After the shoot...

We shot our pilot last Saturday and it went great! It was a thrill for me to see this brilliant cast and crew come together and put all their talent into some silly words I wrote.

Now it's time to edit, which is going to take a while but will be tonnes of fun. Hours upon hours of fun in a tiny, enclosed space, watching the same moments over and over again until they lose all meaning. As I say, fun!

We'll keep you up to date on the blog and on the Ultra Clean Facebook page. Come for the coffee, stay for the intensity! (I don't know what that means.)

Show Week

It's show week!  We shoot this week!  Everything we've done so far has been leading up to this moment.  This is the week the script, the actors and the vision of the director come together.  We're going going to capture our pilot episode, and thus the essence of our show this week.  And I'm beyond excited about it.  I'm shrieking like a marmoset about it.

This is a marmoset:

Wait, that's a marmoset?  Seriously?  Do those things even shriek?  Then what the hell am I doing?!

Regardless of all that, I'm a happy fella this week.  A happy, busy fella.  We've been running around locking down costume, props, locations and making sure the script delivery is smooth as silk.  It's nuts and it's going to get nuts-er.  But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Hooray for the industrial revolution, which step-by-step led to this moment in time, effectively making all of this possible!

A Writing Meeting

We had a writing meeting last night. Normally a writing meeting for a comedy show means sitting in a sweaty room with a bunch of men, drinking in the odours of jam doughnuts and feet. But ours was a much more civilised affair.

Joining me, the head writer, were actor James Chapman, series director John Wood and friend of the series Sally Davies. See? We're already better than most comedy shows because we have a woman writing with us. We'll probably be pulling in some more writers as the series progresses, but our little group of four was perfect for a start.

L to R: James Chapman, Tristram Baumber, Sally Davies (John Wood taking the picture with his hands)

Together, we started tossing episode ideas around, as well as little scraps of ideas that couldn't possibly make a whole episode but were nonetheless trapped in our brains and had to see the light of day otherwise our heads would explode. Ideas of that type were mainly mine.

We're planning on writing 12 episodes, so now is the time to lay out the plans for what each of those episodes will be. Lots of ideas were suggested, although sadly no episodes about robots. I like TV shows about robots. As well as individual stories, we were also planning out some long-term story arcs. These are the stories that take place over whole seasons, or even complete runs of a show. For example, on a TV show about robots, the writers would plan out everything that was going to happen to the robots as the show progressed, episode by episode. Or on Lost, the writers wouldn't plan anything, they'd just pretend to.

On our show there are several stories that are going to continue episode to episode. It's our way of making the show a bit "soapy" and getting people to tune in each week. I'll talk about this more in our next blog but right now a giant robot that claims to be my secret brother-in-law is taking me and my whole family to court, risking our fortune, and I have to open this envelope containing my important medical test results.

(See what I did there?)