This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 533 – Writing an Interactive TV Series with Gavin Michael Booth.
Welcome to episode 533 of the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I’m AshleyScott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger of its sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I am interviewing Gavin Michael Booth. He is a Canadian filmmaker who’s done a number of very unique, interesting projects, including his most recent one, Dream Crusher, which is an interactive mystery TV series where someone who watches it could potentially win $100,000 if they figure out all the clues. So, we talked through this project, how it came together for him, where the idea came from, and some of the other interesting items that pertain to writing and writing in this new interactive medium. So, stay tuned for that interview.
SYS’s Six Figure Screenplay contest is open for submissions. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. If your script is ready, definitely submit now to save some money. We’re looking for the best low budget features. I’m defining low budget as less than six figures, in other words, less than one million US dollars. We’ve got lots of industry judges reading scripts in the later rounds. We’re giving away thousands of dollars in cash and prizes to the winners, along with a bunch of other prizes to potentially bring exposure to the top scripts. We have a short film script category as well, 30 pages or less. So if you have a low budget short script, by all means submit that. We do have a number of industry judge producers who are specifically looking for short scripts. So hopefully we can find a home for some of those. If you want to submit, again, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. And again, our regular deadline is the next deadline and that deadline is May 31st of this year.
So, if you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread the word about the podcast, so they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mentioned in the podcast can be found in my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You’ll find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast and then just look for episode 533. If you want my free guide, how to sell a screenplay in five weeks, you can pick that up by going to sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide, it’s completely free. You just put in your email address and I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide, teach you how to write a professional logline and query letter and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really is everything you need to know to sell your screenplay, just go to sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.
So, now just a quick few words about what I’ve been working on, so I’m officially in pre-production now on the indie rom-com that I’ve been putting together, just polishing up the script over this last year. We’re still really early in the process, but right now I think we’re going to be trying to shoot the last quarter of this year, so October-ish. The first thing I did once the script was locked was coming up with a preliminary schedule. Now I wrote this script in Celtics, just really sort of as an experiment. I’d never used Celtics before, this isn’t a plug for Celtics, I don’t get paid to promote Celtics, but their scriptwriting program I liked, it seemed to be pretty good. There was some little buggy issues here and there, like it’ll log you out, it’s all in the cloud, so which is nice, because then you can share the script easy with other people, they can type notes and this. So there’s some advantages to being in the cloud, but sometimes you’d just be sitting there writing and your 10-day logout or something would expire and it would just log you out, you have to log back in. So there’s some little issues with Celtics, but overall I like it. And there’s some other features, you can pay an extra $10 a month and you can get access to some of their production features. So I did that for this script and then I have the ability to create sort of a preliminary budget and schedule. I’ve never used any other film scheduling tools, I’m sort of new at this coming from the writing angle, but on this one I just opened up the Celtics scheduling tool and started dragging the scenes around and sort of made a preliminary schedule. And that’s, you know, was really the first thing I needed to do, because I needed to start to figure out what I need in terms of locations, how many actors I need each day and just how many actors I’m going to need, can I have two act, can I just arrange everything in an organized way where I can really optimize that? How many actors will we need in all total? Because that’s a big part of the budget along again with the locations. So I did start to break down the locations a bit. The movie takes place primarily in a dive bar and it really needs to be a dive bar. It’s sort of written as this sort of low-end kind of a bar and the guy that’s working there is kind of a little bit of a directionless dude who’s kind of trying to find his way. So, it sort of needs to be a little bit grungy and then someone comes in and they sort of have this romance and they both sort of move on from there. But a third of the movie is shot, it’s a 93-page script, so a third of the movie is shot in the bar, 37 pages.
So that, again, breaking down this little schedule that I did, it’s looking like that’s about six days. So you can do the math on that. We got to do about six pages a day. So that should be very doable. For an indie film, we’ll be moving quickly. But finding a dive bar is not that easy. We can shoot around operating hours. We can go in in the middle of the night and then leave in the afternoon when the bar opens. So we can be trying to have as little of a footprint on this bar as possible.
Obviously this is super low budget, but I have budgeted some money for the locations. The total budget of this is going to be around probably 30,000, which is about what the pinch was. That was a film I did maybe four or five, six years ago, now seven years ago. And that was about the same $30,000 budget. Just again, that’s the primary budget. We can raise more money, maybe we will, but with that $30,000 budget, I have slated about 5,000 of that for locations. Hopefully it’s enough, but we’re going to be shooting, so it’s basically 15 days. So, you can do the math on that, 15 days divided by 5,000. But I think five of the days will be able to shoot at free locations. For instance, this house where I’m recording this podcast will be one of the locations, won’t have to pay for that. And that will save us some money, but I figured there’s about 10 days that we’ll need something. So again, just some napkin math, $5,000, 10 days, that’s $500 a day, which is not a lot. I mean, you can find some locations for that in LA, but it’s tough, $500 a day. So I’ll definitely going to need to cut some deals and find some indie-friendly bar owners. If you know anyone, if you’re listening to this podcast and you know anyone who owns a dive bar, if you work in a dive bar, you know somebody, by all means, just pitch it to them and be great. We can advertise, that’s one of the things I’m going to offer the bar is we can rewrite the script a little bit to sort of feature their bar. So we could advertise them. It could become sort of product placement. We’ll use their logo, their sign, that sort of stuff. So it could be a cool thing for, potentially if we find the right bar, could be a cool thing for them to get a little free publicity. And then hopefully they can make a little bit of money. Again, we can be closed when they’re open so we wouldn’t necessarily impact their ability to earn their normal amount of money. So hopefully I can find that bar that’s willing to cut that deal.
And then the next big piece to it is figuring out the cinematographer. On the pinch, my cinematographer was a fellow named Bernie Rao who I’ve developed a friendship with over the years. And I’m really hoping he can come back and shoot this one. I felt like he did a great job on the pinch and we just got along really well. So I’m in discussions with him. We’re trying to figure that out. And that will be sort of an ongoing discussion here. The next couple of weeks, we’ll sort of figure out what we’re going to do just in terms of cameras and lights and crew and that sort of stuff. So we’re starting to have those kinds of conversations. I’m planning on doing a whole podcast series on the making of this film. We’re going to showcase three films in this podcast series. It’ll be something separate from selling your screenplay. Really a filmmaking, it’ll be a filmmaking series. And this film, this rom-com that I’m doing will be one of the films. But we’re going to feature two other films from two other indie filmmakers as well. And they’re all sort of different types of projects. So, it’ll be an interesting cross section of three very independent filmmakers putting together their indie films.
