Let's Talk About Oliver
In the middle of January 2017 cogs began turning on a new project, completely distant from anything I had undertaken before. A good mate of mine, Connor contacted me with a proposal for a 3 to 5 minute short film which would help a friend of his with some showreel footage. Oliver was born.
Oliver started out as a short film but it was soon evident that we would not be able to achieve what we were going for. The basic premise of Oliver was taken from a previous short film I had worked on a few months before, Streetwalker. In the original drafts Oliver was going to be a sequel/prequel but we ultimately decided against it because we wanted to add ideas to this 'universe' that weren't set up well enough in the original Streetwalker.
We began an outline of what it was that we wanted to do and where we wanted to characters to go but we realised that everything seemed really rushed and all the characters didn't have any room to breathe. For a good hour I was considering making it into a full feature! After many long Skype calls and conversations over the phone Connor and I struck gold...
"Why don't we make it into a 4-5 part web-series?!"
Suddenly everything just worked; it all fell into place really well, we are able to fully plan out each characters story and didn't have to compromise any screen time. All of a sudden I felt like the male equivalent to JK Rowling (Author of the Harry Potter book series)! We knew what would happen; all we really needed to do was plot out what happens to get from A to Z.
I thought that having an 'event' happen in each episode would work well so that each episode has something to look out for. Don't read the next few paragraphs if your want to stay completely spoiler free.
The original outline of the series would go as follows:
(Please note this isn't the final plot. Obviously you'll have to watch it too find out exactly how it everything turned out. )
Episode One: Oliver would be forced to move out due to his dwindling finances
Episode Two: Oliver is thrust into living it rough with two other teenagers who help him to find his feet in this new life.
Episode Three: One of Oliver's friends would die/go missing
Episode Four: The friends try to work out who did it, the culprit wouldn't be completely revealed.
As you can probably tell, each episode varies in severity, this was intentional so that we could have the audience the odd break from the dramatic stuff for some more character driven stuff. We wrote full scripts for episodes 1, 2 and 3 and planned to film the first two episodes back to back to limit the amount of time we would need cast and crew.
Once filming commenced we basically shot an episode a day leaving a few hours here and there for any pick ups. I cannot praise the cast and crew highly enough. The amount of effort everyone put in (for free!) was amazing. All of the footage is looking really good.
As of now (May 2017), I have seen all of the rushes for episode 2 and most of the rushes for episode 1 (not everything has been filmed). Now all that is left to do is produce a final edit which both Connor and myself are happy with and arrange some extra filming dates to get episode one complete.
Producing this series has been incredible stressful and time consuming; the fact process has been slow has been annoying but it'll come together eventually. Our actors have been great and I can only apologise so much for all the delays.
Hang in there! We're nearly there!
Keep telling stories,
