WHAT ARE WE WORKING ON?? 💪

Hey everyone, I checked the analytics and we are up to a whopping EIGHT visitors to wldwlf.com this week, with at least one of those being me. I designed this website with the hope that people would engage with it however they wanted to, whether that be clicking around and watching the vids, listening to the pod, or reading these posts. But at the end of the day, even if no one is doing any of that, for some reason I still feel compelled to work on all this content and release it. It’s what I like to do, idk.

So in this post, I wanted to talk about three of our upcoming projects that may or may not ever be seen by those eight pairs of eyeballs. In this order, I’d love to introduce you to Howie!, the Spirit Axe video, and GOOD INTENTIONS.

HOWIE!

For many many years now, we’ve wanted to try making an animated show. Ideas were kicked around, but nothing substantial had hatched that was worth the large time investment of creating a whole show from scratch. With animation, you aren’t limited to the physical resources that you have access to, so the possibilities for a good concept are truly endless. Luckily, we had plenty of time to brainstorm during this quarantine-era where we were all at home, and the wild story of HOWIE! was born. The plan is to release 5 episodes of this original animated miniseries, and potentially continue the story afterwards if people like what they see.

Here is a quick visual rundown from the show’s pre-production development process through it’s final polishing stages as we get ready to release Episode 1:

After my friend Mitch Broddon and I decided an animated show would be a fun quarantine project, I sent him these weird character concepts I made from the LAST time I was discussing doing animation… They are admittedly pretty terrifying and I’m glad these abominations never saw the light of day (for now)…

Mitch randomly texts me this drawing and I know he’s onto something… He says he’s got ideas for the plot as well.

After many meetings discussing the story, I digitized the character and made some concept art to pitch the visual tone of the show; absurdly realistic and somewhat dark. We like it.

After completing an all-day voice recording session for all 5 episodes, we began drawing polished characters and building the environments from stock photos to match the “radio play” edit to the style of the concept art.

HOWIE! has so many hilarious characters (mostly designed by Eric Gershilevich) that I would love to throw in here, but I think I’ll keep most of them a surprise until the pilot comes out. However just for the eight loyal readers I suppose I could be nice enough to debut your favorite Good Pickles manager and employee: Curtis and Moe.

Please stay tuned as we finalize the edit of the pilot, we want to release this ASAP. To be less vague, expect the pilot to drop in the next 3 weeks. The best part is that we have all 5 episodes fully voice-recorded, so animation on the rest of the season can commence quickly with the assets created for the pilot. We hope you like it and want to see where the wonderful world of Howie! takes you in episodes 2-5 when they release. You won’t wanna miss it, he’s a real Christ figure.

THE SPIRIT AXE VIDEO

I have a habit of starting projects, editing them to 95% completion, and then letting years pass before realizing I could have released it if I put in the final 5% of effort to finish it. In this case, (along with my SNOWMAN video, and the JAIME BEFELER IMPOSSIBLE RUN documentary) I actually came back to cap off an interesting short film we started shooting in the Summer of 2019.

The interesting thing about this video is that it sort of spawned out of a writing/filmmaking challenge: create something fun that utilizes this new 24-105mm wide/zoom lens I got, and work this awesome axe prop I got from my great uncle into the story somehow.

This short film is another experiment, with an improvised story revolving around a prop, aiming to showcase a new camera lens. I worked with my partner-in-crime Jacob Giancola and his brother Chase, a talented acting duo I’ve collabed with quite often as they’ve been my next door neighbors for 20 years…

My favorite thing about this film is definitely the cool shots we captured in the woods around our houses. We had a lot of fun, and overall I’m impressed with the commitment from both actors on this project- you’ll see what I mean soon. I can’t wait to bring you into the spirit world when the time is right.

GOOD INTENTIONS

Okay, completely disregard that image up above, it has nothing to do with GOOD INTENTIONS and is in fact a result of the three nights during the quarantine that I tried to teach myself the 3D program “Blender”. What the project actually is is a quarantine writing challenge that also serves as a way to build up some sample material: Write a 10-episode season of an original TV show. Every time I talk to or hear from a professional writer, their advice is always just “write, write, write, and then write some more”, so we wanted to take on something like this to see what our current strengths and weaknesses were throughout the process.

During lockdown one of the only forms of adventure we really had was going on socially distanced walks around the neighborhood, and during those we had a lot of time to flesh out details on this new project based on experiences pulled from our lives. The conceptual logline for season one of the show is something like this:

“Inspired by the viral internet sensations of their childhood, a group of friends called The Council stretch an ambitious dream of becoming famous content creators up until they must face the reality of splitting up for college.“

The title page of an early draft of the Pilot

We have developed some great characters, complex storylines, and hilariously ambitious episode scenarios in these 10 episodes, but this is all I’m going to share for now. We entered the pilot into ScreenCraft’s TV Pilot Competition, and hope to hear if we advanced through the first round in October. I’ve also connected with an executive producer through an internship I had, and he graciously said he would check out an unofficial pitch when we felt we were ready. The ideal goal is to get this project actually made one way or another, or at least to use it to get us hired for other writing jobs.

GOOD INTENTIONS may stay in the dark for a long time, but I’m extremely proud of the 10-episode season we were able to plot out and get onto the page. If it doesn’t go anywhere, we’ll either try to create it ourselves, or I’ll just throw the scripts up here for fun. Of course, we already have ideas for Season 2 so I hope this is just the beginning.

I believe that’s all for now with this update post, thanks for reading if you got this far. I hope this may get you hyped for these future WLDWLF releases, please let me know if you have any questions in the comments! As always, I have a list of post ideas that I’m looking forward to adding to the blog over time, so keep checking back every now and then :)