NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD.
I'm the co-writer of Battle Hero Absolute, Fernando Ramos. A huge thanks to everyone reading for their support of this crazy project. Hopefully everyone has been enjoying the characters and stories as much as the slick fight scenes the Jabronie Crew manages to crank out on such a regular basis.
The pacing of the series is a very very good question and it's kinda funny how so much of is kinda determined by arbitrary factors. It was originally supposed to a one-shot or trilogy back when it was first conceived back in my college days, before youtube really hit it off and Jabronie was still relying on direct downloads from the site.
This of course changed. I then tried to structure for it to be a 6-part Youtube series, or about the equivalent of three OVA episodes. Much to my fingers' dismay and your delight, it's now morphed into a behemoth that might stretch to about 12 if not even more episodes depending on how Jay decides to release it. The final episode(s) will probably clock in at about 20 minutes from the looks of how things are panning out but that's Shortboy and Jay's job to figure out.
That all said, I would argue that the pacing is more episodic than cinematic, such as the infodump that is Episode 3, which we can get away with in a serial but would utterly grind the narrative to a halt in a movie. In short, initially we were writing for 10-12 spurts of action/drama rather than a sustained 20 minute narrative. In fact, this worked against us in episode 1, because after submitting a long, flashback and drama-filled 22-page "pilot" script of sorts, I wittled it down to a lean 10-pager, which then needed to get two pages written back to it because the pace was just too goddamn fast and we didn't feel for anybody!
Some episodes also, like Episode 5 and even the now-destined for infamy Episode 6, were done more because certain timed events, such as Andy Long visiting San Diego and of course Jay's visit to Japan. Yet, if you watch, they don't really contribute much if anything to the overall "story" as it's coming along. Not that this is a bad thing. After all, most of Cowboy Bebop's episodes had absolutely nothing to do with the main story of Spike and Vicious.
I will probably write more about the writing process as the series starts to hit it's high notes in these upcoming months.
