My Persona

[to the tune of "My Sharona"]

I’ve been relatively quiet of late about what I’m working on, but that’s because I’ve been consumed with a couple of exciting projects.

You may recall me waxing lyrical about Persona last year, the app-based drama that tells four snappy stories in a month via your smartphone. At the time, I was hoping to write one of the arcs but due to various happenings in the process, that all got swept to one side.

But Phill Barron, awesome guy that he is, kept all us wannabe writers in the loop about what was happening with the drama. So when he sent out an e-mail looking for a writer, I leapt at the chance.

I’ve been working with Cameron King, director extraordinary (you can see for yourself here) on a story that pushes all my buttons and about which, of course, my lips are zipped. Suffice to say, your knuckles will be white as you clutch your phone, aghast. We really hope to bring the drama to this app.

Our story will be part of Persona’s fourth season, due to air around April – no doubt I’ll chew your eat off about it closer to the time.

Meanwhile, January? Pretty freakin’ cool.

Glimpses of The Underwater Realm – part two

Okay, so it’s now January (Happy New Year and all that), but I’ve finally put together some more Underwater Realm backstory.

So, Dave sold me on five short scripts and we had a brainmelting session on possible ideas for the stories. I lost track of the project for a bit (my day job unfortunately takes a lot of my attention) while Dave and Jon developed the scripts for the shorts from those five initial ideas.

The next milestone in the project was the Production Meeting at the end of April 2011. This brought together the core Realm Pictures team with the talented heads of department needed to make these films a reality. Oh, and I was there. Mostly to drink wine.

Alongside the practical business of how to build a Spanish galleon, we spent a great deal of time working through what makes Atlantean culture and how it could fit in with the actual history and mythology of the Mediterranean. A large potion of this was figured out in the pitch black of a Devon night, while I tried to blindly write it down.

Some of the key notes from that meeting that have lasted through the development process thusfar include:

Pre-Fall: “They lead the world – teachers + philosophers. Like Elves, like Star Trek.”; “Giving culture through missionary – to Crete and Egypt.”

The Fall: Ideology shift – “By conquering, we can enforce our ideals to make the world a better place”; “physical disaster to parallel their idealogical cataclysm”

Post-Fall: “Gondor. Decrepit. Memories of grandeur.”; “decaying situation of a golden past”

There were also three questions key to our further development of this mythology:

1) When do they Fall?
2) What mythology do they tell themselves?
3) What’s the most interesting story?

However, I’ve also written things like “Atlantis is in the Atlantic”. They can’t all be pearls.

I also wrote a couple of audition sides for the short films on that weekend. The most challenging thing about those was that none of the characters speak in the shorts. It’s easier to audition people with lines and the scripts themselves don’t lend themselves to auditioning anyway.

Here’s part of an audition side I wrote for 1208, trying to bring out the emotional range we wanted in a monologue style:

In the next instalment, I’ll talk about the development of the feature script through the use of script retreats.