Season 1 Episode Outlines

ouzaru

Well-Known Member
So we've been asked to do this a handful of times by the big three (I'll leave it to your imaginations which one of them is Stalin....), and since I'm in this for both the thought experiment and the writing practice, and we're fast approaching the end of Season 1, it's time to start putting money where mouths are. We need to take the generalities and vague shapes of what we've been spitballing in sessions and in the session threads in Across the Series and actually hammer out scenes for each episode. I would love to have a writers room and do this in real time, but that is probably a pipe dream. I'm putting it out there that, for those who are interested in doing things that way, we can try to get together in the chatroom or put together a Skype call or something, but barring that, this is where the magic is going to happen.

It's 7 am right now and I've slept about 30 minutes (thank you, Professor Higgins for an unironically great class), so I'm not going to actually do anything besides put this up and encourage the writerly types among you to speak up and maybe offer some times you'll be available in the next two weeks if you're interested in doing a writer's table. The exercise is basically storyboarding in text. If you actually want to pitch the occasional line of dialogue, there's even room for that here and there. The goal is having every single scene for season one described so that we can see the flow of how all the big thematic ideas that have been discussed in sessions to date actually fit together to create the action of season one. I will probably set up a Google doc for this, but if someone wants to beat me to it, you're all welcome to, as I am going to pass out so that I am not a useless husk for work tomorrow.

Get in here and do magic, nerds. :D
 
Hmmm. I have a doc that I was working on before some changes were made to episode 1. I'm going to do some reworking to it and post a link.

As to a conversation, I am all in for that. Skype and Google Hangouts are fantastic for that, but as I mentioned in another post elsewhere, I'd be interested in using Blab as well for the following reasons:

Having the ability to have folks be able to chat in the same window even if they don't want to share video/audio.

Having it be something publicly accessible means better visibility.

The system can record it so that we can refer to the conversation after-the-fact.
 
I dunno squat about Blab but that is what the internet is for, let's go have a look.

Edit: Looks interesting enough to download regardless of what people want to do as far as I'm concerned, so I'm on board. Frankly, anything that lets me use my mobile devices while I struggle with getting a Taiwanese credit card so I don't have to slap a wad of 70 blue bills on the counter to buy a computer is a win for me.

Edit the Second: That looks pretty solid, I'll have a closer look when I get home. For anybody who's doing this process for the first time (like me!) there's a handful of outlines for film and television available for review and/or perusal over at http://johnaugust.com/library

My tendency would be to say more is more here, so that anyone who wants to get into the project can get a handle on where the outline is going at any time without having to also go through ALL the extraneous material in the podcasts and the forum, but of course we probably don't want to get longer than 4-6 sentence paragraphs for any individual scene or sequence. Other than that, I really haven't got any suggestions other than have fun, everybody. :D
 
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Okay, my business is all sorted out. I got my Alien Resident Card, I signed up for my Spring classes, I went through my performance review (which was way more positive than I expected), and it's increasingly looking like I'm gonna spend most of Chinese New Year alone without any computer games. I'm gonna give your "rough outline" a good, thorough perusal, Nick, and then I'm gonna make with the comments. For now, however, I'm going to sleep so I can get to work on time tomorrow and not toss all the great feedback I got from my bosses this week immediately out the window.
 
A WORD ON EDITING THE GOOGLE DOC.

This may not even be necessary, but as a teacher I prefer to have everything clearly laid out before anyone goes and makes a mistake so I can clearly point to the sign and see "see where it says don't do that?"

I think we're all striving to work in Valinorian harmony and avoid succumbing to Melkorian pride on this project. To that end, as we go through each episode in a given session, the bulk of the initial work for an episode will go on the document in the wake of a round table. You are welcome to edit after that, but we please ask that you do so by striking through any parts that you are changing and adding you edits in a different color so that it is immediately clear what has been done by whom at a glance. You are of course welcome (and encouraged) to discuss your alterations in the thread for the episode in question here in the script forum. I would like for the document to remain available for everyone to view and edit, but we will need to make final decisions and actual progress: if we can't be thoughtful and respectful of ideas, opinions, and explanations and go making edits willy-nilly, I'll encourage Nick to close the document to editing and have him take his ball home.

Which will, of course, not happen because we have all got the spirit of Manwe in our hearts and are working in tandem and harmony rather than aggrandizing our individual parts, like some other Valar we could name! :D. Have fun, everybody!
 
