AustinvilleTone

"A Fine Day in Austinville"

Some Notes About Tone

I know I wrinkled my nose at some ideas at our first meeting for 'tonal reasons', so I realized I should try to set down what kind of tone I'm going for with this project.

1. Don't Blow Up the City

We have to respect that all of these sketches happen over the course of the same day. This means that some of the more extreme actions that would be possible (desirable, even) in an isolated comedy sketch -- say, ending a sketch with someone running out into the streets carrying a chain saw and intent on mass murder -- are best avoided. Or, more precisely, we shouldn't introduce the chainsaw-wielding madman unless we're willing to let that event have its natural effects on the rest of the series (which would be sizeable and generally unhappy). And god knows I don't want to do that kind of heavy lifting, so Mr. Chainsaw is out.

2. Don't Break Reality

All of these sketches should reflect a consistent reality; put another way, they all 'occupy' a consistent universe with consistent and comprehensible rules. If the universe feels arbitrary and inscrutable, then most of the audience's fun of puzzling out a nonchronological narrative is gone.1 And that means we should limit the number of elements that break reality. As I understand it, we have only three impossible elements so far: Jesus shows up; the SRV statue talks; a house is haunted. Improbable elements are great, but let's try to keep the number of outright impossibities low.

3. Don't Be Miserable

I want this to be light in tone, to what extent we can manage. I respect League of Gentleman, but I don't want to spend large amounts of time in the macabre and bizarre environs of Royston Vasey. Try to think of characters in terms of what they want, not what they don't want. Make them get themselves into trouble, rather than avoiding stuff. And don't introduce murder, misery, and mayhem unless you have sound story reasons for doing so.2

4. Don't Tie Things Into a Big Knot

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -- Plato3

This is a show about sprawl.

Put another way, it's about that moment when a kid realizes (and soon forgets) that all the people around him have lives of their own. With Austinville, we can explore so many characters, and crisscross back and forth across the day so much, that we get to convey the sheer scale of the world we live in. This is not a show about how we're all tidily interconnected. (That show would be Six Degrees.)

What does that mean in practical terms?

It means the show is open-ended. We explore characters, and places, and more characters, and more places. We can leave plot hooks and pay them off later, but our main focus is on making sure individual sketches work on their own.

This goal matches the viral-web-video form nicely. People will probably see a single video out of context, and (if they like that one) might watch the others in some arbitrary order. And it's best not to have to say "we must make <x> videos or we won't reach the end of the story".4 :)

So this is a show that's going to be messy. It's going to sprawl out in all sorts of directions and -- this is key -- it will not neatly bring together all the characters in one big, climatic scene. Yes, our characters will encounter each other throughout the day; yes, there will be scenes with impact; we're just not hell-bent on tying things into a bow at the end.

Footnotes

1 See also: LOST.

2 <wanky_and_philosophical> To be uber-precise, I'm not so much harping on positivity so much as observing that this format will magnify negativity. By point (2), this format leans more towards realism than normal sketch comedy, which makes it harder for the audience to distance itself from miserable events. And by point (1), if something miserable happens, the audience will naturally think of its miserable consequences as well.

3 Yes, it's a terribly cliched quote. But it's appropriate here, so: deal.

4 Now, if we were making a film (or made a film based on this material), the open-ended thing wouldn't work. (Or to put it another way, it only worked once: Slacker.) We'd want to build up to a climactic event, focus the scenes on moving the larger story forward, and possibly abandon this theme of 'sprawl'.