30 September 2008

Five Years of Watchers

I'm relatively new to Blogger so most folks don't know me well, but for the past five years I've been involved in a virtual spin-off series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that we called Watchers. Basically, our concept was simple: at the end of Chosen, Rupert Giles and Willow Rosenberg gather the newly chosen slayers and the few remaining watchers to rebuild the Watchers Council in Cleveland, Ohio.

What wasn't simple was the scope of the project. CN Winters, whose idea this all was, came up with the idea that Watchers would be presented to the world just as if it were a regular one hour series as seen on television, with one exception...the story would be told in prose format. But that means, aside from writing great copy, we did sounds, videos, music and thousands...I mean thousands...of screen caps, all to create the illusion that you were "watching" a television program and not merely reading something on the internet. Each episode had a teaser and four acts, which came to about 45k to 65k words of text. And each season would have a full 24 episodes, sometimes we even went beyond that and made two part episodes for the season finales.

We started in October 2003 and have now aired part one of the three part series finale called Generations. Five years and 123 episodes, a spin-off of our spin-off called Restoration and thousands of fan who are just as rabid as the most BtVS fan out there. And even though I've been involved in this project since its inception, I am still in awe at what we have accomplished. And there are a lot of our fans out there who are convinced that Joss Whedon is using us for ideas, since a lot of what happens in his comics are things that have previous happened on Watchers.

I invite everyone to, if you haven't already done so, take a look at the website and see the wonder that is Watchers.

And now, I present to you one of the most ambitious videos we have ever done. Five Years of Watchers. (The caps are all actual screen caps that appeared in the episodes.)



--->Susan

3 comments:

Dan said...

It's been a lot of fun working with you on this, Susan! May we continue to tell stories together in the future.

Rob Kidman said...

Yes, what a wonderful five years. I've been with WaTchers from the relative beginning, finding the site just a few episodes into Season One, and when the hunt went out for new talent, I just had to jump in.

I'm so grateful that I was able to get the chance to be apart of this incredible series, and meet some truly awesome people who I consider friends for life.

It'll be sad when it's over, but I'm looking forward to working on our "special project", and revisiting WaTchers a la DVD movie one day :)

Truman Carr said...

You guys have been the best.

--->Susan

 
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