I wrote the first part of this a long time ago, and I have been trying to get back to it ever since. Events have conspired to keep me busy – turns out a show won’t shoot/post and promote itself, but as tonight is the first punch up session for bump 2 (our second of third set f 60 episodes) I thought it was a good time to carve some time aside and jot down some memories. And no, I haven’t had time to dig up pictures!

In the last post, I talked about the people. Now let’s talk about the set up.

We mostly met in my “office” which is in the basement of a church nearby where I live. I bought tables and chairs from a retirement home, and Joel and I spent many hours scrubbing the cream corn off them. Once they were set up in my room, there was barely enough room to squeeze around the edge of the room to grab a snack or a coffee.

We bought ourselves a roll of craft paper and tacked it to the wall. We marked off four character streams – Evil Trojan Borscht, written by me, Fantabulous Gal, written by Melanie Hunter, The Plumber, written by the team of Scott Watkins and Adam Swimmer, and Major Faultline & Leopard Woman, written by Conor O’Hegarty and Chelsea Larkin. Then we made a grid by dividing the character streams into 15 parts. This was our Bump 1.

Then we just started tossing around ideas of what happens to each character. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had a general idea where each character was starting from, since they all picked up from the aftermath of Captain Euchre. The only one that did not start from a Captain Euchre plot point was Fantabulous Gal. It was Mel’s suggestion that Fantabulous Gal be DynaGal’s sidekick/personal assistant. I immediately said no. But then I started to think about it… and realized it added quite a bit to an otherwise murky character (at the time).

Each time we had an idea for an episode that made us laugh and moved the story forward, we wrote it on an index card and slotted it on the grid. We didn’t start at the beginning and come up with the story in order. We started with what we already knew we wanted to have happen and then filled in the blanks. It’s a technique that I use all the time – it really helps to find your story quickly, instead of getting stuck because you don’t know point two, or whatever.

In the first session, we had all 15 episodes for all 4 character streams up on the board. And so we all went away to write. The scripts came to Neil, who polished them and reworked them as needed, and then they came to me, where I did the same. Two weeks later, we all met again to go over the scripts and tried to figure out if they made any sense. We talked them through, and then we all went away to rewrite. Again, the scripts went to Neil, who rewrote them, and then to me.

Including the punch up room sessions, each script went through at least 7 revisions! That’s a lot of writing for something that was going to be semi-improvised anyway, but we want to do our best to give ourselves a solid foundation of story, character and humour… that they can then dive off of on the day of the shoot.

We did that same process – meet to discuss, write, rewrite, meet to discuss, write, rewrite twice more until we had scripts for all three bumps – 180 episodes! I’m trying to remember now how long it took – something like 5 or 6 months. And while we weren’t working on it everyday 9 to 5, each of us put in a lot of free time. And Joel, our script coordinator, put in many hours of additional work; formatting, organizing, writing synopses and keywords… Thanks Joel!

And now, about 2 years later, we’re finally going to camera. We’re already posted 15 episodes online! It’s weird, because I’ve known them for so long as theoretical things typed into a computer, it is a little hard t adjust and realize – no, that one’s actually done and out there for the audience!

Oh, the punch up room is about to start! I gotta get going. Tonight we’re going to be working on scripts for Fantabulous Gal’s episodes #16-31! We’ll be shooting them in December, and they’ll start airing in February.

Thanks for reading this post! I hope that someday I’ll have a chance to add a part three and give you a little more detail about our Punch Up Rooms!