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Updates regarding the writing/production of FEOR
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Earliest entry: 18/02/2026
Entries: 5
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13/04/2026
You know how a lot of people say that if you hit a wall with your screenplay, the problem's always further back than you think? I usually follow that advice like the bible - if I ever get stuck I delete or rewrite the previous section, and try to take everything in a slightly different direction. That tends to work. Today though, I learnt that sometimes the problem isn't further back, it's can be exactly where you get stuck. I had been stuck on this one script for a while, I had every plot beat planned, I knew exactly what was meant to happen in a scene, but I couldn't figure out how to write it. The characters agree to meet up after school, then it cuts to them meeting up after school. Should be simple, right? Not for me, I always have problems with timeskips, no matter how small. Last night, I was reading some of my old writing, just summat I did for fun, and noticed that the last thing I had written was a timeskip. Some characters decide to explore a new place, then there's a cutoff
like this ^^^^. Only, I never continued after the cutoff. Cause I'm terrible at timeskips, even when it's just a minute or two. This morning, when I went through the script I had been stuck on, I remembered what I read last night, and decided to take out the timeskip entirely, and have the whole episode be pretty much continuous. So now, the characters agree to meet up after school, before one of them suggests just skipping the rest of the day and furthering the plot then and there. Anyway, I should probably get back to actually writing this script, rather than just writing about writing it.
14/03/2026
I haven't done any writing for the past couple of weeks, I've been focusing on drawing instead. Today, though, I've been going through a very old script - one that I hit a wall with and abandoned - and fixing some seemingly unfixable problems. Ages ago, I spent loads and loads and loads of time on this episode, but no matter what I did, the pacing was complete sh*te. I tried everything to fix it, to no avail, and decided to come back to it with fresh eyes at some point in my future. And that future was today - I found all my old notes on the pacing and everything, and realised that the problem was the entire premise. I figured out a way to keep all of the major plot beats, but changed the fundamental premise and added a bunch of plot at the beginning, so the original script begins about a third through. The new premise fixes pretty much all of the problems with the original episode, namely the terrible pacing at the start and the absent context, but there's still some pacing issues towards the end. I won't go into too much detail here, since it's a s3 episode and I've decided to only talk about s1 stuff, but basically there was way too much plot, but not a lot of stuff happening - at one particularly low point, the script was like an hour and a half of people sitting around talking. This is meant to be a ~20 minute episode, not a full-length My Dinner with Andre ripoff. But I'll fix the problems with the last third tomorrow, I'm pretty sure I can just cut loads of stuff.
Basically, the moral of the story is that if you don't like summat, come back to it in a few months and change literally everything about it.
23/02/2026
Sorry that this entry is worded so weirdly, I'm like super tired.
Today I completed most of the new ep 1 draft, apart from the final two scenes. I think it's a big improvement from previous versions, but my opinion might change when I reread it with fresh eyes. For now though, it's pretty good.
I also replanned all of ep 2 from beginning to end - most of the scenes are practically the same, I just changed the setting. For example, one scene was set in a hotel room, and the carpet set on fire, but now it's set in a car park, and some spilled alcohol sets on fire. I also removed some scenes that weren't really adding anything to the plot, and added a scene that hopefully will. Since I didn't have to change a lot, planning didn't take that long, so I was able to start writing up the new scenes. I also changed the bargaining ghost (see the 18th) from the penultimate episode to be one of the ghosts from this episode, making a reappearance. There were several reasons for this: if the ghost in ep 2 never showed up again on screen (like originally planned) it would mean that there were interactions with him offscreen, and I want to have as much of the events of s1 on screen as possible. Like, every time the characters interact, it's onscreen, nothing happens inbetween episodes. Another reason was that I had set up a sort of mystery around him in ep 2, but I never actually gave it a conclusion. It was one of those things that happens off screen. If he reappears later in s1, it gives me a chance to actually conclude the mystery. The third reason is that it just makes sense for it to be him. When the bargaining ghost is in the penultimate episode, the characters look for his body and dig it up. In ep 2, we explicitly don't know where the ghost's body is, so looking for it later in the series means more than if it was just someone random.
Finally, while I was editing the scripts for the first 2 eps, I noticed how clunky the timestamps were (every scene has a timestamp with the time, date, and location), since a lot of scenes are set in places with kinda long place names. To see if this would actually be a problem, I took some random screencaps and put a timestamp on top of them. It was lowkey clunky - the location took up a lot of space, and was sort of difficult to read. I realised that it would look a lot better if it was only the time and date, and it would also look more similar to one of those home video time stamps. I attached the screencaps below, the left is from Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy (a video game), and the right is from Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (a film). Fun fact I didn't notice till now, but there's an episode in s2 that's explicitly based on both of these. Like woah I must have subconsciously chosen them cause I associate them together since there's an ep inspired by them both. Ok I'm super tired and I got school tommorow, goodbye.
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22/02/2026
I've been out most of today, and was in London for a bit as well, so I've only really had a chance to work this evening. I'm trying to massively focus on series one, since I need those scripts to be finished if I want to actually get anywhere. I've been going through my script for episode one a lot, rewriting dialogue here and there, but today I decided that it needed something to actually happen. I dunno how to word it.
In Y7, my english teacher told me that my short story was very good, but it needed something to actually happen. She suggested having an ancient Greek god descend from the sky, obviously trying to appeal to my Percy Jackson obsession. I never ended up changing my short story, I just left it as it was - a meandering conversation between some students on their first day of school.
That's pretty much what episode one was a couple of weeks ago, just a bunch of conversations on the first day of school, without any actual conflict. I realised that this wasn't really working, and decided to add some more "drama" to the episode, such as a kid trying to break up a friend group by filming their conversations, and stuff like that.
