Aspiring: The Pilot Episode(s)

The introduction to Aspiring: The Series is complete!

Now, I'll let you in on a little secret. The first three episodes? Well, they used to just be episode 1. So, what you've seen so far is the pilot, divided by three. Why?

Well, when I was initially editing the pilot, I had a 9 minute episode that got all the points across, but dragged. Especially in the middle. I needed to introduce Jack and Ray. I wanted to reveal that Jack was recently laid-off, on unemployment, and thinking about leaving LA. And then I had to show Jack's new goal in life, and his typical approach to getting things done. So I threw it all in to get it out of the way. And the result was too much.

I kept tweaking and tweaking, hurting some performances as a result. Trying to get it down to a length that web viewers would allow. And then the unthinkable happened...

I was losing one of my leads to Hawaii for a few months, and as a result, filming was stalled for the foreseeable future. This ended up being a good thing, however. I took the opportunity to walk away from Aspiring for some time, focus on other projects, and try to make back some of the money I had spent filming this. As a result, I eventually came back to Aspiring with my passion renewed. And with the realization that I wrote each act of episode 1 in a way that they could work individually. Maybe not as well as if I had done it on purpose, but enough to save what I had. So I began to re-edit.

And there you have it. The pilot became episodes 1-3. First-timer screw-ups on my part feel a little more spread out than they otherwise would have, but I can deal with that. It's done, I got through it, and now I can move on. Bring on episode 4!

In case you missed them, here they are. Enjoy.

- Chris

WE'VE LAUNCHED!!!

It's been a long road, with roadblocks seemingly set up about every 100 feet. But we did it. We got an episode out. And let me say what I know you're all thinking.

It's about damn time!

First, I want to get one thing out of the way. The sound. It sucks. I know. It's one of those roadblocks that I was talking about. And it was a big one. Essentially, some of the dialog was recorded incredibly low, and by boosting it in post, a fair amount of static crept in. Cleaning up said static led to other problems. Which then led to more problems. And so on. Bad news is, I filmed the first three episodes together, so it may continue for a bit. Good news is, the scenes in the first episode were probably the worst of it. Even better news is, I know where the problems came from, so everything should be fine after episode 3.

Something else you might be noticing is the grainy, cheap, black and white look. That was a big creative decision and it'll get a blog post all it's own in the near future.

Episodes 2 and 3 are in the can, so expect them soon.

So sit back, relax, hopefully enjoy.

And thanks for the patience.