New Script Mag Article with Afterworld Creator Brent Friedman
January 3rd, 2008 by Alec McNayrPosted in Online, Our Work, Series, Strategy | No Comments »
Check out the new Script Magazine issue for Jan/Feb featuring our third article for the publication — an interview with Brent Friedman, creator of multi-platform series Afterworld.
AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE: Q & A with Afterworld series writer-creator Brent Friedman
by Robert Gustafson and Alec McNayr
[January/February 2008 Issue]Afterworld is a multi-platform sci-fi series about an apocalyptic world where 99.9 percent of the population has disappeared and all technology has mysteriously shut down. A unique blend of beautiful animation and narrative voiceover, Afterworld also offers a look into the future of digital creation and online distribution. We sat down with series creator and head writer Brent Friedman, a man with plenty of experience penning alternate universes—including episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and The Twilight Zone.
How did the idea for Afterworld come about?
Brent Friedman: After I had worked in film and television for over a decade, in a weird way, it wasn’t that much fun anymore. I told my agents I wanted to write in a different medium. I wanted to be challenged again. I wanted to be scared. They said, “Are you nuts? You’ve got a nice little career going. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.†But it was broke in my head.So they got me a job working as a consultant over at Electronic Arts, and I started looking at stories in a completely different way because games have their own structure and story logic.
Learn more about the series:
About that same time, I was approached about doing a show called Broken Saints, which was an online Web series from 2000 to 2003. It had gotten enough acclaim that it was being pushed around Hollywood as something that somebody wanted to adapt into a live-action series. A lot of the networks were intrigued by the idea of the Internet working as a farm system, but it got me thinking: What if a project had been conceived and designed from the beginning to be a franchise?
So, I took one of my television ideas that I had always liked but that everyone told me was too ambitious and too costly, and produced it for the Internet with some of the basic compulsions of gaming. By providing light interactivity and fan interaction and influence on a connective website, I set out to build not just a series, but—what they call in gaming—a universe.
And how has that concept played itself out?
BF: Well, there’s this [phrase] “a universe worthy of devotion.†Look at Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. Not just the movies, but the universes. [The writers] created the illusion that these places really exist, and fans want to know more about them. Not just the main characters, but everything about the world; they want to go live in that world. That was what I was trying to do with Afterworld; not just create the story and the characters but a world that you could know more about.Read the rest in the magazine!
