Earthbound Episode 6 shooting began on July 26, 2010.
Wait, what?
You heard us right, Episode 6 has been partially shot since late summer 2010.
The obvious next question would be “Why?” Well, let us explain ourselves as much as possible – doing this was a pretty crazy move for us, and the reasons seem pretty ludricous in hindsight, but I promise the end result is nothing but good.
Around July of 2010, Earthbound Episode 5: Cake principal photography was wrapping up, and we had already started working on writing the script for Episode 6. As Cake moved closer and closer to being in full-on post-production, I began to fear that I would be able to complete all the visual effect shots for Cake at some point later that fall; at such a point in time, I would be at college and unable to shoot anything else for Earthbound, and I’d have to just sit on my hands until next summer to begin working on the next episode, Episode 6.
Of course, we all know that this prediction for when I’d finish visual effects work for Cake was a gross underestimation – we just completed Cake around mid-May of this year. However, we didn’t know that then. And so, on the last week of July 2010, with a first-draft copy of the Earthbound Episode 6 script in hand (Yes, a first draft script! But, it was a draft we all thought was serviceable for what we were about to do), we decided to go out and film key scenes for Earthbound Episode 6 before Cake was even close to being released, the ultimate goal being that we’d be able to keep working on the Earthbound series, even after we had supposedly finished Cake in the midst of the schoolyear. So, for that last week of July, we filmed at breakneck pace, trying to get every scene done that we could, after which we immediately shoved the footage onto an external hard drive without taking one look at anything we shot.
I told you it was a pretty crazy move.
The ultimate irony of all this is that by the time we finished Cake, it was already summer of 2011 and we were all back together again, meaning that our attempt at being efficient and shooting a chunk of Episode 6 in advance was basically for no reason – we might as well have just waited it out for a year. The upshot, however, is that Episode 6 is closer to completion than it would have been if we had just done nothing.
Your next question might be “Wait, you guys filmed part of Episode 6 with just a first draft script? Aren’t those parts of the episode going to blow chunks?” The short answer is “no;” but if you already dislike our episodes, then the longer answer is “not any more than the rest of the episode will.” Even though it was just a first draft script, we had all given the story arc for Episode 6 a lot of thought before we even started writing, and like I said earlier, we were all pretty happy with the state of the script when we finished the first draft.
There haven’t been any major changes to the story since then, but we have significantly polished up at least two of the scenes that we shot last summer. We’ll be re-shooting those soon. As for everything else we shot last summer, I’ve been reviewing the footage recently, and I can safely say that the quality of the episode has not suffered for our bad foresight. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised with how well the footage turned out, despite how insanely fast we shot everything.
So, to get to the bottom line – we are officially announcing that Earthbound Episode 6 is “in production,” even though it technically has been in production since last July. In addition, the wait for Episode 6 is likely to be shorter, since Episode 6 is a shorter episode than Cake was, and we’ve already shot a significant portion of it. As for the rest of the episode, we’ll be picking up the pieces and filming more for this episode in the coming weeks.
Stay tuned…