Tag: CARGO 3120 marches on

Cargo 3120: The Making of a Sci-Fi Franchise #6

CARGO3120Entry 6 On to the Advanced Class

by Aaron Walker Sr.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Story So Far starts HERE)

The advanced class was where things really got interesting. The class was down to only four weeks in length. On the surface this was a good thing, but in reality it meant you had a lot of work to do, and a short period of time to get it done.

The focus shifted from the mechanics of screenwriting, to matters of story and character development. The first hurdle was clear: The script was just too long. The first attempt at Cargo was meant to be a T.V. movie in hopes to get picked up as a full blown series, which was why the script was 117 pages. So Larry tasked me with trimming that bad boy down to no more than 90 pages. read article

Cargo 3120: The Making of a Sci-Fi Franchise #5

CARGO3120Entry 5 The Rebirth of CARGO

by Aaron Walker Sr.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Story So Far starts HERE)

The process of molding the story of Cargo 3120 was in a word: Grueling. I remember reading an article about an Oscar winning screenwriter saying that it took him a couple of years to tweak the screenplay that ultimately won him that illustrious award. I found that hard to believe, but I had to eat those words, because it took us over 3 years to get our story to where it is today (and we’ve never won an award!).

But it all started with the first day of the beginning writing class, which felt a bit overwhelming at first, as it seems everyone in the class was much more experienced than I. In fact, Cargo was the first screenplay/completed story that I had ever written. read article

Cargo 3120: The Making of a Sci-Fi Franchise #4

CARGO3120Entry 4 – The First Draft of CARGO

by Aaron Walker Sr.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Story So Far starts HERE)

Though I graduated in 2008, I didn’t write the first draft of Cargo until 2011. One thing that helped was having the source material from the class I took back in 2005. Note to all who are trying to develop a series: Work out your fiction before you start writing. One thing that impeded our progress back when we were teens was our failure to plan our story and develop our universe first. We talked about a lot of “cool scenes” but we never tied it together with a strong narrative. In short, world building and story planning is the very foundation of any science fiction endeavor.

Not knowing what I was doing, I turned to the internet to learn how to write a screenplay. Someone suggested planning your story out using index cards, so that’s exactly what I did. The result was a 117 page monstrosity that I absolutely loved and was proud of at the time. In my mind, I was ready for the competitions. So I entered the TVWriter.com 2011 People’s Pilot competition. read article

Cargo 3120: The Making of a Sci-Fi Franchise

CARGO3120Entry 3 – Picking up as Adults where we left off as Kids

by Aaron Walker Sr.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Story So Far starts HERE)

Eight years after Daymond and I went into the Army, I wanted to resurrect our idea to write a science fiction movie, yet I never forced myself to sit down and do the work. So I decided to go back to school for Game software Development. During one of my courses we were tasked with developing a Game Design Document (GDD). The assignment called for a fully developed storyline for the game. I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to finish what we started so many years earlier. So I chose our previously untitled SciFy story to be the subject of a roleplaying game which I called: Cargo.

The problem that I immediately faced was that we never got very far with the story when we were teenagers. All we really had was a couple of character names and partial back stories for them. Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me. During the course I fleshed out a lot of the details for both the universe of Cargo and its major players. But despite the momentum and positive instructor feedback, I never worked on the actual script until three years after I graduated. read article