Down The Wire

Back from a two-day brainstorming session with Work Buddy. While everyone else was winding down in preparation for the holiday season, we were ramping it up to get the series bible and supplementary material ready to be sent out in the New Year with the already written pilot script.

This has been casting a very long shadow over us for a while now. With the corporate filming finished for the year and everything else tucked up and put away, we finally had the time to sit down and put all the pieces together.

The blitz was on to make sure we had all the descriptions down for the main characters, supporting characters and the key recurring characters. Using spreadsheets we made sure everyone had relevant parts to play in each episode and satisfactorily developed through the course of the series. In tandem we tied down the individual episode stories that laid the trail of crumbs for the overall series story arc, playing characters off against the action.

While I was away, I’d left the computer on to transfer files. I came back to find that the power lead to the external drive had crapped out so that nothing had come down the pipe. Typical.

After all the years out of animation, I’d gotten lax and forgotten to check the connections before leaving. Depending on how tight the schedules used to be, if there were compositing scenes queued up to be rendered overnight for the next day, I’d go home for a couple of hours in the evening, wash, grab a bite to eat and a change of clothes before returning to the studio to watch over the data transfer.

There had been times, starting out, when errors would occur in a scene and stall the outputting, leading to either a mad rush the next morning and hell to pay. Not to repeat the experience, I’d sleep better for just a few hours on the couch in reception than a full night at home, stretched out in bed wondering whether the computers were behaving themselves.