A Hearty Hello from the Hampshire!

Gosh, 3 weeks just sort of flies by doesn't it?

Well LAN'ders, let me just start by saying that this week is a HUGE week for everyone. There's a new Pixar movie, E3 is happening, and the Imaginary Trends team is getting together for read-thrus once more. After all, we're all up here in the beautiful roads of New Hampshire now, so we've got plenty of time to work! Personally, it's a bit of a departure in writing up here. Whereas I was surrounded by media outlets of all sorts in Pittsburgh, up here I have to drive at least 15 minutes to get anywhere. Just puts everything in a different mindset.

Truth be told, many different iterations of the episodes we used in the reading have been written and re-written and time and time again it keeps coming back to the basics: How can we get our point across, and how can be innovate it? The ideas, we think, are innovative enough with our concepts, but how do we have these themes and ideas identifiable? Rather than mining pop culture through and through using any and everything to get a laugh (Like Family Guy), we're relying mainly on things that make you think of childhood, like comics, Muppets, video games, and cartoons. It's expanded from just a dorky coming-of-age tale and has evolved into a celebration of childhood in a way.

Part of the difficulty in writing the content is merging those aspects with the adult themes of the characters. Christian is an adult, living as a scared child. Izzy and Natalie are manifestations of the sandbox best friends he's never met or had before. How do you relate the child and the adult? Well, luckily for us, we never really grew up. That's not to say we're men who behave like boys, but we're mature kids at heart. We still have our action figures, we still love our Looney Tunes, and we still would jump at the chance to play some good old fashioned Mario Kart. Merge that with a big desire to create and you've got something great and new on your hands. Hopefully when LAN'ded becomes fully realized later on in its development cycle, you'll be able to see that as well.

I'm editing the scripts one last time, fixing typos and such before we start doing read-thrus again tomorrow. Can you believe I mixed up Robin Hood and Peter Pan? Yikes...people have been killed for less.

One last thing - Go see UP! You'll love it.