The final draft of the “Channels” script is complete, and although it will be a while before you can see it performed, I wanted to share a little peek behind the curtain. I thought it would be fun to compare the final draft to the first draft to see how much has changed. (Remember, first drafts suck, and that’s okay!)
The most obvious thing is that the final draft is much, much shorter. Remember, each of those little phrases represents a snippet of television audio. I originally recorded almost 15 hours of channel surfing audio back in 2015 and 2016. Then I listened through it all and extracted any piece that seemed useful; this amounted to about 82 minutes of material (less than 10% of what I recorded).
By 2018, I had assembled the funniest clips into a first draft, which you can see on the left in the above image. The first draft was 7 minutes 46 seconds long, less than 10% again of what I extracted from the recordings. This then went through multiple drafts as I performed it for several small groups of people and listened to their feedback (and their laughter) to figure out what I should change. I certainly couldn’t have figured out on my own which parts to keep.
And this brings me to my final draft, completed in November 2021, which you can see on the right of the above image. It’s a mere 2 minutes 32 seconds long — about one-third the length of the first draft, and amounting to less than a third of a percent of what I originally recorded!
Looking at them side by side, it’s interesting that most of the clips stayed in the same order, though of course a great deal of material was removed from between them. There are also two clips in the final draft which were not present in the initial one: “soccer”, which replaced “tennis”; and “tentacle”, which was suggested by my friends Charles and Pixie. You can see both of them in this video of excerpts:
I’m really pleased with the final product, and even more pleased that I got it done before the birth of my daughter Juniper, which happened about a week later!
Covid permitting, I hope to debut this skit at the Puppets Up Festival, which is coming back this August.
To close this post with one more sneak preview, here’s a little video showing a special lighting effect that my dad helped me rig up:
The flickering blue light in the prop TV is created by a bicycle light, and now I can turn it on and off at a distance, making it look like Mumford’s remote control really works.
Happy New Year!
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