We are halfway through “The Black Dawn” and I have to say that I am really pleased with how it is turning out. I certainly am not the creator of the show, but I wrote nearly a third of it and did some extensive rewrites as well.
Here’s episode one, which was written almost entirely by William Hellmuth, the director, then rewritten quite extensively by myself, and then changed again on set due to location restrictions. The dialogue between Adam and his roommate was meant to take place in their dorm room. We couldn’t get access to one of the rooms, so we changed it to the stairwell on the day of the shoot.
Episode 11 I am also quite proud of. It is supposed to be a “breather” episode. A sort of departure from the drama of the show. The characters get to have a “time out” and unwind a bit. The bit on the soccer field was a hundred percent my writing, and the dialogue between Adam and Julie ended up on the screen exactly as I had re-written it from Abe’s original draft. So naturally, I feel fairly attached to this episode because I wrote so much of it, but I also love the finished product. The score by Jeff Swingle (or was it Curtis, not sure who did this episode) came out beautifully and really helped give the entire episode a very haunting feeling.
And of course, their is episode 12. This is the midpoint of the series, and is naturally the game changer. The first half of the season moves a bit slow. Now that I have learned a bit more about storytelling, I admit I would have structured the entire script a bit differently. But from here on it should be pretty awesome.
As always ,excellent work on the web series. Actually I thought you were one of the creators of the show, but to be fair, it’s mostly William’s baby, correct? Still, great work on the writing! After TRUNK and this us fans have high expectations for your future work!
Still waiting for your cameo… we had Anthony as a corpse, now Jessie in Catalyst… where is Johnny?
Thanks for the kind words, Alec. I heard about the dinner you had with the other guys and I was sad I couldn’t be there.
As of now, no plans to cameo, and I believe everything has been totally shot by now, so I don’t think it will be happening.
And yes, if you want to be technical I could claim myself as one of the creators, but most of the creation falls to William and Abe. I would consider myself more of a guide, like Obi Wan perhaps.
Cool little blog post, Brian. I agree that I would restructure a little knowing what we know now about filmmaking. But hey, you never learn until you try eh? That’ll make the next project that much awesomer!
Thanks for the credit on writing the first episode! I never really considered myself a writer of this show, even though I did do some writing… coinsidentally, the very last scene of episode 12 was almost all written by me too. I kept expecting someone like Josh, or you, to change the dialogue (because I always thought it was on the nose), but no one ever did! The last scene of episode 12 was ALSO pretty much lit by me. As you can see… I went crazy. I had watched Lost the night before we shot that scene, there was a random green light in a street ally and I thought, “hey, copying Lost never seems to get me in trouble…”
And Alec, I must point out, Brian already had a cameo in the show. Check out episode 1. And I echo Brian’s thanks for the kind words on the series. It’s always encouraging!
I think I was camera operator on the shots in the thumbnails of the top two videos you have there! I get bragging rights too!!