
I'm going to use this blog to scribble notes about the status of this show.
Red Sands Investigations is a 5 part mini-series that I'm currently writing and will hopefully start producing in the next couple of months, under the production company title of The Picture Postcard Audio Playhouse.
Actually, by my original timetable, I'm meant to have started producing it ... ooooh... about 2 weeks ago, but it's taking a little longer to write than I'd hoped...
It's a post- noir detective series set in an English seaside town. The blurb goes like this...
Carla, the sole benefactor of her detective uncle?s will, travels to the town to sort through his affairs? and soon becomes entangled in new cases.
All is not as it seems. Did her Uncle jump from Red Sands pier or was he pushed? Who in the town knows the truth? Only his pile of dictaphone tapes and his infatuated assistant, Tiff, can help solve the mystery? and maybe avenge his death.
I've written episode 1 & most of episode 2. It is a lot of fun and I'm happy with most of the characters, but there are just a couple who are not so easy to get right.
I originally planned on writing an episode every 2 weeks, but episode 2 has taken double that already.
An old friend, a musician, is coming over this weekend & we're going to work on music for the show while she's here. She plays violin and piano and we have a few other instruments around. It's going to be fairly sparse, obviously, as it's different from using fully orchestrated creative commons music, but that suits the production. She's played a couple of tunes down the phone & I'm really excited to hear them properly as they sounded fantastic.
She's going to do the theme tune and a lot of underscoring music - she asked for a list, so she has one along the lines of:
melancholic, lost love theme
fortune teller's mystical theme
gypsy curse
nothingish curious
nothingish tense and building
nothingish action, fight.
The nothingish thing is kind of important. She writes very lovely melodies, but I've found from directing Wonder Woman, that in fact it's music that's bland that works best under dialogue. Anything too melodic and it's distracting. I will use some creative commons stuff for source music - in the casino, hotel & amusement arcade, etc.
In episode 2 there's also a music hall number, which I had great fun in making as filthy as possible whilst being absolutely clean & innocent: it's a song about drinking, which sounds like it's much, much dirtier. I love music hall songs of that style, so it was great to write an homage. I'll just have to find a bloke with a really filthy vocal delivery to sing it (I'm imagining kind of Sid James/Stanley Holloway style), and it should come off.
Otherwise I have done a couple of pictures for the show (one of which is above). I'm fairly happy with them - they're about to the best of my abilities using coloured pencils and MS Paint. It doesn't matter to me that it's not great - it's more to give an idea of the tone of it.
Other than that I have a Wordpress site to release it on when the time comes. And that's it so far. So yeah... a bit of a way to go still... but it'll come together.