Casting.

 

Recruiting actors is important. Jellybabies has the following excuses for refusal:

• For some roles, two actors, a child and an adult work together. Selection in these roles might depend more on whether two actors resemble one another, than their performance.

• The time commitment.  We don’t use extras, we only have full-time actors. Everyone works:

1.    4 months – Children

2.    8 months - Adults

• The education commitment: Everyone in the company will be in education, learning all the skills we all need to multi-task. Jellybabies is a summer school, an after school club and an apprenticeship.

  (There is a possibility that we will work directly with some drama schools and clubs in some places.)

 

Happily, we want actors. If we asked anybody else for this kind of involvement, they’d say no.

 

Under no circumstances make any of this information part of recruiting. This information is to be leaked (told as a rumour) after filming commences because it sets the mood for the first series. In fact, during the course of filming this series, we play a game, whereby we begin to pass important script information to all the cast through the work groups. At first, actors read for many parts and wait to be told their roles, however, while they zero in in the parts they want to play, we are choosing the actors who will play the roles which demand specific personal skills. These are:

 

Belle

Beau

Ronnie

Tyrus

Jurgan +

Theseus

 

At the moment when we announce who plays the other 4, we tell the actors who play Belle and Beau (all 40 of them) that only one of the two twins exists.

 

This is so that, even after doing the Alesia training exercise that we run by choosing the main characters, we still have a mystery. Why we need a mystery is that 7 characters are filming backwards:

 

Theseus

Kiera

Tyrus

Sky

Dorian

Echidna +

Aaron

 

These people know the end of the story and the rest of the cast must, necessarily, talk to them about it. However, this section of the cast are not allowed to tell them anything. The aim is to bring the whole cast, across all 20 versions to a moment when find out the plot on their own so they understand the story we are trying to tell. It is important that the cast understand how the audience are going to feel once they realise the complexity of the show. We have to maintain a sense of the intrigue, without it ever being unnatural.

 

The whole cast learns all of this at the end of filming series 1. This is to protect ourselves if anybody drops out. By the time we’ve done series 1, we’ll either be good enough to retain cast members or we will have failed.

 

After this period we will film for another six and a half years, working from the back, the front and episode 70 (Kiera's youngest moment), which is why the entire core script needs to be written before we start.

 

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Adult and child actors.

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Jurgan is played by an old man until Episode 60 and by a young teenager from EP61 – EP100. This is because Kiera became pregnant after she took the Jelly Pill. Jurgan goes into a cocoon at the end of Series 6 and is born again at the beginning of Series 7. This is the moment when the family become famous.

To save time, filing, we change the actor who plays either Kiera or Theseus.

In my story the parents age like this:

Theseus – 24-14

Kiera – 17-10-13

If we change the actor who plays Theseus in Episode 61 we can release the show earlier. Other shows can have the wife being older than the husband – (and/or the wife being the geneticist!)

 

Filming takes 7 years. The show will run for 2 seasons per year for 5 years. We release Episode 1 as we are filming Episodes 34 and 67. (2/3 of the filming) (Sooner if we change Theseus or Kiera)

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Filming.

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20 studios will each make parts of the sets.

Much of the sets will be re-usable because lots of sets, indoor and outdoor could be anywhere.

Much of the sets will be co-usable. We don’t need 20 schools, for example, just, one. Each set could build a classroom. The rest could build duplicates out of cardboard and green curtains. This means we have to coordinate set changes precisely, and, we CAN make sets to an extremely high quality. We are also a long running show and so our sets and props will get a lot of use.

 

Costumers:

For crowd scenes, The costumers are the most important people on set. Jellybabies films crowd scenes in five takes, each with the same actors, with different costumes and scripts. For every take, the actor has a list of directions, but she follows a laser pen light on the floor with a particular design. In this way, we derive 20 perfect backdrops.

It is the Costumer which has the biggest calculation: Five styles which can work on ? Settings, in ? Shots, for ? Seconds.

 

Studio set up.

Sets have to be exact sized spaces. There will be a set kit which we bulk buy, these will be set up in exactly the same way:

 

Lights and Camera.

Each studio, for every shot will configure the lights and camera’s to a shot configuration as directed by the director. The director can be in any studio. All the directors will design the kit before we build.

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Call-sheets

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A call sheet is an actor’s job list. It tells them when and where they are filming. Every actor in Jellybabies plays two roles in two different studios. Suppose Actor 1 plays a main part and she is in 95 shows. She also plays a secondary part which lasts for 5 shows, in another version of Jellybabies and she acts in a different language. It is the same as an actor who plays in 50 episodes in one version and 50 episodes in another version. This is a broad calculation, but basically, once the script is written, we list all the characters from the biggest to the smallest and fold the list over so that the parts match up: 1-9, 2-8, 3-7, 4-6, 5-5.

 

This has the further benefit that the worst linguists get the biggest parts, and all of the actors in middle sized parts have the distinct benefit of being a big part of two shows.

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Jellybabies Academy

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Actors train as crew, crew train as actors.

This is because of the number of children in the team and because of the length of time it will take for us all to get paid. There have to be qualifications after all the work in case we never sell the shows. I thought from the beginning we should aim to sell 10/20 shows to break even (make no money) and if we can sell more than 10, we develop the props better, make some of the movies which are in the show into real movies, build some of the computer applications, the toys and the other products which are in the script (although, perhaps not the immortality pill itself), not as props, but as real products to sell. Hint: Episode 85 is set on Mars – maybe we will have the money to buy Mars?

 

Everybody learns at least 1 language.

No reason!

 

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Spin on shows.

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A 'spin off' is a show which uses characters or ideas from another show (Cheers + Fraser, The big bang theory + Young Sheldon). We might make some spin-on shows. We would write a kids show about Forest Gate in the year before Jellybabies starts, and release it at the same time as Jellybabies, but a different version (dubbed) and on another channel. It would take the audience a series just to find out that the shows were the same and then the story would have caught up. We can so the same for Rosewood Creek. The audience do not find out the truth about RC until mid-way through Series 3.

 

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The Flash forward / Flashback.

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My favourite part of the whole show

Episode 75 is shown in the place of Episode 65. Episode 65 is shown in the place Episode 75. The audience will have half a year to guess what happens in the meantime. Only one of the twins (Beau and Belle) appears in episode 75 because the real twin recovers from multiple personality disorder between those two shows.

 

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