So, we’re starting to talk about that. I’m talking with these other filmmakers. I’m going to be recording that. And what I’m hoping really, just so people sort of understand. So, what is my strategy? Or what I’m hoping is to build sort of this other podcast, maybe get a little bit of traction with that. But it will give me a marketing angle. And these other filmmakers that are participating as well. It’ll give them a marketing angle where we’re sort of participating in this sort of experiment. This film group, this film group. And we’re going to tie our films to it. And hopefully we can get a little bit of publicity just from that. And hopefully the publicity that I get on my film can help these other films and then vice versa.
So we’re just trying to put that together. I think we’ll probably release those episodes as the films themselves become finished. So as I said, they can really help promote the actual film, the end game, which is helping to promote that film. So that’s another piece of this. That’s not going to be a huge problem or a huge bit of work. I mean, I do podcasts all the time. So, I have all the infrastructure to do the podcast. So it felt like an easy way to kind of just build something, build a little community, a little interest around these indie films. So, I’m starting to ramp that up and we’re going to actually have our first call. We’re going to break it down into a couple of different, a couple of different episodes for each film. And we’re all in pre-production. The other two filmmakers are in pre-production as well. I’m in pre-production. So, we’re going to go ahead and do an episode, we’ll record an episode in a couple of weeks and then we’ll have that. I won’t release it, as I said, until probably the films are finished or nearly finished. But we’ll start recording those episodes as we’re going through this process so that we have some real, there’s some real nuts and bolts and real practical advice. And I want to record these episodes while we’re actually in the trenches doing this just to make it as real and practical and nuts and bolts as possible. So that’s another project that, as I said, I’m slowly ramping up on. That probably won’t take a ton of my time but it should be interesting to put that together and get to know these other filmmakers too. Any of these projects like this when you’re interacting with other people, it’s a great opportunity just to meet other filmmakers, hear what they’re doing and really understand some of the things that they’re trying to do and maybe that can help you yourself. So potentially this could be a model for anybody out there. Find other filmmakers in your community and just trying to do something, come together in some way and support each other. You know, could be potentially helpful for any independent filmmaker. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been working on.
So now let’s get into the main segment. Today I am interviewing writer, director, Gavin Michael Booth. Here is the interview. Welcome Michael to the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Gavin Michael Booth
Happy to be here, thanks for having me.
Ashley
So, to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah. I grew up in a small town called Amisburg, Ontario, which is close to Windsor, Ontario, which most people would know is the border city right across the river from Detroit, Michigan. Uh, so to, to put it into one of my favorite movies, Star Wars context, like the, uh, what does Luke say? It’s the, if you’re, if there was a bright center of the universe, then you’re on the planet that is furthest from describing Tatooine as farm. Uh, there was a bright center of the filmmaking universe. Then Amisburg would be the town that is furthest from. So not, not a lot, not a lot happening pre-social media days when you couldn’t just post, Hey, I want to make a movie. Who wants the help? So, it was a lot of, I had saved up with my paper route money and bought a camcorder and just ran around the neighborhood making stupid parody movies with all my neighborhood friends. Like a Friday the 13th, part 27 or Indiana Jones, the last controller, remote controller, and, uh, in high school, we had a pretty significant video editing suite at the time and, and really kind of fell in love with making movies then and, and just kind of never, never stopped. Didn’t go to school for it. Just bought screenplay books, read screenplays. And, uh, you know, I saw Kevin Smith make a movie and like, Oh, you just need $25,000 and you go to Sundance and that’s it. So I put together the money. I made a movie, didn’t go to Sundance, barely survived making the film, but, but we finished it and kind of learned like, Oh, that’s the lesson. You just need to go make the film. And then, then you figure out what to do with it afterwards.
Ashley
So let’s talk about that, like getting that first $25,000 together. And then what you did with that film, it was like a low budget, similar to something like clerks, very contained one location, and you did, you do the film festival tour. You, you tried to submit it to film festivals and that sort of stuff.
Gavin Michael Booth
I wish that was the case. I made a movie that had cars exploding and action sequences and no less than 15 locations and 15 characters. It was ambitious. We got it. We got it all done. We pulled off all these amazing favors in my home region. It had a bank robbery. We even got a bank to let us like stage the robbery in there. Uh, and, and I didn’t know anything about film festivals at the time. It was just a different world than what we have today. Uh, so we were just sort of floundering in the dark, really all we were able to do was to get, you know, people that we know local in the community to watch it, and then some industry people to watch it that helped us sort of like just establish, Hey, we’ve made a film now. What’s next?
Ashley
So now, okay, so you’re living in this Canadian town, there’s not much of a film community. Maybe you can give some advice because I know there’s a lot of people out there in that similar situation. And in fact, I would say I was in a similar situation. I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, so there’s no film community there to speak of. So, for me anyways, it was packing up and moving to LA. But maybe you can talk about that, building a film career in your small town. What are the resources that are local to you? Are there some local film groups and have those been helpful? Are there local people that, you know, actors who moved to Hollywood now have moved back to your local town so they’re in the industry outside of it? But just maybe you can speak to those people that are way outside of Hollywood and they want to get some career going. What is some of your just sort of bare bones advice to get them up and running?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, it was a different world then. We didn’t really have a lot of that. As I sort of joked earlier, social media is your best friend. I feel like most cities, towns, regions have at least a couple actors, Facebook groups and filmmakers of whatever city you live in group, some kind of monthly mixers or film centers. It’s really just putting yourself out there and finding those pockets of the internet where there are people in your region that want to collaborate. And that’s the biggest thing. If your goal is writing and directing features, don’t think that you’re going to get your shot to do that immediately either. Sort of humble yourself a little bit and go out and help other people. Go be a PA on their set. Go drive and pick up the pizzas for lunch. Whatever they need done because that sort of grunt work on other people’s sets will win you all of the favors and the respect that you need when your time comes and you’re putting your project together. So, I think it’s just about building that collaboration and no fear.
