Jay’s Vlog – Writing for Season Two of Guidestones
August 9th, 2013 by Jay
(Transcript from Jay’s Vlog )
“Hey It’s Jay Ferguson down at the Guidestones studio. I just wanted to talk a little bit about what’s going on here right now. We are getting close to a final draft on the Season Two script and it’s actually been a pretty difficult process, probably more difficult than I was expecting, in many ways. What’s happening in terms of the scripts for Season Two? Really you’d have to go back to Season One and look and what happened there.
In Season One we built a story and an idea that was really about creating something specifically to go online. What we’ve learned is that while we’ve been extremely successful online with that process or with that model it’s been very hard to monetize it. Without being able to monetize the content, we can’t make it.
Interestingly enough the money and being able to finance the show is actually effecting how we’re writing the Second Season. It’s really important for anyone who is trying to write something in some kind of a pure-play, pure “out of your heart” process, which is what Season One was, to realize that it’s actually very difficult to do that in reality.
Season Two has to be a hybrid. We are still building something for the internet but we’re also building something that can be re-purposed. That’s what we’re discovering now. We have to re-purpose our content because you can’t monetize it online. We’re looking at building something that can be then transformed into a different format and then go onto TV or become a feature film. iThentic is doing that with a lot of other projects right now and we’re doing that with Guidestones as well. I think that that’s one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned.
The script itself is coming along nicely. I’m really excited about it and I’m very excited about having the opportunity to have longer episodes because we can really “dig in” and get really involved. There are multi story lines in the script as well so we’re not just following the two protagonists as we did in the first season. We have some new bad guys and there’s going to be some action and adventure. It’s all very exciting. But as I mentioned it’s a very different format.
Probably the hardest thing I’m finding, and I think Jeremy (Diamond) my co-writer would agree with me, is that we have to be thinking from four different angles. We can’t just build an arc for a seven minute episode. We have to be building an arc for a half hour episode as well and having to build an arc for the overall story.
It takes time and it’s hard. As you can tell I’m unshaven and unkempt and looking basically terrible because… it’s a grind. We started working on the writing almost a year ago now. We are coming close to the end of it and frankly all I want to do right now is get into production. I want to start shooting some of this stuff.
We appreciate your patience. We will be having updates on a much more regular basis now. Thanks for watching and I can’t wait to talk with you more.”
