Production Update June 2016
Production Update
June 2016
The blocking out of the third edition of our written and video timeline was completed on June 13. It pulls together all our far flung ideas for the Prologue and the first scenes for the body of the documentary in just one written timeline, with a video backup to give us a feel for how it all flows together and times out, something we can’t do in writing. But, the writing was good for filling in all the important details that aren’t yet in the video timeline. Some of the scenes are nearly finished, and some are just a “sketch” of what’s imagined, a guide for boarders, background artists, character designers, and animators.
The Prologue is comprised of 22 scenes, running a little over nine minutes, a sort of illustrated table of contents for the documentary as a whole, laying out the kinds of stories and interviewees ahead, plus a feeling for the creative approach we are using, to pay homage to the ground breaking work of the UPA artists of the 1950s. We also added 18 additional scenes for the body of the show, which brings the total of the newly expanded timeline to 40 scenes, at a total of a little under twenty-five minutes. So, that leaves us a good 65/70 minutes to include more of our interviewee’s stories.
We have over 100 “hot” interviews, which include UPA artists, local and international animation experts, and animation historians, who all have wonderful comments about UPA, many of them never heard before. We’re not even counting almost 100 additional interviews we’ve done, that are also quite good … just not great. But, we probably won’t even have room for all the great comments, but, those can go into a DVD box set we’re considering creating with a DVD of the Boing Heard Round the World feature. There’s also tons of archive material we possess which will be in a companion book we are also developing.
But, the feature documentary is our primary focus. With this 40 scene timeline blocked out now, there are three areas we are focussing on; production, pre-production, and marketing. We have a dedicated core crew of boarders, background artists, character designers, and animators, who will be rolling up their sleeves again under the supervision of our Art Director, G. Allen Black. Much of the initial work will be creating more characters for the new scenes we’ve blocked out, which will be specifically coordinated by our Lead Character Designer, Fenway Fan.
The two images included give you a feeling for the rough ideas we’ve come up with, that our crew will be expanding on, perhaps even coming up with original ideas of their own. The first is a collage of images that will make up what we feel will be a riveting montage of UPA images for a scene we call “UPA Wake-Up” … some of our characters of UPA artists, archival UPA stills, and clips from UPA shorts, all to give the viewer a dazzling first look at the scope of the legendary UPA studio. The second image involves creating a story by Bob Kurtz, where he becomes a part of a UPA short.
Pre-Production includes many things, but one of the most important is getting our interviews transcribed, and organized in an efficient manner to allow us to easily find the best clips, and getting them to work together as a compelling, entertaining, and informative, narrative flow. Gwendolyn Arreola, our Lead Production Assistant is heading that initial stage, with a data base overview of all our crew members, what their best talents are, and how many hours their putting in, so we are ready to pay them when production funds roll in. Also, everyone on the production crew relies on Gwendolyn’s organizational skills to keep the Production phase rolling smoothly as well.
Finally, after blocking out this latest timeline, my focus will now turn toward marketing, contacting some of our supporters with our latest news, exploring new contacts, and building a Pitch Reel for specifically going after new publicity avenues, finding production finishing funds, and building up our crew, still looking for about 36 more good animation artists. Also, I will finally be getting back to creating that long overdue Behind-the-Scenes video, which was promised to all the $250, and above, Kickstarter backers. I apologize that it’s taken so long, but production always seemed to be higher on the “To Do” list.
Well, all that said, I’d better get back to work. But, before I leave I’d like to encourage any of you reading this to tell your friends about us, send them to this website, we’re most interested in new publicity sources, additional funding, and increasing our crew, there are sections for everything in here. And, don’t hesitate to let us know any other ideas you have that you think might be useful. We’re always open as we move along on this exciting adventure of ours.
July Update coming soon, Tee Bosustow, Director/Producer
Category: Back Issues, Production