I didn’t move to LA until very… I was in my mid 30s when I finally made the jump to LA. So small communities can be great for many reasons. One, your rent is generally cheaper. So you can live easier while struggling to be an artist. Two, things like getting the community to give you locations or maybe sponsor a meal for the cast and crew is a lot easier ask than when you’re in one of the big cities like New York or LA. And I think it’s really just about finding your tribe.
And of course, we’ve got YouTube and all these video platforms too where you can showcase your work and find other people that are doing it. Not everybody has to own their own camera package and lighting. That’s the other thing you need to learn is you don’t have to buy all of the gear if you don’t want to be a gearhead. If you don’t want to have to do a bunch of corporate videos to pay off that gear aside from making your own films. It’s about if you want to write and direct, then that’s what you should focus on and find the other people that are passionate about being a cinematographer or being a gaffer and lighting and bring them on board because then you’re raising all high tide raises all ships together. If you allow everyone else to specialize in what they want to do, it’s not trampling on them by also trying to wear all hats.
Ashley
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s sound advice. So, let’s talk about, I just want to talk briefly about your film Last Call, and then we’re going to get into Dream Crusher. I think these are both very innovative projects, sort of outside the box. So maybe you can just talk about Last Call. It’s a one-shot feature film. Maybe you can talk about the inspiration to this and just sort of what you were going for and how you were able to pull this off. Just briefly. And as I said, then we’ll get into Dream Crusher.
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, it’s much easier to explain to people now that Adolescence on Netflix is blowing up. And Adolescence is a four-episode miniseries where each episode is a true single take. So all that means is when you hit record on the camera, you don’t stop until the movie is over and then you cut, there’s no hidden cuts. The actors, the camera crew have to do this just absolute dance of performing the entire movie in one go. Our movie differs a little bit because it’s split screen. So kind of like how I’m looking at you on Zoom right now, there were two camera crews in two different parts of a city filming simultaneously. And then the only editing in the movie is like putting those two sides together. But it deals with a man attempting to dial a suicide hotline and miss dials because he’s been drinking. And on the other end of the phone is a woman named Beth who’s a janitor at a college who isn’t, has no idea how to help him, isn’t a mental health expert, but just out of basic human kindness, decides to stay on the phone with Scott and figure and try to help him through what he’s going through. So it just becomes this sort of emotional, emotionally gripping tale of a woman trying to do her best to save this man’s life. And the idea of doing it in a single take and showing you both sides of it was to give the audience, it’s unflinching, you never get a pause, you never get relief of, oh, we’re fading out and now it’s the next day or a few hours later, you’re just in it with her that everything she says might be a trigger for him to hang up or take his own life and just sort of you’re in the tension, you’re in that rollercoaster for every unbroken moment. So we had to write the project really thinking about real time. Okay, well, it’s going to take him four minutes to walk from this bar to his apartment. And then at the elevator, doesn’t come right away. How do we do it? So, we have what we call the bit of an accordion script where either side could breathe a little bit and the actors knew that, okay, the phone is supposed to ring now because they’re actually acting live over the phone from their respective location. But if it doesn’t ring, you’re the janitor and you’re supposed to be finished mopping, but go to task B, there were sort of like multiple threads at different points in the script, just so that if something went off timing on one side or the other, we didn’t have to cut and reset. It would just kind of could keep flowing organically. We didn’t want to have the situation where somebody would just end up in like video game resting position, just like waiting for the next line.
Ashley
Yeah. And that’s fascinating because when I first heard about this project, I would have assumed you shot actor A, you know, all of actor A stuff and then the same crew, which you, all of actor B’s, but you actually shot that in real time too. So, these actors are actually interacting with each other in real.
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, they’re live over the phone. There was a lot of R&D to go into that to make sure we could keep, because there’s a thing called like audio drift where the longer you roll a camera, sometimes the timecode can go slightly out of sync. And then the fact that sometimes when you’re on a phone call and things can get delayed by a millisecond or two and just everything we had to do to make that work. But if we had shot one side and then the other, it would be really unfair to the second actor that had to do it, because then the second actor has to memorize the exact blocking like beat by beat second for second of when this person speaks, when they don’t to make sure they’re speaking in between the gaps. Whereas this way it’s actually, it’s like a stage play, only the stage is in two different parts of a city and the actors are never seeing each other face to face.
Ashley
And so, I mean, I can see as an independent producer, I can see a lot of just, you just usually say this is one take, so, okay, we got one day we shoot our whole feature film. But I’m sure there was a lot of prep in that. So, talk about that just a little bit. Did you run through this several, like, did you shoot your film several times just to see which take was better? Did you go in through like a plus stage play and block it all out several times? How much time was involved in all of that?
Gavin Michael Booth
We did a super micro budget film. The idea for this film was to self-distribute as much as possible. So, by keeping the budget small allowed us that advantage. But what we did was, uh, I say we, David Wilkins, he’s the lead actor in it. He co-wrote the film with me. He came up with the core idea for the film and, and he’s my producing partner on it. We, uh, we could afford 14 days. So, we had 10 days of rehearsal and four days of actual shooting. The goal being we would start rehearsing, uh, one side and then the other. So sort of all, all morning on day one was one side and it was all about the actor performance. And then we worked in the blocking and then we started full camera rehearsals along with the blocking. Cause there’s a sound person on either side, a camera operator on either side. The camera operators had to be their own focus pullers. So really, really stripped-down crew, no boom operator, only lav mics so that we would never see a boom shadow or boom mic falling into frame. And then by about day four or five, we started splitting off to the two locations and rehearsing. We would just keep an open phone line between the two crews as well as the phone that they were on. And we could just sort of stop, start. And then every night we would take those takes and put them side by side in, in a rough version of the movie. And we could be like, Oh, the blocking’s a little strange here. Because it has to feel like one piece. And sometimes we wanted to feel like almost like they’re looking at each other eye to eye, but they’re not in the same location. So timing up exactly. Okay. Camera’s got to be on the left side of her, the right side of him. Uh, you know, and, and then we want sort of a similar movement sometimes or, or distance where he’s further away in the frame and she’s not. So just filming it every, it’s a little bit like having a sports game tape and then analyzing the plays and adjusting for the players. And then our four days of shooting are, are, we were shooting at night. The whole story takes place at night. So around midnight, 1 AM, we would roll one take, we would take an extended lunch break and then we would go, go broke and try to go again. So we, we’re going to have a maximum of eight takes. And then we had to choose one. We couldn’t intercut, say, you know, side a from day one and side B from, from day four. So we ended up with five full takes of the movie. And then from those five, we had to decide which one was going to live
Ashley
And which one was the live? Was it the final one? Was it the one in the middle? That’s that’d be curious to know.
