Season 1 now complete!
Interview with Writer Scott Fogg
You wrote and produced Remnants. How did the writing process lead to your producing role, and what was it like watching your creation without having direct creative control during the production?
It was strange and wonderful.
For as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve found myself in the roll of producer — it was just that this was the first time I actually had the title. When I was in elementary school (and then again in high school) I would write little plays or skits for me and my friends to do for the class or for chapel. And since it was my idea, it was usually my job to put the whole thing together. So I’ve kind of been doing this my entire life.
However, this was the first time I really approached a project as a producer. I had a story I wanted to tell and I wanted it told as best as possible and so I felt the best thing I could do, for the story, was relinquish the role of director to someone else. I suppose that’s when I officially became the producer; when I approached Loren about directing Remnants.
After that, my job became one of making sure we had everything we needed to tell this story. And while it’s always strange to invite someone in and have them critique your writing, I knew what he was doing was trying to figure out how best to tell the story. I had to remind myself of that as scenes got dropped, sequences were changed, and lines were re-written.
Ultimately, it’s probably the role I was meant to play. There’s few things as fulfilling as writing something, giving it to an actor and his director, watching them wrestle with it, and then them coming back and asking for a re-write. Trying to find that magical combination of words that makes the scene work is truly thrilling. It’s not something I could probably do if I was the director and having to make a thousand different decisions on top of that.
On that note, what does it take to successfully produce a project? What does the role demand, and how does the process change once the actors and director have their hands on it?
My approach to producing is to make sure that everyone has what they need — or in the other words, to make sure that everyone was able to focus exclusively on the task at hand. I didn’t want the director to have to worry about the location. I didn’t want the actors worrying about the props. I didn’t want anybody but myself losing sleep over scheduling the shoot. To do that, I had to sit down and outline what needed to be done to make Remnants a reality and then outline the responsibilities of every crew member and actor. Whatever things didn’t fall naturally to one person to do, became my responsibility.
Those responsibilities evolved over time. Certain responsibilities, for example, are only needed during pre-production and don’t carry over into production. Same thing goes for post-production. There are specific concerns and needs for every stage of production, and I feel it’s my job to always make sure everyone is not only doing their job, but has everything they need to do their job to their utmost.
That was my approach. It took a lot of energy and robbed me of a lot of sleep, but it was also one of the more satisfying jobs I’ve ever had.
Lets talk about writing some more. Where did the story for Remnants come from, what was the writing process like, and what surprised you about the writing process?
Remnants came from my desire to tell a big story on the smallest budget possible. I began working on the script that would become Remnants three years ago. Originally it was going to be a feature film. At that time, it had been two years since I had graduated from film school and I was getting restless. I wanted to work on a film and I wanted to do it as soon as humanly possible. The problem was (and continues to be) that I had no money to spend on a feature film. So I asked myself, “what’s the biggest idea you can think of that could be told on the smallest conceivable scale possible?” Naturally the answer was the end of society as we know it.
The first draft was about 137 pages long and the fall of the American republic was seen from the lowest of the low, a dropout named Derek Fisher. The exciting thing about it was being to able to explore exactly how it would look from the ground level. So many times in history books, the fall of the Roman Empire is glossed over by “Caesar was replaced by a group of warring generals who never got along but then things got better.” That’s a great way to sum it up on in a sentence, but what would that power struggle look like on the ground level? Take away the scope, take away the political visions and ideas, what are the ramifications of a sudden political power mean to the common man? So while the point-of-view of the story was dictated by our lack of budget, it became a really fascinating and thought-provoking thing to me. Most movies and TV shows don’t really focus on people completely removed from the situation. I think the closest thing I can think of that has ever done something akin to that is Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, where we got to see how drugs and drug trafficking effected multiple people on various levels and from different walks of life (though, now that I think about it, I suppose that was Kim Bauer’s entire purpose during the early seasons of 24 as well). But we were never going to see the White House. We were never going to spend time with the men and women who were making the decisions that were affecting the common man. We were going to stay with the common man and see it through his eyes.
