Today I’m working on the script and “scene listing” for a Grimm episode based on “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”. So I thought I’d post a bit of artwork related to that episode. Here you see the light/dark version of a blacksmith worker from the opening scene of the episode. These guys get theirs when the happy metalworks they’re laboring in turns into something straight out of Mordor.
Internally, we refer to this episode as “BoyFear”. Other lengthy tale names also get shortened, “Cinder”, “NoHands”, “FishWife”, and “DevilHairs” being some fine examples.
For each episode we tackle there’s a tremendous amount of documentation generated. Adapted narrative drives episode design documents, VO scripts, cinematic scene scripts, asset lists (NPCs, objects, terrain textures, sky boxes, particles, sound effects, etc), task lists, programming requests, AI updates, schedules, MS Project files, and so forth. We treat each new episode as a virtual stand-alone project, and separate creative, production, and tracking information as such.
Episodic production certainly has its interesting differences from traditional single-box-product development. One of these days, when I find time, I’ll get into some more detail on the differences.