Gavin Michael Booth
It was, it was our second last one and our last one we all felt was better in many ways, but one word was spoken incorrectly by an actor when the camera is just so up close that we couldn’t have ADR’d it or changed it to something else that like that. But just by saying the one word incorrectly, made the whole take unusable, which is part of the, the risk of doing a single take that, that any one moment, I even, I was watching Adolescence and listen, I love the show and what they accomplish is amazing, but I saw an actor flub a line and then just quickly recover and make it sound like he’s frustrated. And you know, the way that some of us speaks, he says, I never did, I never did that. And I was like, okay, well that worked. He saved the moment versus being like, Oh, I screwed up. We have to start over.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. Having those experienced actors is key for something like that, did you find, like, what was sort of the purpose of this as just a technical achievement doing a one-take film? Did you find, was there some vision with this? And then ultimately, do you think it helped you gain some recognition, some distribution, some, you know, something interesting to talk about? Does it give you just a little bit of a marketing angle when you go out to sell this film? But just sort of what was your sort of, you know, motivation for doing a one-take?
Gavin Michael Booth
I’m obsessed with single take films. I had loved what Mike Figgis did with Timecode, the movie Russian Arc, which is absolute insanity. That’s the first one to do a feature that way. Rope with Alfred Hitchcock, yes, there are hidden cuts just due to the limitation of film running out after 10 or 12 minutes in a film canister. I’ve done a bunch of single take music videos, but that’s more on the gimmick side of things. You hear the word gimmick used a lot when it comes to a technique like single take. To me, you can’t make a single take movie if it’s just going to be the gimmick of like, oh, we did it. Cause there’s no reason to do it for the gimmick because editing would give most movies a better finished version, a better polish. It has to be key to the story. The same with even if you just have like a Spielberg one or in a single scene, there’s got to be a reason that you want the camera to not stop, why you want to give the audience that tension. In terms of marketing it, we felt we had made a good film, but you don’t know what’s going to happen until you screen it for the public. Thankfully, the public embraced it. Our sort of first screening was at the Chinese theater, dances with film festival, sold out, tons of people sobbing. We got a standing ovation, like beyond our wildest dreams of the reception to the film. But marketing, it was tough. Cause you tell me like, oh, we have the split screen, one take movie, and everyone just kind of rolls their eyes and goes, oh, you did one of those, great. I was like, no, but the story’s really good. But until you get that first audience of those first reviews, it actually worked against us in terms of marketing.
Ashley
Gotcha. That’s interesting. So let’s dig into your latest project, Dream Cusher. Maybe to start out, you can give us a quick picture of Logline. What is this project all about?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah. So Dream crusher season one of a new TV series called Reward. If you think of American Horror Story being the brand, and then every season it has its anthology style contains story. So that’s the plan with this. Every season will be a different story. Season one is Dream crusher. It is on the reveal streaming platform, which is newer to most people, but it’s free like Tubi. You sign up, there’s a few ads and everything you watch, but no subscription fee. Get that out of the way fast before people roll their eyes and go, not another subscription service. Uh, but it’s their first original narrative series and the idea of reward is a seven episode murder mystery by which the audience can interact. You can sign up to be a detective. There’s, there’s sort of a web app or, or the website to log in and each week in the episode, there are clues buried in the episode and there are clues buried in the real world. So what you’re doing is going on a bit of an online scavenger hunt and, and, and looking, you know, sort of rewatch the show as many times as you need to, to find the clues in the episode. You log those as an investigator every week and then you move on to the next episode and before the finale airs, you’re going to have to make your, your, your best, guess as to who the killer was, the motive, all the sort of clue esque kind of things. And one viewer will win a hundred thousand dollars if they can correctly solve the case.
Ashley
Huh. That’s fascinating. So where did this idea come from?
Gavin Michael Booth
So William Shevery and Joseph Aveeno, William is the owner of the reveal platform. And he came to me, he had seen a project I did for Blumhouse that had a little bit of interactivity and was a little bit outside the box and said, hey, this is about going back four or five years ago. I have this core idea of reward, an interactive murder mystery where somebody can win, win the prize by playing detective at home. Would you be interested, say no more. So, he’s sort of been developing it on and off over all that time period. And I’ve written a completely different story with my friend, Ryan Murphy, not that Ryan Murphy, other Ryan Murphy. Not the American Horror Story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I wish, yes. Sorry, Ryan, I love you, but yeah. And that didn’t work out at the time. It’s been through a couple of different iterations and then eventually settled on this idea of, I made a living for years shooting music videos and shooting tour videos for bands and kind of getting the experience of being around musicians in the studio and they’re dealing with record labels. I’m like, oh, what about a murder set in the seedy underground of the pop music business? And that sprung open the idea. So, it’s drawing from a lot of situations. I don’t know anybody who’s been murdered over their record deal, but it’s just pulling from all the things that I see on the dark side of entertainment. And a good friend of mine, Blue is a pop songwriter and producer, so he wrote original music for us and our actors could sing. It was just sort of the perfect alignment of, oh, I can play in a world that I love. I can write something that I know very well. And it gave a lot of just interesting, any murder mystery you need interesting suspects and enough interesting background on each of the suspects to keep the audiences guessing. And this was just the story that aligned. But a difficult project to write because you’re writing the traditional narrative TV show that has to serve as entertainment for somebody who wants to watch it and not do the contest side of things, but also building the larger world of all of this online element and further backstory and elements that you can find online, this whole sort of second screen experience that elevates the storytelling as well as just being a clue that you can find, but doesn’t take away from the story if somebody only watches the TV show and doesn’t go explore all of the rest. So, it’s been a bit of a dance and it’s still a learning curve even week to week as we’re putting episodes out. I’m still finding ways to adjust and alter and make things better as we go.
