Welcome to the production blog of season two of CON! I’m Amy Suto, the executive producer/writer/creator/coffee expert here. Maybe I can convince my showrunning partner Jen Enfield-Kane (whom I’ve affectionately nicknamed Jenfield) to chime in as well about how we wrote CON and what production is like moving forward.
If you want to read about season one’s production, I did some blogging on AmySuto.com (my blog and coffee recipe archival):
- Writing Season One of CON see also: unnecessary GIFs!
- On Set of Season One of CON
- The Brainstorming of Season Two.
- The Trailer and Post-Production of CON (along with some handy dandy time management tips)
The Writing of CON: Season Two
Jen and I start as we usually do when we’re cracking web series and whatnot: we go out and buy bagels and hang out at bars. For research. Of course.
Then, when we’re ready to set aside the carbs and booze get serious, throwing around ideas and seeing what sticks. We tell stories, talk about what we’d like to see, and decide on a storyline while doodling our characters on a whiteboard.
After that, we get into breaking acts and beats, and we put up the good ol’ notecards all over my apartment wall. We’ll bring in some unfortunate souls who we’ll pitch to and see how they react to the character development, plot twists, and jokes about moonshine we have planned.
Once we’ve taken another break for some more carbs or german-vegetarian sausages (Wurstkuche in the Arts District was one of our go-to break spots) we’ll hit the outline again and assign beats main conflicts, establish what time of day it is, and make sure we don’t have any overall consistency problems. Once during breaking season two, we had a scene in the middle of the episode that happened at night because it was sketchy as hell. However, both scenes before and after were like morning scenes so it didn’t make sense in the timeline. That’s easy to miss unless you do extensive outlining first.
One of the hardest parts of breaking a story is deciding on a character’s dynamic, both with the rest of the characters as well as how they are controlled by their own personal agenda. We’ll have meetings just to talk about villains or dynamics or the various
Rewriting, Rewriting, and Tacos
Rewrites come in many, endless waves. In July, our rewrites were big picture and focused on “DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?” or “HOW MUCH SEX AND VIOLENCE CAN WE GET AWAY WITH ON COLLEGE TV?”
In the past few months, we’ve moved from universal notes, and zeroed in on issues of character consistency, dialog adjustments, and feasibility (can we make this on like zero dollars?)
Jenfield and I are meeting to do our last round of large rewrites before we’re able to send the scripts to the actors and move forward with auditions. However, the scripts won’t be locked yet: we still need to get them approved by the station and then make final dialog changes at a table read. After that, we’ll lock the scripts and only change them based on changes with locations or producing issues that come up, as well as some minor tweaks on set.
Then we’ll get tacos.
Follow Our Journey
We want to bring you on this journey of production and food recommendations with us:
Now on to casting!
-Amy
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