Finding an editor that shared our vision and whose imagination helped bring our concept to life felt like unlocking an achievement. We had found our ally – the Aku Aku to our Crash Bandicoot – but we had also unlocked a whole new world, with a whole new set of challenges.
We gave our editor eight months of our life on our hard drive, handing it over with the care one takes when holding a newborn baby. Before we could exhale a sigh of relief, she smiled and said, “Alright, I’ll start editing as soon as you send over the scripts.” Phil and I played it cool – smiled and nodded in return, and walked back to the car perplexed.
New level, indeed.
Back at our laptops we swallowed our pride and sheepishly Googled “How to write a script for a TV series”. Scrolling through the results we soon accepted that as with most new undertakings, there is no right or wrong way to start – there is only starting.
And so it began, Phil and I gathered for the tools necessary and began to shape a script out of our experiences. We broke our sail down into episodes, looking through hours and hours of footage to pick out the story we wanted to tell. To tie the filmed segments together we wrote a narrative, weaving our feelings and impressions of past moments with the images we had collected.
Next came recording these narratives into voice-overs. The first recordings irritated us when we played them back, our tone was either overwrought or too dreary and we struggled time and again with audio quality. With no budget for a studio, our editor suggested the next best thing and we recorded our sound clips from a parked car or from inside our boat. With the air-conditioning and fans off to avoid background noise, we read out our lines over and over into a microphone, sweating in the oppressive tropical heat.
The fear of the unknown can seem paralysing but in taking the first plunge this fear can also be overcome. Anything is possible, as long as you are not afraid to try. Dreamcatchers was born from this belief, and we were determined to stick to it.
Arduously, our first script came to life… 33 three-column pages, a skeleton to which our editor could add life. We even managed to record some voice-overs we could live with… and just when we begun to feel we were getting the hang of things our quest morphed and we got news from the real world – Player One was going to need a series of surgeries. Phil had been experiencing some health problems during the latter part of our sail and the time had come to resolve them.
Scriptwriting and Surgery, anyone?