“Almost a quarter of all female characters in family films are undressed or partially nude compared to 4% of male characters.”

Source: TruthOUT

We have many of the same crew members as first season, so it’s a good time to look back at our first tech scout as shot by Jennifer Liao.

We’re very excited about the locations and also how much production value we’ll get shooting out doors at this time of year. With trees and flowers blooming, it should be absolutely gorgeous. Combine that with the beautiful architecture and landscaping of the University of Toronto’s campus and you’ve got killer production values.  Can’t wait till this afternoon to take it all in.  I hope to bring back some pictures.

So much has happened this week. We locked our library location yesterday. That was huge. We’ll be shooting at a gorgeous old library at University of Toronto. It is a dream location. Waiting to hear back has been very difficult. We’re 13 days out from shooting and we don’t have a shooting schedule yet because we’ve been waiting to find out what location we would have and what days they can accommodate us. The pressure is on our first AD Jason Bourke now. Hopefully, we’ll have a schedule by the end of the weekend and that will make everything feel way more real.

The other big thing that happened yesterday was that I finished another draft of the script. It had ballooned up to 96 pages and I managed to whittle it back down to 85. The script has changed quite a bit in the last three weeks.  There is a time in the writing process, when the structure feels very rigid and everything seems to have only one possible place where it can happen.  That time is long past.  The story seems to be like Lego now.  I can take it apart and re-assemble it in any number of ways.  And I keep pulling it apart and trying new things which drives my writing partner Julie insane.

I will keep tweaking the script as we move toward production, playing with dialogue and emotional arcs and cut, cut, cutting where I can.  But I think we’re good structurally now.

Okay, that isn’t entirely true.  There are two scenes I want to try in new locations but that won’t affect production, really.

When it comes to script, today’s agenda includes going through the Clearance Report, annotating the script to show the flow of interactive elements and meeting with the director to talk.

I do really want to share what’s going on. The project is kind of cool but also very ambitious — hence  my inability to get the blog.

So I’m going to try very short form updates.

Yesterday, we had the first production meeting. In attendance, Director Kelly Harms, P.M. Niko D’Souza, Production Designer Anahita Dehbonehie, Cinematographer Alex Dacev, A.D. Jason Bourke, Sean Van Delft (who did our sound first season and sadly, seems to have scheduling conflicts this time around), Cat Patrichi (Gaffer) and Andrew Tays (Grip). Jason lead us through the script scene by scene and we talked about special requirements. We haven’t nailed down our library location yet, so there is a lot up in the air about everything.

There is a lot of uncertainty in prep. Right now, we have a whole lot of pieces of paper — which I’m still rewriting, a team and not much else. Wish me luck staying sane between now and the end of May.

Also yesterday, Digital Lead James Hetmanuk showed us the first drafts of some of the world building sites he’s developing for the project. One of them is website for O’Deary Library – the library where the story is set. We plan to populate it with video book reviews submitted by people like you. Record yourself talking about a book you enjoyed (or one you hated), upload it to YouTube and we’ll put it on the O’Dearly Library site. We’ve got a couple of other neat book related things planned. I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to play with the fledgling sites, but it seeing them is pretty exciting.

We had a casting session today. Most of the roles are cast and we’re pretty darn excited about who is coming on to the project. Makes me grin just thinking about it. But two big parts haven’t been filled yet. We had a bowling alley room at Fraser Studios where the light was streaming in. Niko, Kelly and casting director Marjorie Lecker were there and from the first audition we knew it was going to be a great day. We saw so many great people that we decided to take the night to think about some of the options.

That’s the news.

After I wrote murder mysteries on Blue Murder for four years, I refused to read or watch a detective story for a long time.

And before, during and after the launch of Ruby season 1, I was intensely focused on getting content onto the web. I needed a break from it.

But now it’s time to start again. I started earlier last time, but I have a bigger ship to get in motion this time.

Let’s look at the assets: RubySkyePI.com. Beautiful design. Navigation? Not so much. Totally my fault. I like endless numbers of menus and pages that can only be reached by circuitous routes.

It needs an overhaul and for the moment it is silent. No new material is getting put on there.

Ruby Skye P.I. also has Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr and assorted other communication channels. At the moment, all are dormant.

Then there are my personal assets – too numerous to enumerate since I essentially join every social network and social site I hear about in my search for narrative potential. All of it’s quiet. I barely Tweet these days.

But I have to get it all started again, get the machine running in order to promote Ruby Skye P.I. Season 2. Yay!

The idea of getting the machine moving is a little scary. Luckily, Julie Giles is working with us this season. It is very cool to try to integrate the marketing into the project from such an early stage. But meanwhile, I still have to start nudging my own social media machine into motion gradually.

Last week, I made a list of some of the themes in the new story. These can help me identify communities with similar interests and also the kind of content they might be interested in.

There are some big themes in the show that we hope will attract some community around it. There’s the literacy strand – it’s set in a library and many of the clues have to do with popular tween novels. The librarian is a main character and the library itself is a character. Another big strand is the promise given by the title: The Haunted Library. There’s a ghost, a séance and a frightening night in a dark place. It’s a detective story, so another big theme is mystery and all that goes with it.

I made a quick list of 5-8 words that are synonymous with those big themes and then just kept writing trying to capture other themes – like being sisters, being awesome, interactive storytelling, (digital) media literacy.

There’s more. But that’s a start. From those themes, I can start to pull out who might be the audiences and communities I want to reach and then I can start to match them to the channels that might be the best ways to reah them.

Teachers – Twitter, Pinterest
Librarians – Twitter, Pinterest
YA Book lovers (and of a bunch of specific books) – GoodReads, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr
Detective Fiction fans – GoodReads, Twitter, Pinterest
Teens and Tweens – Tumblr, Facebook, VidCon
Transmedia/Web Series folk – personal and company blogs, Twitter, personal appearances
Ghost and scary stuff fans – Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook

Then I can set up a chart that matches content to channels. (Below please express appropriate awe at my first ever html chart. Yes, it’s a little misshapen, but nonetheless, a thing of beauty!)

Next comes the Google Alerts on each theme.  I set up  a separate email account to collect them.  My gmail account is already full as it is.

I’ll start culling the feeds for relevant content and pumping it back out through the appropriate channels.

Other steps will follow: Finding the right people to follow, refining information sources, starting to converse more and interact with people, creating original content on these themes, generating more show information, set up a theme calendar…