Living in Durban when you want to pursue a career in South African television is a bit like living in Canada when you want to be a screenwriter. It can be done, but you know all the action is happening in L.A.
Here all the action is in Jo'burg. Now, it's not far from us. A one hour flight or a five hour car ride, but the production companies in Jo'burg tend to look on it as living on the other side of the world. Well, most of them do. Caroline and myself have been quite lucky in that we've made contacts with people who don't mind the distance. Well, I say don't mind, but that's not exactly true. They do mind, but they are willing to work around it. Backstage, for instance, the soap opera we work on. We were initially an experiment to see if long-distance writing would work. And it did, a fact that we are very grateful for, as it brings in out main source of income.
And now it seems like another company is looking past the distance.
Actually, that's a bit unfair. We worked with Penguin Films on our first television job. We wrote three episodes of a prime time sitcom. But this was a year and a half ago now, and we haen't heard from them since. But then about a month ago we got an email asking if we were willing to really put in a lot of hard work on a drama series they were working on. The problem? One of their writers pulled out and they now had six hour long episodes that needed to be written. Were we willing to give it a go?
Hell, yes.
(The reason we weren't invited to write on it in the first place is that it is 52 episodes long and they had a lot of workshops to get everything on track. There you can see the disadvantage of living in Durban.)
So we were emailed all the background information. Series bibles that must have run to about 150-200 thousand words, and we had to read all this info over a weekend, absorb it, and then start our treatment for episodes that fell smack in the middle of the series. We managed to pull of the treatments, (5 thousand words. Scene by scene breakdowns), with minimum of fuss, and are now working on the first two scripts. All six scripts(nine thousand words each) have to be done by the end of October.
We can do that.
So then we got another email for the same production company last week. Would we like to write eight episodes in an upcoming sitcom they are producing.
Hell, yes.
I don't know if we impressed heads of the prodco with how quickly we managed to get on board with the drama series or if they were going to ask us anyway, based on our initial work with them, but we're very happy about it. They are having a workshop for the writers up in Jo'burg in October which they have kindly paid for one of us to attend. (They know we have a young baby, so they said only one of us had to go.)
It's a lot of work. All I can say is thank God I had already finished my Eberron book. Otherwise I'd be a gibbering wreck right now.
