As we are deep in the throes of pre-production for RINGER$ Season1, I am struck by the fact that we are even doing this to begin with…let alone again.
The first go around was new and exciting. Everyone wanted to help and spread the Good News. All of the details came together quite easily, in fact. As though the universe aligned simply to make The Pontius Pilot happen. And it did and has been quite successful.
So successful that people have been clamouring, well maybe only asking, for more episodes. They want more content! So Cornelius and I looked at each other and said, “okay”, and RINGER$ Season 1 was born.
But this time we know what to expect, well sort of, and now have 4 times the amount of footage to shoot on less than our original budget to shoot the single pilot episode.
Things can become overwhelming quickly. Like, really overwhelming. And that is when we break it down, task by task, in order to get the episodes shot. Once there is a list of everything that must be done, we figure out which task must be done before everything else can be chosen, cast or scheduled. Then we do it. No matter how hard or daunting it may seem.
Once the ball is rolling, things start to fall in place. And I am preaching to the choir here but be flexible. If one location or cast member or any of the other hundreds of things do not work out as planned, there was a reason. And perhaps option B will be better than originally thought.
For example, we had a scene written in Episode 2 starring one of our actresses who turns out could not attend our shoot on the date scheduled. At first, we were thrown into a panic, “OMG, when will we shoot this scene with this location and cast again?!”. Then we took a look at the script again and realized that what we had planned for the scene was completely wrong. We looked again at the story we were telling and realized that another character should be having this moment. So we replanned and rewrote the scene and could not be happier with where the story is now going!
Or, as we learned by letting our cast play on set, take your show in a different, perhaps more interesting direction!
Sure, we all have the survival jobs, relationships, and life that happens while trying to create, write, scout locations, schedule actors (not to mention that we have a cast of about 25 people). One step at a time is the only way we know how to get the job done.
"candid" photo of Rebecca Barko & Cornelius Bethea having a production meeting