Story ideas

[Mystara]

Hi all,

Apologies for the delay in writing this up.

A week or two ago, we had a chat via mumble about possible ideas for the "story" of the documentary. Here are the possibilities that we discussed:

How we made the Convention

My concern with this one is that there's not really a great deal we can talk about. We basically faced three real obstacles in putting the convention on:

1. People - But I think to go into details regarding people that got in our way could have legal consequences.

2. Admin - But, as I've said before, exciting as it was to write to the Inland revenue to reset the accounting date so that the CT600 can be sent within the requisite three months of sending the DS01 to companies house in order to avoid having to deal with the annual return, I'm not sure that's the sort of thing that anyone will have the slightest interest in.

3. Work - For which there isn't really much to say.

My other concern is that it's very central on me, and I'd rather that the focus wasn't on me on my own.

Convention 2

So the idea for this would be to film the prep and process that we go through in running the second convention.

One minor difficulty is that it makes any second convention significantly harder to run. Unless we were all to individually film ourselves during each step of the process (which I suspect most people would be unwilling to do), it requires us to have someone interviewing each of us at every step of the way, which could make it unmanageable.

It does then tie the success of the documentary to the success of the convention.

Superfans

The idea here would be to focus on the Knightmare community and its various accomplishments over time.

The advantage of this is that it would allow us to significantly open up the story, to talk about all the things that we've done and it would remove the focus from any one person in particular.

One slight downside is that there isn't an obvious end-point (except perhaps the convention?) to the story.

Other comments

We discussed that we should probably take a few weeks to discuss possible ideas. Maybe mid-November.

One thing that came up is that EPIC have a great deal of behind the scenes footage from shooting Knightmare Geek Week. However, it's unclear to us whether they'd be willing to give us this.

[KaM]

My idea centres around the Bring Back Knightmare campaign, which has shown signs of success and has certainly driven enough momentum for the seeds to keep blowing.

The advantage of this is that it has enough scope to draw upon many different projects of interest, for both Knightmare fans specifically and for broader fans of fantasy and TV. It also means we can use a number of core community contributors but without getting too bogged down into personalities.

We could go back to the origins (Atik Atac, etc) and plot a timeline of how the show fitted into a technological shift that has moved away from TV.

The interesting part comes afterwards. Knightmare ends - to much confusion and anguish. Its fan base grows. Inspired by a sense of injustice, they come together to launch a number of Bring Back Knightmare campaigns and commemorative projects, including an RPG. By the turn of the century, TC’s VR project gathers momentum and funding. KMVR is piloted, along with TimeGate (I still believe a large number of fans are unaware of these two projects, and would benefit from understanding them as part of a documentary rather than in isolation, where they tend to get poorer response.)

The RPG efforts become more ambitious, but ultimately fade into the distance, as does the memory of KMVR. We launch Knightmare.com anew, in hope rather than expectation.

But it seemed that all hope was gone.

AND THEN:

• Geek Week.

Knightmare Live.

Knightmare Convention.

We’ve even got a clip of David Rowe saying ‘watch this space’!)

There’s all sorts of stuff we can go into for the latest revival. We can also mention the Crystal Maze Experience as another successful TV revival and Bewilder Box as an example of fantasy interactive gaming.

I don’t think there are too many downsides to this chronological structure. It gives us the opportunity to avoid making it too Knightmare-specific or too single-person orientated. I think it has the sort of ambition to blast the 25th anniversary out of the water, and it’s thoughtful enough that we could probably get some old faces willing to say something that’s not just answering the question ‘what was it like?’ or ‘when’s it coming back?’.

Is there something here that will work?