#cracked slate

I’m learning a lot from working on this web series: artistic collaboration, how to tell a visual story rather than a prose one, the importance of listening to others, patience, marketing and funding necessities, and a slew of other things. 

The ONE thing I’m the most grateful for the lesson of the bad idea... 

katherineclynn and I are constantly pitching ideas to one another and to our teammates. I’ve pitched some epically terrible ideas. Like cliche, cheesy, unnecessarily complicated, boring ideas. We all have. 

That’s the creative process for any project - collaborative or singular. You’ve got to be willing to put your bad ideas out there. On collaborative work you have to share them with others and know that your bad idea might yield a better one. Or it might go no where. 

On singular projects sharing your bad ideas might be putting them on paper or talking them out with a friend. The trick is to get them out of your head so you can take a step back and look at it. It might not be as bad as you think, and it might not be as brilliant as you thought it was yesterday. 

Velociraptors are important…

Long distance collaboration is a challenge. The members of Cracked Slate live all over the United States and Canada, and because of this we’ve chosen to use many online collaboration tools. Asana, WriterDuet, RealtimeBoard, Google Drive, and Google Hangouts--they’ve become vital to our development. In many ways they are as much our friends as the people we have met doing this because they have allowed us to connect in the first place. 

At this writing very few of our team have met in person. Even Katie, Katie, Hannah, and I have never been in the same room together. We’ve talked and laughed ad nauseam, but never in the same physical space. Yet that has never affected our ability to connect and create together. We share a common love and goal, and these tools are merely a means of collaborating to make it happen.

Make no mistake, though—when we do meet in person, that moment will be epic and there will be no need for Google Hangout. 

In the meantime, we collaborate through space, time, and the interwebs. Like all creative projects, we have all sorts of code words that mean very little to anyone else and random ideas that will never see the light of day—to include strange middle-of-the-night discussions regarding penguins dressed as velociraptors. (Yes, really.) And as crazy as that sounds, these moments are important. They allow us to connect with each other and to our story in odd and magical ways. The distance simply does not matter. These moments of genesis do.

So if, in the middle of the night, you receive a mysterious email from one of us saying that we simply must have a hand-knit penguin dressed as a velociraptor that looks something like this, there is no cause for alarm. We have not lost our minds. It simply means that we are busy—very busy—collaborating together across the internet to create a story that we love and hope you will love too.

I met Anne in the summer. I was thirteen and at camp. My mom had tucked the book into my suitcase because she thought Anne would be a good companion for my foray into the woods. She was right. To my younger self, Anne was permission—permission to use long, unwinding sentences, to marvel at nature instead of a Cosmo cover, and to love stories with a fierce ambition. Now, as an adult, Anne continues to give me permission. She reminds me that the world has kindred people in it and that I still need imagination more than ever. 

When I was eleven, my grandmother handed me a copy of Anne of Green Gables and said, "This is where our folks are from." I was gravely disappointed to learn later that our folks were from Cape Breton, not PEI. (Then I went to Cape Breton and all was forgiven.)

I grew up in suburban NYC; I was Matthew Cuthbert levels of shy, but inside I felt as passionate and imaginative as Anne. I bought the rest of the series with my allowance, one book per week. I was so excited about Windy Poplars that I chattered at the lady at the register in the bookstore instead of awkwardly handing her money and tiptoeing away. My feelings were much too big to be contained. Anne helped me find my voice.  

It’s amazing to me to think that it’s already been a year since we embarked on this crazy, wonderful, delightfully creative (and sometimes insane) journey. It feels like just yesterday that I published my initial tumblr post inquiring if people were interested in brainstorming or helping, and I still remember how floored I was by the response. Now, twelve months later we have a team of over twenty incredibly talented and enthusiastic people working on an amazing story we can’t wait to share with you all.

There’s still a long way to go, and juggling a project of this size with full time jobs and families and life is certainly not always easy; but we are so much closer to making it a reality, and it helps to knowing that so many of you out there are already supporting us with your interest in and excitement for this project.

So thank you all so very much for joining us on this roller coaster of a ride. Hang on tight because there’s much, much more to come!

Cracked Slate turned 1 this weekend!

It’s official. One year ago we made the crazy decision to create our own web series adapting the story of Anne Shirley.

October 28, 2014

Last January we, Katie & Katie, started developing the story for Project AoGG. We’ve had countless Google Hangouts (including an unplanned six hour chat about Gilbert), re-read the books together, and did a ton of research. We grew up with Anne and ended up sharing a lot of our own personal histories to help us find a new, modern story for Anne. We’re dedicated to honoring L.M. Montgomery’s novels, but also to figuring out who Anne would be in 2014. Our starting point was Anne’s imagination; it’s epic and deserves all the scope we can give it.

We have three seasons of Project AoGG planned and our writing team has spent the summer and fall writing scripts for Season One. They’re passionate and dedicated. Also, hilarious. We have learned a lot, including what it’s like to go from being fans to being creators. We know the story we want to tell is complex, and we want to get it right. Yulin Kuang had a great post recently about script revision:

Making movies is a weird process of just repeatedly beating up the thing you love…

We adore Anne, so we’re taking the time we need to do her justice. Currently, we are editing Season One scripts and refining our Season Two treatment. Our transmedia story is ambitious because there's an original story-within-the-story, which we've decided to tell in full. That has meant a lot of extra work for our writing and transmedia teams, but Anne deserves a world as vibrant as she is.

October 14, 2014

It’s been over ten months now since we first embarked on this journey and a lot has happened since that time. Behind the scenes, everyone on our team has been busy working towards our final goal of bringing you a web series featuring our favorite red-head. This is a huge project, and although we’re working on finalizing a start date, we’d like to take a moment now to let you know what we’ve spent the fall doing.

Two or three evenings a week, at least one of our writing, design, marketing, transmedia, and administrative teams of talented and amazing volunteers meet in Google Hangouts to dream, scheme, and plan our series.

We’re pursuing multiple funding options so we can bring you the whole story we want to tell from start to finish.

This is a transformative work, and our writers are dedicated to telling a great story. Story arcs and scripts are being written and revised so that we’re ready to go once we start production.

We’ve begun to build a production team with professionals who will help make this a great series.

We still have lots of things to do before we have a show but we’re much closer than we were ten months ago. Your support and enthusiasm for the project have been invaluable to us, and we look forward to being able to share even more with you in the coming months.

Sincerely,