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Calendar Events / Announcements '10 II / Re: Dark Shadows Caption Novels
« on: November 17, 2010, 08:53:57 PM »
Yeah, I remember you. I think I even saw you at the 2000 Fest. Caption This folded around 2004. The stuff we wrote on Caption This (all of which I still have, incidentally) was funny, but it was impossible to understand unless you'd just seen the episode. And it was a dozen people talking at once, some of whom had never seen the show.
If you looked at the links above, you can see it's come a long way since then. Now it's written in such a way that it's not just a series of one-off jokes, it's designed so that you can (ideally) be able to follow the story from beginning to end without ever having seen the actual show.
There have actually been three phases to it all. Phase I was the stuff we wrote on Caption This (which covered episodes 300 to about 1040. Phase II was when I couldn't write on Caption This any more. I just capped the rest of the series to Episode 1245 by storyboarding an episode with photos, watching the episode, and then writing caps around it from beginning to end.
This was good, and got me to the end of the series (with a different ending for both the 1840 and 1841 stories!), but eventually I wanted to do the Black and White shows. Before that, I capped House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows in 2003. To try to make those as good as possible, I didn't just watch and then cap later, I worked off a screenplay, to try to get every little nuance possible in there. When I started doing the Black and Whites in late 2003, I did it Phase 2 style for the first 40 episodes, but then started doing it HODS/NODS style, using transcripts (which meant making transcripts, since none are out there). When I got to Episode 300, and made a full circle of the series, it was obvious that the most recent stuff was much better than the original stuff, so I started re-capping episodes that had been done in 1999. It's up to Episode 683 now, with the added benefit that I have a full transcript of every episode from Episode 40-ish to Episode 583 (I might have to see about releasing those sometime too).
If you looked at the links above, you can see it's come a long way since then. Now it's written in such a way that it's not just a series of one-off jokes, it's designed so that you can (ideally) be able to follow the story from beginning to end without ever having seen the actual show.
There have actually been three phases to it all. Phase I was the stuff we wrote on Caption This (which covered episodes 300 to about 1040. Phase II was when I couldn't write on Caption This any more. I just capped the rest of the series to Episode 1245 by storyboarding an episode with photos, watching the episode, and then writing caps around it from beginning to end.
This was good, and got me to the end of the series (with a different ending for both the 1840 and 1841 stories!), but eventually I wanted to do the Black and White shows. Before that, I capped House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows in 2003. To try to make those as good as possible, I didn't just watch and then cap later, I worked off a screenplay, to try to get every little nuance possible in there. When I started doing the Black and Whites in late 2003, I did it Phase 2 style for the first 40 episodes, but then started doing it HODS/NODS style, using transcripts (which meant making transcripts, since none are out there). When I got to Episode 300, and made a full circle of the series, it was obvious that the most recent stuff was much better than the original stuff, so I started re-capping episodes that had been done in 1999. It's up to Episode 683 now, with the added benefit that I have a full transcript of every episode from Episode 40-ish to Episode 583 (I might have to see about releasing those sometime too).