Completed after weeks of work: a series of dramatic, dialogue-driven, leadership training video scripts I wrote for an international management consulting firm. Take a look there at page 7: that’s a great scene, huh? (Just kidding.)
Bonus: Just spent a few days on the set, watching a great director, dedicated crew, and gifted actors bringing my words to life. Gotta say: that never gets old.
Yes, I pace and write, simultaneously, all day long. I move from MacBook to sketchbook to iPad to popcorn. Especially to popcorn. These 43 seconds demonstrate one thing: a writer’s life makes for kind of a boring video. Oh, well, at least you can see our living room!
Happy to report I’m writing adventure comics again! Just completed a script (scroll to see it) for a deep-diving tale of The Terranauts, the team created by Paul Daly and Don Secrease. Splash page complete. What new menace taunts the ‘nauts? We’ll find out — in a cold, dark place.
Credits on this page: Pencils by Paul Daly. A great composition meticulously realized. Coloring by Don Secrease. Masterful. Look at that water. Copy and inks by me. (Yeah, inks, too. “Walt Jaschek inking” is not something you usually see in any reasonable reality. But I wanted to try it. Let me tell you, inking Paul’s beautiful pencils is daunting. Fun, but daunting. Also, now my carpel tunnel has carpet tunnel.)
Here’s the fully inked page, just before I sent it to Don to do his amazing color stuff.
Bonus! Here is the
TERRANAUTS 2020
“CALL OF COLD DARK, PLACES”
8-Pager
Script by Walt Jaschek
++++++ SPLASH ++++++
CAPTION: In the middle of the Aegean, we locate the anomaly.
CAPTION: We are warned it will sense us.
CAPTION: And will not be friendly.
CAPTION: But we are…
[LOGO] TERRANAUTS 2020
CAPTION: So we dive.
++++++ PAGE 2 ++++++
PANEL 1
A hero shot. Under the surface as Adam and Maria complete the dive, each arcing upward to stabilize, a trail of bubbles indicating their trajectory.
SFX: KER-SPLASH!
ADAM: Read me, Connie?
MARIA: Si, Adam. It’s as if we’re in the same ocean.
ADAM: Very funny, Terranaut.
ADAM: Propulsion mode.
PANEL 2
Having stabilized after the jump, Adam and Maria have activated the propulsion packs: they are jetting swiftly through the water in a downward diagonal,
ADAM: How ‘bout the ship? You with us, Harry?
HARRY (from off): With you and remind you…
PANEL 3
Back in the ship, Harry is standing with his walker, but is surrounded by sensors and screens and sonar, some of which are hologram projections.
HARRY: The sentient is self-replicating.
HARRY: It doubles in size every 6 hours…
HARRY: …along the top of a seamount ridge…
PANEL 4
Close on Maria as, through her mask, her eyes go big. She sees something.
HARRY (through transmitter): …close to surface.
Maria: Madre de Dios!
PANEL 5
In the foreground, a jagged “arm” of ice, coming from bottom right corner of panel and seeming to reach out like a warning finger to our oncoming divers in the distance.
And in alien letters and/or alien balloon, the word: S T O P
++++ PAGE 2 ++++
PANEL 1
And there is the creature in full, as seen by our divers in foreground. They are about a mile away. The creature is a huge, octopus-shaped alien crystal. It sits atop a mountain in a mid-ocean ridge. Gigantic tentacles are growing down the side of the rigge and into the surrounding ocean. It’s half holding on. And half spreading out.
Near the the top of this icy mass a “face” has formed, chunks forming brow and dark holes in the ice forming “eyes.” At the moment, the face is glowering..
Alien balloon: G O A W A Y
PANEL 2
ADAM: Getting this, Harry?
HARRY: Threat projections.
HARRY: Translated by your partner’s telepathy.
PANEL 3
Adam turns to look Maria in the eye, through his goggles and hers.
ADAM: You heard him, Connie. You’re our conduit.
ADAM: Can you get in there…
ADMA: And read its “mind”?
PANEL 4
Maria is “floating” in an all-white panel with no background, to suggest she is in some other place, some netherworld of telepathy. She has her hand to her temple, reading incoming signals.
MARIA: Memory synapsis evasive…
MARIA: Like static…
MARIA: Wait… I have something…
PANEL 5
Outer space. Earth a blue ball in background. A huge comet is hurling in blackness, rocky, irregular, minerals in catching distant sunlight. But attached to the bottom is of the comet much, much smaller version of our creature, an irregular mass of icy lichen on a rock. A piece of it, though, is tugging away.
MARIA (from off): It was using a comet…
MARIA: (from off): As habitat.
MARIA: (from off): On a near-Earth pass…
MARIA: (from off): It tore itself off.
++++ PAGE 4 ++++
PANEL 1
Long shot as the creature crashes hard into the ocean, speed lines indicating its trajectory, a circle of waves where it hits.
MARIA (from off): After eons inert, all it needed was…
PANEL 2
Back in the ship, Harry has taken off his glasses and is holding the bridge of his nose with his fingers. A realization is sinking in.
HARRY: Something to drink.
PANEL 3
As close as we’ve been on the creature yet. We can see its whole “face.” And its “scrowl” is deep.
ALIEN: I DRINK.
ALIEN: I GROW.
ALIEN: I TURN YOUR SEAS…
ALIEN: INTO ME.
