thejazzemu

Pilot Artwork and some more BTS

Added 2022-06-22 16:01:53 +0000 UTC

I wanted to share with you some of the art design from the Pilot, just to show you how much effort and attention to detail went into the world-building by everyone on the team. The album covers were all put together by yours truly ('tis I), frantically the night before the shoot. I was firmly instructed that no image could be under copyright so they are all composited from free stock images I pilfered from various places. I love stock libraries; for the bizarre variety you can find on them, and the sheer humanitarian spirit of sharing (often quite high-production value) photoshoots for free, for people like myself to mangle. My personal favourite is Colin Fongle, mainly because I am stunned that anyone would take this picture, and upload it for others to use. What purpose could it possibly serve apart from the one I selected for it?

The movie posters were designed by the brilliant Henri Holz at Blink, who took my specific - and in some places horrific - brief in her stride, and produced these with love and gusto. The names of the actors on the posters were all from suggestions from the cast and crew.

You can also see the character bio for Pastrischa, from the pitch deck that I lovingly crafted over several months. I've put up the first draft too (with Meryl in pride of place, naturally), so you can see some context for how things developed over the months that I spent writing and correcting the ideas for it. I had to do one of slides for every character, as well as slides that describe the tone and style of the show, and some visual references. It took forever but it was a good exercise for me in narrowing down ideas, tone, and seeing how characters interlinked with each other.

You'll notice that one of the movie posters contains a reference to the goblin Johnk. Anyone who has seen my live show will be familiar with his loveable and villainous antics. The original pitch of this pilot actually featured Johnk as a main character, who I intended to be animated. I actually wrote an entire draft episode (30mins!) in which he was a main character alongside Jazz. I was hoping to delve into his tortured backstory as the forgotten fourth Rice Krispy boy, and dig into who he really is. Sadly for the purposes of the pilot, it was too expensive to animate, not to mention unpitchable to channels. So Johnk has been shelved. For now. One day he'll be back on screen, I feel sure of it. Crowd-funded full feature-film following Johnk's exploits? There have been worse ideas.

I hope you're all having a promiscuous Wednesday.

Love JE xxx