Ashley
So, you mentioned this interactivity. Are there some big examples? I mean, there was a Black Mirror episode that had a little bit of interactivity where you could sort of choose your own adventure. But are there some big examples of this that you sort of look to and sort of ultimately, where do you see this going? Do you think big studio films might get into this? Is this something you see coming in the future, more interactivity? And what is this called? I used to hear the term transmedia, where you got the video game and the website and the this and that. Is this sort of fit into the transmedia bucket? Is this something new? Is there some new term to describe online or offline play with this?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it technically falls under transmedia. I don’t know. We refer to it as viewer-engaged content, where this is a show you probably want to put your phone down and watch the screen for a change and pay attention, because paying attention can lead you to that $100,000 prize. In terms of examples, there’s board games out there. There’s things that challenge you, like quiz games and things, some of them set in the true crime world, true crime podcasts, really, and the sort of love for murder mysteries is just the real core. There’s not any specific example that we followed or not really anything exactly like this that we could find. Maybe there’s something out there that we’ve missed trying to explore, but when I heard the idea from William, I thought, this is just awesome. I would 100% participate, and if I’m going to watch TV anyways, why not watch TV and try to win $100,000? But I do think when I listen to true crime podcasts or narrative murder mysteries, everything from what’s the only murders in the building or the Ryan Johnson Knives Out series, the fun of it is trying to guess and try to see if you’re correct in solving the case before they reveal who it is. So, we’re just sort of helping to put the audience in the driver’s seat in that detective position.
Ashley
Perfect. So maybe you can take us through your writing process a little bit, just where do you typically write, when do you typically write, what does just your writing process look like sort of in general, and then maybe we’ll talk specifically about the Dream Crusher project because it’s probably a little different than what you’re normally used to.
Gavin Michael Booth
Lately this year, I’m coming to you live from my garage, which is my little garage studio. So a lot of my writing is done here, but I also travel a lot for work and I can write anywhere. I just, I mean, the process I start with now is on my phone notepad or I have a Google drive where I kind of have a folder and a Google doc for every project that I’m brainstorming or thinking about. And every time I have any idea from like, oh, that’s a good character name, or oh, that’s a funny line, or oh, here’s an idea for a scene. I just go pop it into that Google drive and eventually I’ll open one of those for a movie or a series and be like, oh, there’s like 500 notes in this Google doc. There’s probably enough here to start like forming what it is. I can be very slow in the development side of things and it’s just all kind of like, you know, like a boulder going downhill and just gathering velocity. But once I’ve sort of got something locked in, I get pretty obsessive with it and can pound out sort of first drafts pretty quickly. I’m very big on getting feedback. I kind of have a trusted circle of friends that we can share scripts and get notes. Some people take notes as the enemy of creativity. And it can be true if there’s, you know, a studio executive or somebody telling you, like, you have to change this or we won’t make it. But notes to me are great. And the minute that two to five people give you the same note or a similar version of a note, you can’t ignore it. That means there’s something up that everybody’s identifying as not working or maybe should be changed. But I like writing in coffee shops. I like writing in places where there’s just a lot of noise around me because that sort of white noise helps just tune everything out. I like writing with music. I think, I mean, how many screen writers will tell you the same story? Like I put on my favorite movie soundtracks, but when I was in high school trying to write my first movies, it was the Braveheart soundtrack. It would be, you know, anything by James Horner or John Williams, it was always on CD in the background when we’re trying to write. So instrumental music is a big help to help kind of keep my mind not getting caught up in lyrics. But it was just, this one was interesting because I definitely wrote a treatment for each of the seven episodes because I just think about moving pieces around to build up that mystery before. I didn’t want to, sometimes I’ll do the vomit drafts which is like, here’s the core idea for a movie, go. But because this was so intricate, I wanted to make sure that I had a very, very detailed outline of each episode and how it would all play out.
Ashley
And does that start with like index cards and an outline? That’s phase one. And then you broke that down into, and how long are each one of these treatments? Like a page or two per episode. So, then you have like seven-to-10-page treatment, basically covering all seven episodes.
Gavin Michael Booth
It’s more like a scene by scene treatment where I’ll just, I’ll number episode one, scene one, two, three, four, and a little paragraph description of like, this happens on the scene. Maybe I include a line or two of dialogue that are crucial. Um, the next scene is this, here’s where it’s set. Here’s what the characters do. It just as brief as I can. Sometimes they end up being two sentences. Sometimes they end up being half a page if there’s like a lot of detail to cover or ideas are flowing. I haven’t done the index card thing in a while because everything digital now and like a Google doc or whatever is pretty easy to just cut and paste. And I have, I have been looking into a few of those. There’s, there’s a few desktop apps I’ve seen where it gives you like the sticky notes for your desktop. So I feel like that visualized and I do have a giant blank wall on this other side here that I, I’m like, God, that could actually be a good storytelling wall. I would probably need the little red threads, right? To tie it together like a murder mystery for me. Yeah. Make it look like my investigation board, but no, I, I’m pretty good at organizing a story in my head. So I don’t always need that, um, much of a visualization. Um, and then it’s just about cranking out drafts and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. And I’m usually rewriting even when I’m on set, still trying to improve things or actors are suggesting things that go like, you know what, that’s better. Let me, let me a lunch break. I’m going to change a few lines of dialogue and things here. And generally, as long as I’m also, when I’m writing for something that I’m going to direct, I’m, I’m very liberal with the actors that like, like they’re going to say things in their own words. They’re going to come up with great ideas. The cinematographer is going to come up with great ideas. Everybody on set in their department is going to come up with great ideas. So I try to be very open to that, that like, okay, the script is the building blocks. We have to get the core information out, but let’s, let’s play while we’re on set. And I have the, the liberty of doing that being the writer and director and producer of a show like this. It’s not as locked in. I, I haven’t directed network television yet, but from everything I hear, my wife’s a full-time actor. It’s, it’s a little more locked in where this script had to get approved by so many parties and peoples. And like, these are the lines. This is the, the beat by beat that has to be followed.
