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Here’s a bit more on the writing process from Rough Magic Theatre’s Tim Austin:

The trouble with starting again is that you get very attached to scenes and dialogue that you’ve already put together. Something said by your main character gets a giggle or sounds profound,… is there a way to keep it?

Simply put: No. You can’t be precious or sentimental when writing fiction. You’ve got to be brutal and ruthless or you’ll end up going in circles.

I wrote three chapters of a disaster story many years ago and I could not, for the life of me, figure out why chapter four wasn’t working and why I couldn’t get beyond it. Eventually I realised that I’d made some psychological errors back in Chapter 2 that meant the main character’s headspace was wrong by the time it came to concluding that act. Two chapters had to go. And they did.

Because the beauty of starting again is that sometimes the new stuff that you write is better than you wrote before. You’re working with new ideas and new challenges and that takes you in different and interesting directions.

Sometimes you can recycle a line or two, sometimes not. The trick is to not get attached.

I’ve now worked out a new plot to run through the series. It’s more intimate, more detailed and more interesting than the original. Starting from scratch allowed me to look at the format again and concentrate more on individual motivations. Maybe it’ll make the crafting and shooting process a bit more complex but it’ll also make the finished series better.

And that’s the aim.

The Secret Keeper will be as rich and fully-formed as any HBO or BBC drama. It’s a full-fat sci-fi thriller,….. just animated with shadows. A Film Noir mystery in light and dark.

The pilot version of episode One is in Pre-production, with puppets now being drawn and cut. Audio for this rough-cut (to be used to gather funding for the series) will be recorded in the next two weeks. Filming is likely to start in November.

You can see the original post on Tim’s blog by clicking HERE

If you missed “Writing the Secret Keeper – Part 1” CLICK HERE

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Having cleared enough space to get a shadow screen, a camera (actually a smart phone with a special tripod) and an O.H.P.(over-head projector for those not in the know) into our Rough Magic Theatre store cupboard we were ready to start experimenting.

We wanted to find out where to put these three things in relation to each other to get the pictures that we want.

We also were particularly keen to try out a shadow face on the flat-bed of the projector to see what size we would need to make all of the characters faces for what we are calling our “hero-face” puppets. These will be for creating close-up facial expression shots of our main characters and will hopefully have moving eyes, eyebrows and mouth to create a wide variety of expressions. This will hopefully save time on puppet making as we will not need to create a new puppet for each facial expression. We will have “hero-face” puppets for all of the main characters both “face on” and in profile.

Here is a picture of my earliest experiment creating a generic moving facial expression puppet (e.g. this was just a face and not intended to represent a particular character)

I made a start on making one based on my drawings for the bodyguard daughter of the main character and it is this partially complete puppet that we did several experiments with (checking the size and a few other things). You can see videos of this in the subscriber only content for this week (or perhaps I should say last week as we are a little late this time).

Unfortunately we have been having lots of trouble with our washing machine which has broken for the 3rd time since lock down so I have been having to take time out to go to the launderette. I have also been turning up trousers for my son who has started at the nursery attached to our local primary school this week where they wear the same uniform as the older primary school pupils and the smallest size is still a bit large on Anthony (bless him).

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