Only about 15 hours to go til Kickstarter finishes up for Sweetpea! http://kck.st/r8Lrid

storyshots:

I remember back when Partly Cloudy came out on the front of Up, Pete Sohn gave a talk about what it was like to make it, and he related the film to a baby. He talked about how you’ve got this new thing with tons of potential, and you don’t know who it’s gonna grow up to be.

I’m going to expand on that a little, based on the shorts I’ve made and the one that’s in the works (that’s Sweetpea right there, in the cowboy hat). Sometimes, working on your story, it feels like everyone’s excited about your baby and so they’re throwing presents at you. You have to shield the baby from the presents that aren’t right for it - like bricks and dynamite and poison - while trying to collect the presents that will help it grow, like baby food.

Only, your baby is allergic to bananas, so you gotta watch out for that kind of baby food. Stuff that tastes bad makes baby stronger, even if it’s upset, but stuff that sends it into anaphylactic shock makes baby dead.

It gets tiring and sometimes it’s easy to think that everything people offer your storybaby will hurt it. It’s important to keep an open mind and remember that everyone is just trying to help because they’re excited about what the storybaby will grow up to be… and plus, if you guard the storybaby too fiercely, you never get the chance to see that someone else can provide for it, too.

Coparenting a storybaby is also hard, but when you have two people who understand the storybaby and want what’s best for it, disagreements come from a good place and arguments over what baby should be doing resolve into progress. That’s what you need, really, that’s why you’re feeding storybaby and shielding it from arrows: so it can grow and change into something that stands on its own, self-sufficient and confident and clear…

Because really, at the end of it all, you’ve gotta let go of storybaby and send it off to go play with the audience.

watercolor paintings by James Robertson - inspired by outlaws of the old west and fiction. Roughly 3”x5”.

You can get one at the special JRob $100 level pledge on Kickstarter: http://kck.st/r8Lrid

See more of James’ amazing stuff at http://theironscythe.blogspot.com

Last weekend we went location scouting, but right before we hit the road to Barstow we took our outlaws out to breakfast. We picked an old-west themed bar on Sunset for authenticity and stylish decor, to properly impress them and get them into the mindset of what the old west was really like.

Everyone knows it warn’t proper back in the day to ride a mechanical bull before lunch, but you also know there’s no such custom when it comes to cotton candy the size of your head. The Sundance Kid was all about cotton candy, it’s a fact. I’d like to think they were impressed by our professionalism and attention to detail.

Thanks to our casting director Julia, we were lucky enough to have a lot of great actors audition for the leads. There’s really nothing like watching the lines you put on paper being transformed into an actual character in the hands of an actor. You realize where the lines are too long, and get the surprise and delight of seeing spots of comedy they found that you weren’t even sure would work. It gets you extra pumped to jump into rewrites, to make it even better than they just gave you.

Although there were loads of great auditions, Christy and James were the actors who came out of the gate playing it with the tone of Raiders. They played some beats comedic, some beats dramatic, and some beats a little bit pulpy. I’ll be working with them in rehearsal in the next couple of weeks, and they’re already getting into riding on their own. Meet our outlaws, Rider & Tracker.