Ashley
How did you approach screenplay structure with the seven-part series like this? Is there an act one, an act two, an act three? Do you have a midpoint inciting incident? You know, act breaks. Just how does it go along when you break it out into seven episodes?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, these are shorter form episodes. They’re anywhere between sort of like 18 to 22 minutes. So, it’s more like a half hour show. There are, I do have to plan for one to two commercial breaks depending on what episode number it is. So, keeping that in mind while writing, okay, here’s a good dramatic moment to end on and cut away to commercial and then cut back into, but not a traditional sort of one hour or half hour TV script format. Really, it’s interesting because I can’t say too much about it yet because we’re only on episode one, but there are ways that the narrative structure of some of the upcoming episodes change format. So, some of the episodes in a way feel like standalone, even though they’re all telling part of the same story, it’s playing with different genre and style of telling the story that they really do kind of feel standalone, even though they’re the greater sum of a whole.
Ashley
So just maybe you can describe what do you think is now some of the differences with a feature film versus a TV show? What are some of the things that you noticed in terms of the writing?
Gavin Michael Booth
A lot more time to spend on scenes and interactions between characters with a series than a film. You get a bit more of a film. You have to be very, very succinct with your exposition and just making sure that that story is never getting bogged down. In a series, you get to hang on moments a little longer. You get to include more moments that just don’t, it’s not that they’re not great for the film. They just don’t fit like if you’re trying to two-hour runtime. Here it’s a little more flexible and especially in the streaming age that we’re in where these episodes don’t all have to be the same length. One can be longer than the other. It’s not locked into this 60-minute window with a commercial break here, here, here, and here. It’s been kind of freeing compared to what it is making a movie. And generally, a movie I find you end up shooting more than you need and whittling it down in the editing room. That’s sort of par for the course that you’re going to lose some material. With this, so far it’s not all fully edited, but I haven’t lost any scenes at all, at least not in whole. And there’s been the breathing room to kind of get what was on the page up on the screen. The most in the editing process we’ve done is maybe rearrange a few things or maybe borrow something from episode two and move it to season or episode three. But it feels looser than writing a movie, which has been the majority of my background.
Ashley
Yeah. So, okay. So, the producer, he comes to you and basically says, I want to do this interactive murder mystery, but he didn’t have any real story beats. And then you came up with sort of the basic premise around the music industry, a mystery around the music industry. Did he give you notes as you’re developing? And maybe you can talk a little bit about that. Just receiving notes. I mean, ultimately they have some vision for their platform. So there must have been some direction or sort of what they were trying to accomplish for their own business needs. Maybe you talk about that. What were some of those notes and what were just some of your responses to those notes? How did you handle those notes?
Gavin Michael Booth
It was very hands off, uh, more suggestions than, than full on notes, you know, would read things. What about this? What about this? And we just feel very in sync with what’s trying to be done. A lot of the notes would come from the purpose of, I needed to understand how they were going to build up the app, how the episode, how the contest side of things, how they saw that working. So a lot of the notes and exchanges were me making sure that I had enough things planted in each episode. Uh, and for the sort of bonus content that’s out there that it, that it would work for the system. I didn’t, I couldn’t just autonomously write, uh, the story exactly the way that I would want, cause it had to work within this, this system that they’re building, but even then there’s flexibility with season one, there’s, there’s a, there’s a huge learning curve for all of us, uh, that season two, I’m sure we’ll be able to improve and, and, and, and elevate, but it’s been a really great working experience in relationship. No, no sort of hard notes of like, this can’t stay. This has to go. I hate this move this, uh, you know, it it’s everybody at reveal at the platform. They, they have a good grasp of vision and how they want to do things different. So, things on this project where I was like, Hey, what if we cast an actor that can actually sing and then I’ll get my friend who was a hit songwriter to, to write a song and we’ll record it and then we can use it in this way. And this way, and, and most of the time you’re going to get, be met with resistance of like, I don’t know, that sounds expensive. And like, that’s just too much work. Let’s stick to this. And in this case, they’re just like, that sounds amazing. How can we do that? If we can do it, let’s do it. Let’s find a way to make it happen. Uh, kind of the opposite experience of what you typically gets, in the note giving scenario, I always compare it cause I, being Canadian, you apply for a lot of grant funding, telephone, Canada, Ontario creates, and sometimes the note givers there feel less creative. It feels sort of like if you had to go to the DMV and have to get notes from the person that’s in charge of renewing your license or giving you a road test.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, I’d love to get your thoughts just on AI in general. It’s just someone who’s doing innovative, independent film. Just what are your thoughts on AI? Where do you think that’s going? And how do you think that’s going to impact the entertainment industry?