PANEL 4
Maria and Adam are jetting through a “cave” – AKA a hole — at the edge of a tentacle. Maria is shining a light into the foreground, where we see floating dead fish and brown, limp sea plants, and a murk of grey gasses.
MARIA: Not good, Adam.
MARIA: Whatever alien chemical stew it’s excreting…
MARIA: …is killing sea life for kilometers.
ADAM: Roger that. “Sentient bad.”
PANEL 5
Adam presses down one of the buttons that make up a grid of rectangles on his high-tech band on his wrist. The button he’s pushing is green.
ADAM: But as I’m sure Harry would agree:
ADAM: “Sentient” does not equal “smart.”
++++++
PAGE 5
PANEL 1
In the ship, Harry is looking at a looking at a screen. It shows a large panel opening at the bottom of the ship. Emerging from the panel are five, high-tech harpoons, pointed down, ready to be launched.
HARRY: It does not.
PANEL 1-A, small inset panel. Closer on the screenshot of the harpoons. Words appear over picture: HARPOONS BOOTING
PANEL 2
Wider shot as Maria and Adam make a loop around a tentacles and shoot off in the opposite direction, away from the creature.
ADAM: Yo, cranky alien! Ever heard of the internet?
You should have used it to search…
“Where Not to Breed Underwater.”
PANEL 3
The creature squints, trying to understand.
ADAM (from off): Top answer:
ADAM (from off): “Above a Geothermic Vent.”
PANEL 5
Adam and Maria are booking out of there, full propulsion speed, diagonally up and away.
CAPTION: They’re all over the ocean floor.
CAPTION: Temps up to 3000 degrees Celcius.
PAGE 6
PANEL 1
Looking up at bottom of the ship. The panel is fully open and the harpoons have been fired. They’re raining down on us.
CAPTION: The vents it’s sitting on have been clogged for a while.
PANEL 2
The high-tech harpoons shoot through the surface of the ocean.
CAPTION: We’re the plumbers.
PANEL 3
Harpoons penetrate the surface of the ocean
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
PANEL 4
Alien: M I S S E D
PANEL 5
Unclogged, the geothermic vents turn into geysers of super-hot water. All around the geysers, the tentacles of the creature are instantly melting and dissolving.
ADAM (from off) Didn’t.
PAGE 7
PANEL 1
The face of the creature as it knows it is doomed. Already the ice of its face is melting and dissolving into streams shooting upward with the hot water.
ALIEN BALLOON: [SCREAMS WHILE DISSOLVING]: AAAA
PANEL 2
ALIEN BALLOON (GETTING SMALLER WHILE THE LIST OF LETTERS GETS LONGER): AAAAAAA
PANEL 3
ALIEN BALLOON (GETTING SMALLER WHILE THE LIST OF LETTERS GETS LONGER): AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
PANEL 4
Now back outside: long shot of the ocean as seen from the ship. A mile or so away, globules of dissolving creature are sending up wide showers of steam. A piece of the ship in foreground suggests scale and distance.
No copy
PANEL 5
Inside the ship, Harry is looking very closely at a censor and tapping on it as he does so.
HARRY: 99.9% decrease in sentience.
ADAM (communicator balloon): Not 100?
HARRY: 1% margin of error.
SFX (as Harry taps on censor screen) TAP TAP TAP
ADAM (communicator balloon): Well, I’ll round up and call that…
PAGE 8
PANEL 1
The surface of the ocean. The large raft we saw hanging from the ship is now floating on the surface, waiting, stocked with containers for food and dry supplies. On either side, rope ladders. A dripping wet Adam and Maria are climbing the ladders and climbing into the raft. The sun is low in the sky.
ADAM: …“mission accomplished.”
MARIA (a disappointed grunt): Hurmph.
PANEL 2
Maria pulls off her hood and goggles: we are seeing her face full for the first time. She is looking at Harry pointedly.
MARIA: Shortest. Mission. Ever.
PANEL 3
Reverse angle looking at Adam as he removes hood and goggles, too. Also, in the background, the silhouette of the hovering ship against the late afternoon sun. (A silhouette to save you from drawing those details.) Its presence subtly underscores what Adam is saying.
ADAM: Be thankful, Terranaut.
ADAM: They get longer.
PANEL 4
Maria hugs herself, shoulders hunched, cold. Her wetsuit is now slighting zipped open at the neck, revealing a small crucifix necklace. Adam is reaching out to her, handing her the cup from atop a Terranauts-branded thermos. It steams with a hot beverage.
MARIA: And I’m still cold.
ADAM: Warm your core, Maria Consuela Santos…
PANEL 5
Deep down below. A tiny chunk of the creature, sinking even farther into the crevices of the ocean. A stream of bubbles follows it down. It is breathing.
ADAM: “They also get colder.”
End of script
Walt Jaschek likes spending time in warm, bright places.
After decades of writing marketing copy and content in every medium in our time-space continuum, including branded fortune cookies (really,) I have been asked about my “copywriting process.” For visual learners, I try to capture it in this bar chart.
Aaaaand repeat.
Wow, look at all that red. I guess self-pity is the most colorful kind of pity.
Oh, I’m kidding, for the most part.
But not the whole part.
Walt Jaschek promises more process charts soon. Let’s hope his short-term memory holds out.
