"How's It End?"

We started filming Season Three of Something to Be Desired in May of 2005. Here we are in April of 2006, nearly a full year later, and I've just now realized how it ends. That's funny, because I wrote it.

Here's how Season Three came together: we started brainstorming ideas in early 2005, and those ideas coalesced into the first scripted episode around April. Then I built outward from there, figuring out how to lead into the various subplots I'd planned. This grew into a massive database of scenes that only loosely held together, with various notes (such as what needed to happen before one certain or event, or after another) and continuity tips (who needed to be wearing what for day-to-day overlaps, etc.).

In theory, this should have been a perfectly useable plan, and it was, except for two wrinkles.

1. Ann Turiano, who plays Caroline, was scheduled to leave for grad school in London by mid-September 2005. That meant I had to film everything she was involved in before then, with little room for error in case I realized I wanted to reshoot something or add an extra scene not in the original outline.

2. I planned on updating STBD on a daily basis this past season, with a new 5 minute episode every weekday. Thus, most scenes were filmed under the impression that they'd be standing alone or mixed alongside one other scene, which meant we allowed many of the sequences to run longer than they would have otherwise, in order to justify their standalone length.

Once I realized I couldn't update 5 times a week without working myself into an early grave (how does Rocketboom do it, anyway?), I backtracked to one episode every Monday. This meant we filmed FAR more than we'd actually use in the new, shorter season. The new challenge became selecting the scenes I would need to tell the heart of the story, without all the peripherals.

In that sense, we've been mildly successful. There are a few scenes that "made the cut" which wouldn't have otherwise if I'd had a clearer plan, and several that should have been included but were left by the wayside due to other chronological choices I've made -- most notably being a lengthy Dean & Jessie sequence in which they finally find their working rhythm, which is hysterical in its raw form but which was bumped when I needed to achieve a certain milestone before our Christmas uploading break.

However, the Dean and Caroline relationship that became the spine of the season provided my biggest logistical challenge. I'd filmed at least two sequences that could have stood as the season-ending scene, since Ann left for London before I'd put all the pieces together. Now that I'm sitting here staring at our last two episodes of the season, I finally understand how best to sum it all up, but I know it would be ending differently if I'd had even one more scene filmed with the two of them.

The lesson learned? Well, you could be practical and say "Plan small, plan early and stay ahead of schedule," or you could be a realist and say "Adapt!"

So, how's it end? Stay tuned: you have two weeks to find out.