the end - Winter filmed and released - and worked our way to the beginning. And then I wrote it up so it almost looked like a business plan.

So now we have a plan, and we also now have a name for the whole enterprise - Chris had actually been using the word all through our discussions, and the original conception is his so it seems only fair to use his word.

But I'm not telling you what it is yet. That will have to wait for the official launch of the project. And there are a couple of steps ahead of "official launch" which have to be achieved first.

So what's this got to do with world domination? Well, Winter is only the beginning.

So if you know (or are) an artist or illustrator who might like to do some piccies for a Steampunk project that's going places, get in touch.

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What's on the turntable? "Take a Pebble" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer from "Emerson, Lake & Palmer"