How it all began. Part 6

November 2008 and I’d got an episode done.  So I sent it round to everybody in my department.  Resounding silence.  But then one of the youngest people in the place came over and said how much she liked it, and was so uncool in her enthusiasm, I just had to carry on.  Even if she was the only one who read it. (You know who you are)

So I got down to episode two.  After Christmas I sent a message around asking if anybody wanted to get these things regularly and about a dozen or so people said “yes”.  That was all I needed.  I set myself the target of getting one episode out more-or-less each month.  It seemed to be long enough to allow me time to get the episode together, but short enough to keep the story fresh in people’s minds.

The first five episodes turned out to be 18 or 20 frames long, by luck, really. But episode 6 was about 30 frames, which just seemed too daunting. So I rewrote episodes 6 and 7 into three 20-frame episodes. I added in the bit where Faren meets the Guy from Performance Improvement again.  This was based on a real meeting I’d had with somebody I had been working with at about this time.  It was still quite “raw” for me, so I didn’t know if it’d work.  But I thought it was worth the risk.

Anyhow, this set the pattern of using a standard 20-frame format for each episode.  It’s about as much as I can reasonably do in spare moments over a month, and it’s long enough to push the story along some.