Writing the Story 1 - The Start of the Series

At the start of 2007, Dane and I spent a day writing as many rough concepts for a Rhubarb Zoo webseries as we could. The idea to create an ongoing, regularly updated series came about when my dad asked if we had planned to have any regular content on the site. Our plan had been to go into hiding for three years or so to make a short film, but we liked his idea so we decided to do both. In true Ruzu fashion the series, which was originally meant to be simple and short, quickly spiraled out of control and became the single focus of our endeavours for the next several years.

These were the two final concepts that were settled on as a starting point –

• A race of people that live underwater uproot themselves and board giant airships to dwell above the ocean at the behest of a megalomaniac leader.

• In an amish-type society, every person is taken away to have a sense removed every tenth year of their life. The story picks up after the protagonist is 20 and is set to be taken away again.

We decided to spend a week on each, fleshing out characters and creating a story structure. After the two weeks we would decide which we liked more.

The first week went by in a flash – we had settled on a rough story and had even started the character concepts. It was fairly film-noir – had a love interest, lots of cool imagery, and a bizarre twist which explained why people had become depressed and suicidal (because their source of love was in the ocean). We had a lot of fun with it, and it felt strange uprooting ourselves to work on concept number 2.

After the second week we sat down and decided which path to take. The decision was, in a way, life defining. The outcome would determine what the next big chunk of our lives would be like – and impact on where we would go after that. After a moment of uneasiness we discovered that we both far preferred the ‘sense’ concept we had just worked on – we had introduced another idea to the original concept that seemed to make the possibilities we had with the story endless (for reasons we can’t tell you).

So we got to work on writing it.

J

































Early concept art for 'Fin', protaganist of the first story idea