Ok. I have finally had a chance to go through the outline document, and put down the version that we discussed last night. I would like to get input on any changes that anyone would like to make before we set to work on a more detailed outline, which I will begin on what is currently page 4. I am going to put in anything I write initially in black, but then I will be switching to orange. I'll make a key at the bottom of the document.
 
Ok, as there haven't been any edits, I'm going to continue with the more detailed outline that is started on page 4. I wanted to give people time to respond so that I didn't have to make broader changes down the line. For now, I'm going to assume that we're good on the big picture outline.
 
I have the Google docs app now, so I'll get in there tomorrow morning and do some work. I had mostly sentences to add to flesh out what you had a little more, get things looking more like paragraphs than bullet points, I can't recall any deletions or real editing of what you had so far.

Thanks for all your great work so far, Nick!
 
Oh, and before I scamper off to dreamland:


THE DEADLINE FOR THIS EFFORT IS APRIL 18, per a brief discussion with the Hosts following today's session (1.14). We need to be DONE and handing this in by then. That means we have got, if we hold a session every Sunday evening at 7pm, approximately 10 sessions in which to completely outline the remaining 12 episodes.

With regard to how to proceed going forward, unless we are super in love with an individual scene, I think we need to talk in broad terms about the general shape of an Act and leave the individual scenes for the write up so we can maximize the efficiency of our discussion. I wouldn't be opposed to actually trying to get some writing work done during the sessions themselves either, though I don't want to get super bogged down by individual changes to the document as we're decompressing the info from the podcast and sorting it into the acts. We'll play it by ear.
 
I can't promise anything but I'd just like to say I'm interested. :)

The time for the live discussions has wound up being 7PM EST on Sundays, if you'd like to join us! And of course the Google Docs can be edited at any time.



For Episode One, one of the open questions has been what will be the 'priceless historical artifact' that Estel knocks over in the Rivendell library to start Elrond's interest in his education.

One suggestion was to have an urn/plate/bust with a depiction of Elwing (Elrond's mother) on it.

I would be willing to consider the silver harp that we see Elrond take with him at the end of LotR. There has been a suggestion in fandom that this silver harp originally belonged to Maglor (who raised Elrond after Elwing took off). The advantage of this would be that while the harp would be damaged, it could be fixed.
 
I apologize for being so behind on the boards lately. I've been swamped at work where I usually do most of my stuff, then add getting the videos up and getting the house ready for my wife's return in a couple of days has had my attention pretty divided up.
 
The script outlines are in need of some editing to clean them up prior to submitting them to the Exec Team(Corey, Trish and Dave). Any volunteers?

I've collected all the existing outlines into a Word document, but I can't attach that here, so I've posted the pdf for you to peruse. It's currently 25 pages (with gaps between episodes), but very uneven in style/format, and still contains some question marks where decisions should be made.
 
I might be able to take a crack at it this weekend. It'll give me something to do, and I can pretend to have done something truly important.
If I understand aright all that I have heard, I think that this task is appointed for you, Alex.
 
Great, Alex! Thanks so much :) I won't have the time this weekend, and I think that a different pair of eyes looking them over would be highly beneficial. I'm not going to see the gaps at this point, I don't think.

It's your choice what format to use, just try to make it consistent (currently, this is *not* the case).
 
Haakon brought up the importance of tracking which actors are needed in each episode, so I've added a line at the beginning for 'cast' - this is all preliminary, of course, and if people want to add dialogue for characters who are not named in the Outlines, that's acceptable.

Also, my other document accidentally had an early version of the outline for 2 episodes, so I've updated it to at least be the correct version now.
 

Attachments

  • SilmFilm Project Season 1 Script Outlines.pdf
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So, at the moment, I've exerted my power as Organizer of the Outlines to make an editorial decision. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this but...

In the first episode, when Iluvatar "commissions" the first theme, our outline has Nienna starting first with a song of lament. However, in the published Silmarillion, Nienna's song of lament (filled with "immeasurable sorrow") is only prominent in the third theme; The sorrow is a reaction to Melkor's rebellious discord, right? I'm changing this in the outline as it won't change the scenes too drastically.

Please, if there was a reason for this change in canon for our adaptation then let me know, and I will change it back to the way it was outlined. My goal is not to make this thing about my own thoughts, but I still want to fix any simple mistakes that may have been overlooked.
 
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