Gavin Michael Booth
I am an eternal optimist and I have to be an optimist to be in this career. There’s no way to do it otherwise. But I am incredibly pessimistic about AI and AI and art. Because not that I don’t, I think the tools are amazing and I think what they’re allowing, there’s great scenarios for a creator in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t have the money to join the industry. It’s going to allow anyone to create on a grander scale and I recognize that. But I already see the job erosion starting with voice acting and with foreign dubbing for movies. There’s a case with a Stallone movie that just used a bunch of AI instead of hiring actors in the foreign markets. But that also means the studio engineer, the dialogue editor, the studio rental, all of that will go away. I think it’s going to impact commercial work a lot sooner than the narrative film and TV. I don’t think human made film and TV and music will ever go away fully, but kind of like what happened to live theater when TV and film came in, it was diminished greatly. And I fear that AI will be able to make all of the content, the stuff that we don’t consider art very soon within five or 10 years. Like I’m talking about generative AI, I already see it in Adobe Premiere. There’s already AI features that I see just built into the latest version. Extend your clip two seconds if your clip was too short. And you’re like, wow, that’s an amazing tool, but I’m training that so that next year’s version will just be able to make the entire clip that I don’t have to hire a crew and go out and film. And oh, wow, I film next to a highway and I can use AI to remove the highway. I don’t have to ADR this anymore. Think of how much money we get. Oh, we just put the whole ADR business out of business and the ADR rerecording studios and the actors who get paid and paid residuals on their ADR sessions. I think there’s going to be a job loss and erosion in a way that we haven’t seen. You know, there’s a lot of cutbacks already. Streaming is sort of decimated the traditional system. I saw during both the writers strike and the actors strike that the studios really didn’t want to budge on on AI protections for people. I would believe that all of those studios companies have an AI lab somewhere buried in the basement where they’re trying to quickly figure out how to get rid of writers. You’re already starting to see, don’t get don’t get notes from a human and coverage for your script. Use our AI software. Here’s our AI table read software. And you’re like, and some of it you’re like, this is great. I can. And you’re like, oh, but I’m just every time I use it, I’m replacing the need for a human. Well, at the same time, training it to just get better and better and better. And we saw Coca-Cola make a commercial at Christmas time that was fully AI generated, you know, in the arts community and amongst my friends on social media. So you’re like, this looks like garbage, but the average family in Ohio or kids in, you know, England aren’t watching TV and be like, you know what, I’m not going to buy Coca-Cola anymore because they’re taking money out of artists pockets. And it’s just it’s just here. And, you know, it’s a fine-tooth comb. I’m really trying to not use it in any sense, but I also feel like I’ll probably be left behind for whatever period artists are still in charge of the AI. But I think the end game in 15 years, maybe sooner, you’ll just come home from work and your little AI Apple TV box or whatever will have just generated new songs and new shows and new movies and new content for you. The AI influencers that are already coming out, you know, like selling products and things that’s, you know, most of it looks a little janky and it’s not quite there. But, you know, this is the Steamboat Willie era of AI. Yeah. Unlike Steamboat Willie, where humans had to learn to draw better and do photography better and change the way we do multi-layered plates that Disney invented and eventually gets to CGI and from Toy Story 1 to Toy Story 4, the difference. This is I feel like every three months there’s something else popping up on YouTube or Instagram where it’s like, look how much better generative AI is already. Look how much better audio for AI is. I don’t I don’t feel it’s going to do us any good. And I think at some point we have to ask the question of why do we want this other than cost savings? Why do we want to decimate an industry that so many people have been able to make a living at for so long and entertain and tell stories? And I think there will just be let’s say AI makes 50 percent of the content. And that’s 100 percent of the workforce in entertainment vying for 50 percent of the jobs. And there’s just no scenario that I can see where it increases jobs or adds to the system in a way that benefits all of us.
Ashley
Yeah. And I mean, that’s definitely, I would say a clear-eyed analysis from the film industry’s perspective of the people working in the film industry. And I definitely, I agree with you. I get that, but just from the consumer end, like I, again, I, I feel like I’m like you at a, an optimist, eternal optimist. And you know, it seems to me it would be good for the consumer. If everybody on the planet could write a script, feed it into AI and out would come a produced feature film. We would have a lot more choice. And then the choice, you know, it would be the best filmmakers, the best writers, the best creators. And these tools are going to be developed where you can go through and tweak your AI will generate a scene and you’ll say, oh, a little bigger smile on the actors, you know, you know, a little more perspiration on the forehead. You’ll be able to tweak those scenes. There’ll be people that know how to, how to do. So, I get what you’re saying. There’s going to be a transformation in the industry. And I don’t know. I mean, it feels a lot like going from horses to cars. It’s unfortunate for the people that take care of the horses, but I don’t know. I don’t know what I think the…
Gavin Michael Booth
I think the transition happened a lot faster. And I don’t think that’s what people are prepared for. It’s, you know, every year, every piece of software evolves every year. The cameras get a little better every year and every year, uh, it makes it easier, more accessible for people to make films. The same with cars, you know, one person bought a model T and then 10 and then 20, but like it was, there’s still decades between the first model T and all of America being interconnected by highways. Whereas this is happening so fast. I, I, it’s going to be like blink and, and we missed it and it’s here and it is exciting that anybody can create, but then you’re feeding your, you know, the minute you feed your script into something, you’re teaching it. Eventually it’s not going to need any of us to write the scripts. It’s just going to, like, I’m pretty certain that like chat GPT could write a Hallmark movie right now. And I wouldn’t know the difference compared to like the Hallmark movie that’s been around.
Ashley
And I wonder if that’s true. Yeah.
Gavin Michael Booth
It’s not the high art of storytelling. And there’s a very specific formula that I, and so I just fear all of that, that the writing assistant jobs going away, that it’ll just be chat UBT, writes the first draft and the writer comes in and does a pass on it, but like the man hours and the respected salaries and things that, that have always been associated with these things will just erode when they’re like, Oh, well I, my $20 subscription to this AI thing can just do that for me now. And like, I’m not going to pay somebody to write a log line, a synopsis and tag lines. I can just sit here and in minutes have hundreds of options to choose from. So, it’s super exciting tools. And I, again, I’m not a special effects artist, but every once in a while, I’m like, man, like that. I got a boom mic in the shot. I got to pay somebody to paint that out, you know? And that’s, that’s part of what you budgeted, but now I go like, I don’t have to pay that person. So is that person going to do for work when everybody doesn’t need them anymore? So it’s, it’s a fine line because it, yeah, the tech and what AI is doing for medicine and for, for computing power and AI has AI in society has so many amazing purposes. Uh, it’s just the, the impact at art that, and it’s just going to make everything so uncertain, because at some point studios will just say like, it’s a fraction of the cost to make this AI content. And you know what? Most people don’t seem to mind. They’re just going to keep watching whatever we give them. Why would we pay all this money for humans to make things? And then eventually why would Canon or Red or Panavision keep making cameras? If they only have 20% of the market left to sell it to, you know, or the camera suddenly costs 40 grand instead of four grand, does, does everything go backwards? So, I’m optimistic that the goal is to just keep making movies and telling stories like dream crusher and reward where we’re doing something different that AI can’t do yet. That’s my whole thing. Every time people go like, Hey, I can’t do that. I’m like, you have to say yet at the end of that sentence. Cause in a year to five years, who knows who knows what’s going to happen. Listen, maybe, maybe I fall in love with it. Maybe somebody shows me a fully AI feature next year and I go like, you know what? This is better than Shawshank. Like, this is now my favorite movie of all time. Like I am open to the idea that it could lead to the greatest revolution of entertainment.
