From Kickstarter to today…

Posted March 12, 2012

I thought it was worth posting this if for nothing else than my own nostalgia. It sure has been a long road since we came begging you wonderful people for the money to make such a series.

This was shot during the middle of our final draft rewrite, and you can see on our faces that Freddie had just interrupted a stressful writers meeting to film this. That room is indeed where Will, Brian and I spent months writing VGHS. At the time of the Kickstarter, we were going at least five days a week to get the script where we wanted it because we were going to start shooting in a little over a month.

Things in the video that have changed:

  • Clearly we are releasing it on the later end of “beginning of next year.” We finished principal photography just before Thanksgiving.
  • The show doesn’t explicitly take place in the “near future” (we were even thinking of a little Megaman reference “In the year 20XX”…) but instead, in just some weird alternate reality where every 14 year-old boy’s dreams come true.
  • If we had a dumpster of “dead babies” at the time of the video, we had an island of garbage full of them by the time we shot. Soon after this was shot, we removed an entire character!

But overall, the show has come along like we had hoped – scratch that, better than we had dared hope. We wrote a screenplay just filled with every “no-no” for low budget filmmaking possible – heavy action scenes with tons of actors, a futuristic-looking school environment, and much more. However, with tons of help from all of you (and plenty of luck), we were able to do pretty much everything we wanted.

We’ll be going over the evolution of the script and the entire writing process here and in some upcoming behind the scenes videos, so look forward to that.

Thanks again, and hope you all enjoy the show when it premieres.