I drafted the script down to 117 pages, which was a much more manageable length. But we still lacked a budget. So we got a few of our friends together one Sunday and shot the opening sequence. The idea was we would shoot the opening sequence, edit it, and then present it to investors, basically saying, “we need your money to tell the rest of the story.” But we never got that far. After we had the opening sequence (what became episode 1) edited into something presentable, something clicked. I’m not sure who thought of it or who said it first, but Loren and I realized just how quickly and easily we had been able to produce a five-minute short film — and we had done it for free. “What if,” one of us said, “we did something like this instead of a feature film? What if we take this story and turn it into a web series? We shoot it episodically and release it on a weekly basis?”
We loved it so I scrapped my 117 page script and re-wrote the entire thing, this time with five-minute episodes in mind. It’s the same story it’s ever been, but telling a story in five minute episodes is a far different thing than asking someone to sit down for two hours and go on a journey with you. I basically took the script and chopped it into two. The first part, which made up the script’s first fifteen pages, would be expanded into ten five-minute episodes. The second part, the other 100 pages, would become Season 2. At first glance that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but when looking at the structure of the story, and the locations involved and the cast that would be needed, that was the best stopping (and then starting) point.
What was fun about that was certain characters suddenly became more relevant and more interesting. Originally, for example, we were never going to see Derek and Annabelle’s mom. She was just going to be a voice on the phone. But given this opportunity, we were able to expand her role and make something really compelling. It’s through her we’re able to catch a glimpse of the world outside of the Fisher home. It’s also by spending time with Robin that we can see what kind of home Derek and Annabelle are coming from and what kind of morals and standards they’ve been imbued with. That was perhaps some of the most exciting and surprising stuff to come out of the new format. Seeing characters who were once just background voices or plot devices become living, breathing people who were important in their own right.
The original idea was to have ten episodes, but after outlining the events of the first season, we realized Episode 8 served no purpose, so it was dropped. Season 1 now only has nine episodes, but Season 2 will have ten. I’ve already been working that out and every episode is necessary and is packed with all sorts of goodness.
How is writing a web series different than a feature script?
It’s the same difference television shows and movies have. Movies are about finding answers. Within the first ten to fifteen minutes you present a problem and the rest of the movie is dedicated to solving that problem. Television, on the other hand, is a long series of questions. As soon as you provide a definitive answer, the show is over. So while certain answers might be provided, there has always got to be another question being raised.
The most obvious example of this is, of course, LOST. But every show operates under this, really. It’s just on a smaller scale: Will Ross and Rachel ever hook up? Will Mal ever admit his feelings for Inara?
So it took a slight restructuring of the story to make it fit this mold. We couldn’t provide just a straight narrative, that wouldn’t be interesting. We needed to compel people to come back the following week, so I made sure to sprinkle questions throughout the episodes — and usually ending each episode with a giant question mark. Finding a way to do that, and make it feel natural, was a bit of a trick, but since we’re facing nuclear holocaust within the first three minutes of the show, there are a lot of questions that very naturally spring to mind.
As you move towards other writing projects, what have you learned about writing a web series that you didn’t know before you started? How will your next series be different?
I think we misjudged our audience.
We didn’t think that people would be interested in sitting at their computer for ten to fifteen minutes to watch the show, so we followed the Guild model and made our episodes average a length of five minutes. The problem with that is that The Guild is a comedy show, and so each episode is presented as a sketch. A five minute episode is all you need to get in, get a laugh, and get out. For something more dramatic, the episode needs to be longer. We need to spend a little more time with our characters, so we can connect with them. We need to spend a little more time in this world so we can feel the weight of the situation. Getting in and out in five minutes just isn’t enough time.
So for future series, I’ll be more conscious of the relationship between the length and the genre. If we do something comedic, I’ll keep it tight and fast. If we do something more dramatic, I’ll let the scripts breathe a little bit more. I think the ideal length for a Remnants episode would be closer to 10 to 15 minutes.
Scott Fogg is a writer living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He, as his wife puts it, supports his writing career by serving as the video game director at McKay Used Books & CD’s.