Ashley
Yeah, exactly. But boy, if it creates something better than Shawshank in our lifetime, you’re right. I’m giving it up. There’s no need to keep going if it can accomplish that. So, what’s next for you? What are you working on now? And what’s going to be your next project after DreamCrusher?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s talks of future seasons of dream crusher. Um, that’s a little up in the air, but, but hopefully, and, uh, I have a feature film called Sydney versus Sean that we’re, we’re, you know, at the very, very tail end of posts. That’s a, I call it an unromantic comedy. It’s written by Ryan Powers and stars Ryan and Janelle parish from Pretty Little Liars and TR Knight from Grey’s Anatomy. Uh, it’s about a couple getting together to sign their divorce papers only the notary is late showing up and they kind of fall into all their old trappings and arguments and, and the camera sort of seamlessly weaving between the past and present to bring the audience up to speed of everything that this couple has been through to get to where they are a little on the sweeter side of my work. And then I have another movie called primary that I wrote and I’m producing with my friend Sean. He’s a musician known as 10 kills the pack, a folk musician. And we, we wrote this, uh, very outside of the box sci-fi movie about a band on tour that that’s a witness is the birth of a new color on planet earth and how this color changes everything we know about society and religion and life on planet earth. So, it’s part music film. It’s part, sci-fi it’s part found footage. It’s just kind of all over the place. It’s something that we just sell finance and have been putting together in the background. So those, those two are shot and you know, in posts and getting close to being ready. And then after that, who knows? Back to the pitching and hustling and trying to figure out what comes next.
Ashley
Yeah. Gotcha. So how can people see Dream Crusher? And also Last Call while we’re talking, we talked a little bit about that today. So how can people see last call? And then what will the release schedule be like for Dream crusher? And how can people find that.
Gavin Michael Booth
Last call, it’s available on Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, and Tubi with a subscription in the US. In Europe, it’s on HBO Europe. And in Canada, it’s on Prime Video and Tubi. And for Dream Crusher, you can see it on reveal.net. Again, it’s free to set up an account. It works like Tubi. You’ll watch some ads in the content, but everything else is free. And if you want to participate in the contest side of things and trying to take your shot at the $100,000 prize, you go to rewardseries.tv, and you sign up there for your investigator portal. So, it’s sort of a two-step thing. It gets confused for some people. Reward, reveal, both are words, you know, like sort of one syllable. But yeah, those are the two things. Rewardseries.tv and then reveal.net to set up your account. But there are, if you’re on Roku or Firestick or Apple, like there is a app for reveal for all of those same as any other streaming platform.
Ashley
Okay. Perfect. Perfect. That should be easy enough. And I just like to wrap up the interview by asking the guests, is there anything you’ve seen recently that you thought was great? HBO, Hulu, Netflix, anything you’ve been watching that you can recommend to our mostly screenwriting audience?
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, as a one-take fan, I got to go with Adolescence. I still have the final episode to watch, but it uses the single take wonderfully because the acting performances and the tension that they’re putting into is excellent. But above everything else, I’m sure this is most people’s answers is severance. Severance is just knocking it out of the park with originality. It feels like a 70s David Bowie movie like Man Who Fell to Earth mixed with Twin Peaks, mixed with Lost. And it’s just so inventive and different, and they switch up every few episodes kind of perspective and style of filming. And it’s that thing where they drip the answers into your lap enough to ease your frustration and then throw three more mysteries at you at the same time. But emotionally impactful. Season two just wrapped up, and I’m not going to spoil it for anybody, but like, wow, it’s some amazing television.
Ashley
Okay. Perfect. Yes. Severance. I think that’s on Apple TV. Where is Adolescence playing?
Gavin Michael Booth
Adolescence is Netflix. Netflix.
Ashley
Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Those are great recommendations. And what’s the best way for people to just keep up with what you’re doing? A Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, anything you’re comfortable sharing, I will round up for the show notes.
Gavin Michael Booth
Any of those just if you if you Google Gavin Michael Boothall my socials will probably come up But I’m pretty active on insta and Facebook and Twitter and blue sky and threads a little bit, but not as much there’s too many social media platforms to keep up with these days.
Ashley
Yeah, no kidding. So well, thank you, Gavin, for coming on and talking with me. Excellent interview. Good luck with your future projects and hopefully I’ll have you back on. We can talk about those in the future.
Gavin Michael Booth
Absolutely. Well, let’s come back.
Ashley
Perfect. Well take it easy. Bye.
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We can provide an analysis on features or television scripts. We also do proofread without any analysis. We will also look at a treatment or outline and give you the same analysis on it. So, if you’re looking to vet some of your project ideas this is a great way to do it. We will also write your logline and synopsis for you. You can add this logline and synopsis writing service to an analysis or you can simply purchase this service as a standalone product. As a bonus if your screenplay gets a recommend or a consider from one of our readers you get to list the screenplay in the SYS select database which is a database for producers to find screenplays and a big part of our SYS select program. Producers are in the database searching for material on a daily basis so it’s another great way to get your material in front of them. As a further bonus if your script gets a recommend from one of our readers your screenplay will get included in our monthly best of newsletter. Each month we send out a newsletter that highlights the best screenplays that have come through our script analysis service. This is monthly newsletter that goes out to our list of over 400 producers who are actively looking for material. So again, this is another great way to get your material out there. So, if you want a professional evaluation of your screenplay at a very reasonable price check out www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/consultants. Again that’s www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/consultants.
So, this month I ended up interviewing Gavin since his TV show Dream Crusher is available now. I thought it would be nice just to publish this episode people could hear him and then go watch his episode. But next month I’m going to go back and I’m going to publish the episode the interview I did with Pierto Chieto who is an animation writer and producer. He’s done a number of animated animation projects again both as a writer and producer. So, he has a lot of insight into this whole production process. I actually have an animation script I wrote a few years ago that I’ve been kicking around. I always really liked the script. I thought it was a really fun script but I don’t know anything about the animation production workflow. So, I just thought it’ll be an interesting conversation for me to have. So hopefully all of us can learn something together. But if you have any interest in learning sort of the animation workflow how animation is written and then ultimately produced definitely keep an eye out for that episode next month. That’s the show. Thank you for listening.