Waleed Ovase

Kurt Sutter wrote a marvelous piece a while back which I linked to about him being the show runner for Sons of Anarchy, which has been renewed for another season.  In the same spirit, I’ve decided to write about running Doctor Who: Legends of a Time Lord one of the highest downloaded shows at Giant Gnome Productions.

In most respects, Doctor Who: Legends of a Time Lord, is just like any other production in Hollywood, except, that nothing in it is visual.  So perhaps it’s just like any other production at NPR.  Nevertheless, the principles behind running the show are just the same.

As the producer, or show runner, it is my job to: collaborate with the writer on his script, edit his script for any typos or plot holes, put out a casting call out to the major voice actor networks, pick the voice actors, secure a responsible and trustworthy post producer, get the script to the voice actors, get the voice actors to actually record their lines on a deadline, get those lines to the post producer who puts the show together, listen to the final show, critique the final show, and then finally put the show up on the web.

All in all, this process takes nearly 2 or even 3 months from start to finish.  As such, I’ve cut this process in half by eliminating the casting call portion of the job, since as Executive Producer of Giant Gnome Productions, I know many amazing voice actors and can rely on them for to fill any voice acting holes in scripts.  For ongoing series, and recurring characters, it’s always nice to ask if they’d like to be in the production, but in the end, it’s always easier to “auto-cast” or as some would call it “ninja-cast”[although I dislike this usage with the intensity of 4,000,000 suns and radiation filled nebulae] the actors thus cutting out the usual 2-6 process of casting and securing the cast for the show.

A peculiar thing happened with Doctor Who: Legends of a Time Lord, the cast was bigger, and since it is based off of a British Production, there needed to be a fully English Accented Cast for most of the show.  And as Nick Armstrong, one of Giant Gnome’s original producers and writers often put it, “I hate phony accents.  We need to find someone who has a genuine accent.”  This proved to be far more difficult than I imagined, especially as the show progressed.

The Premiere “Episode” was broken into 3 parts, mimicking the Doctor Who of old, in that the plot and episode arcs would take many weeks, even months to resolve.  As such, the first Plot Arc took 3 episodes, or 3 months to finish.  Furthermore, the cast was not as large as I’d feared, and finding good English accents only took me as far as many of the people I cast in other Giant Gnome shows, such as Laura Frechette.  Furthermore, the actual cast of each of these smaller shows was much smaller than any larger show that I’d done, which gave me more time to find the actors that had the best accent.

With the Christmas Special, things went a little Wonky Donky. The script was late, no offense to Ryan Cassavaugh, the amazing script writer who did a marvelous job on this Christmas tale, it required a huge cast set in the heart of Wales, and it was over an hour long, which meant that I had to hurry and get all the lines to John Noble, the post producer, so he could finish his job in time for Christmas.

To finish this show on time, I had to pick some brains.  Enter Brad Smith, one of the actors in Episodes 1 through 3 of Doctor Who: Legends of a Time Lord. He’s the post producer for a not-so-little-show called Second Shift.  A bloody amazing production, Brad Smith knows quite a few talented voice actors that can manage an English Accent.  He referred me to some talented actors and actresses, and I was able to fill quite a few roles with his help.  Thank you very much Brad!

The script for THE BLACK PETER[As is the name of the Christmas Special], required a few children.  For them, I got really really lucky.  It required 3 boys, of differing ages, and one girl of about 16.  For the girl I was able to get April Sadowski, an amazing voice actress with a voice of gold.  For the boys, there was much luck involved.  Michael Hudson is one the key people over at Star Trek: The Hidden Frontier, or whatever new incarnation of the Star Trek Franchise they’re doing at this moment.  I was talking him into voice acting for the Christmas special, and it turned out he had 3 boys that were just the right ages to fill the roles needed!  How lucky did I get there?!  3 youths with Cockney accents that were just right to fill the roles.

And such as that, I was able to fill all the roles needed, though with some unmentioned difficulty and lots of rushing.  Much thanks go out to John Noble, Ryan Cassvaugh, and the entire Cast of Characters.  Your performances were great, and you all did amazing.  I look forward to hopefully working with all of you again in the future.

Just for reference.  I started the Christmas Special hunting for voice actors in early November, and was able to get the show done 3 days before Christmas.  The promotional trailer done 6 days before Christmas.

We’re Professionals.  Don’t try this at home.

Downtime is great when you can curl up with a book, cup of tea, and perhaps your cat, and sit and read a good book, watch a movie, or indulge yourself in other ways which we won’t discuss here.  Usually downtime doesn’t involve your website going down for hours, while you frantically try to save the database through the hard to use and not very user friendly back end MySQL databases.

Which is just a fine way to spend some downtime, especially since this is my winter break and that type of stuff shouldn’t happen.  But in the end, the website is back up and everything, that being Wordpress, is happy as a clam in the wide open ocean.

Let’s go through a rundown of what exactly happened, and how I [Who you may now call "THE MAN" for actually getting everything back up] miraculously fixed everything.

1. I decide to write a “Christmas Special of Doctor Who is Out at GiantGnome.Com” post, so I log into Wordpress and start thinking about the post, while slightly crying inside about the lack of viewing of my blog.
2. I cry for a good 15 minutes while I stare at the page views for the past couple days.
3. Keep crying as I see there is a plugin that needs updating.
4. Ohs noes! Plugin Menu won’t load?!!?!  That sucks.
5. Go through Tools to upgrade it!
6. Fatal Crash of Wordpress.  Everything goes down.
7. Site says something close to, “Site is under maintenance.  Please check back in a minute”
8. Well that sucks, as the sobs of sadness die down [no one loves me].
9. I try the above a couple more times, to no avail.
10. I then freak out at how my site is crashed, and I probably have to reinstall.
11. So I do a manual “re-install” or rather, just a re uploading of the core Wordpress files through FTP.
12. That does absolutely nothing.
13. So, I go through phpMyAdmin and get the database files downloaded.
14. Wipe WaleedOvase.Com Clean of Wordpress
15. Re-install Wordpress
16. Import the SQL data back into the a database.
17. Rejoice as to how everything is now back up.
18. Vonderbar!  Everything works.  The World has agreed to call me the “THE MAN” for my services to all of the…2 viewers of WaleedOvase.Com

That doesn’t sound like much, but that much crying really took a lot out of me.  I feel weak after all that crying.  And don’t forget freaking out.  I really freaked out.

But everything is back up and running, and Wordpress and I are once again best friends! YAY the world is perfect once more.

For right now, I’m going to blame all of this on the fact that I was listening to Jethro Tull at the time…

I’ll get that other post written later…

A while ago, Drew Gallagher [the man behind the code], found an interesting idea, and decided to make one himself, and of course, to make it better.

Thus, Bibliothek was born!  An amazing idea if there ever was one.  In my old age of under 40, I always forget what I read, and more importantly I forget what the cover of the book looks like, as I frantically try to find it to return it to the library.

Bibliothek solves all these problems!  Every single one! Yay for Bilbiothek!  It catalogs what I read, includes a small review of what I thought of the book, and even automatically includes the cover art of the book!  Isn’t that nifty?

CHECK IT OUT NOW!

Cool Beans.