Today I realised that I had the beginning and end sorted out fine, but the middle was still kinda vague. Since one character had just been established as a pyromaniac, I decided to have him starting a small fire, which sets off the fire alarm, meaning the school had to evacuate, and giving the characters a reason to interact, rather than them just being shoved together in a random hallway to progress the plot.
Tomorrow, I'm going to try and write the first proper draft for this scene, as right now it's just a few paragraphs of notes.
18/02/2026
This is a test post. Hopefully, this website will be a good place to track my progress writing and (hopefully) animating my ongoing project. Or maybe I'll forget about it in a couple of days. Hopefully not. Ok, so I should write what I did today. Here we go.
So there's this one episode in series 1, the second to last one, and it's the culmination of two character's arcs. They interact with a series of ghosts, and it's meant to be like a character exploration for the two of them. After this, we should be done with them. (One of them comes back later, but has a completely different arc then, so it doesn't matter.) The only problem is that I didn't know how to use this series of ghost characters to actually explore their characters, and yesterday I decided that they needed to have a pattern of some kind. They couldn't just be random OCs I made in 2 minutes shoved into this role, they had to be specifically created to drive the plot forward, with a specific framework. I was having some difficulty figuring out what the framework should be, though. I googled character archetypes, then googled high school anime character archetypes, but they were just frameworks for the sake of a framework. I needed summat specific to the story. Then I had a brainwave, and settled on the tried and true 5 stages of grief.
I decided not to just do denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance in that exact order though, cause that's not how most people experience grief. The two characters I'm trying to explore definitely different. I decided to do the stages in the order that guy number 2 did, since they are the one who sort of controls the ghosts, and they're the one whose grief is the main focus, since the person they're grieving is like a major character in the series lol. More on that later.
That was yesterday - today I was trying to create the actual ghosts, and link them to the stage of grief they're meant to represent.
So the first ghost the two of them summon (yeah the episode is just them summoning ghosts, I think I forgot to explain that), represents bargaining. Specifically the kind of bargaining where you're asking "what if"s. "What if I did summat differently that day?" etcetera. The ghost (I haven't come up with any names yet) was born in 1926, and was sent away to the countryside as an evacuee aged 13 in 1939, the beginning of WW2. She was relentlessly bullied by some local kids for being "ugly", and one summer when she was 16, in 1942, they pushed her into a lake. Being a working class Londoner from the 30s, she couldn't swim, and she drowned. She was buried in the local cemetery, when the two found her grave and bound her spirit to a candle in a jar. When released from the jar, she can't stop wondering what would have happened if she wasn't so ugly, or if she had stayed in her house that day, or if she learnt to swim, or if she was never evacuated. When guy number 2's best friend died, they went through this phase first. Their friend died after running away from home, and no.2 kept wondering what would have happened if they had stopped him leaving, or had been a better friend, or had alerted the authorities when they found out he left.
The second ghost represents depression. After the initial mourning period, no.2 went through a period of depression. Pretty understandably, since their best friend just died. This ghost was born in 1996 to Black parents, and was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer aged 15, after her symptoms were repeatedly dismissed by doctors due to her race and gender. She was supposed to go through surgery, followed by chemotherapy, but she died during the surgery. As a ghost, she blames the doctors and surgeons for her death rather than the cancer, and she feels, again, understandably, incredibly depressed about it. She believes that from the moment she was born into her body, her fate was sealed.
The third ghost represents denial. When guy number 2 met guy number 1, both of them snapped out of their depressive phase, and began to believe that their loved ones couldn't actually be gone for real. There must be a way to bring them back, with either necromancy or just ghost hunting them down. They must still be alive as ghosts, there's no way they can be really dead. This ghost was born in 1770, and was a member of the Compton family (who are very relevant to the plot later, the mentions of them in s1 are worldbuilding/foreshadowing). The Compton family were and are Catholic, and in 1770, Catholics weren't allowed to purchase or inherit land. This changed with the Catholic Relief Act in 1778, and the Compton family, eager capitalists, seized their opportunity to build their family's status (by the Victorian era, the head of the household held the title of Earl, so they were pretty successful). They began to purchase land, and in June 1780, they travelled to stay in a friend's house in London for some networking reason, it really isn't important, and brought their 10 year old son, of course. For those who don't know (probably everyone), this was when and where the Gordon Riots took place, which were anti-Catholic riots resulting in hundreds of deaths in London. Some of the protesters tried to attack the houses of wealthy Catholics, and the third ghost was killed walking out of one of these houses. It happened too suddenly for him to process it, and as a ghost, he is in deep denial that he's dead. He thinks that this must be some sort of dream, or that magicians have spirited him to the future. There's no way he's actually dead, and if he is, he's gonna come back, right? This isn't permanent, right?
The fourth ghost represents bargaining, but the kind of bargaining where you're trying to fix or undo what's happened. Now that the two guys believe that their loved ones are contactable as ghosts, they're desperate to find a way to actually contact and bring them back. This ghost is also desperate to bring themself back, and convinces the two guys to find their body, and reconnect it with their spirit. The two guys try, and they dig up their body from City Road Cemetery, Sheffield, but once the ghost makes contact with the skeleton, it disappears. I haven't come up with a backstory for this ghost yet, but that's what they do in the episode.
The fifth ghost represents anger. Guy number 2 has spent months trying to raise the dead and ghost-hunting, but other than brief conversations with random dead guys, they feel like they haven't accomplished anything. Their best friend is dead, guy number 1 is annoying and just gets in the way, they're bored of catching ghosts, and they're incredibly frustrated. This ghost is a teenager who died in the 1970s from sepsis. All she knows is that she was ill for a couple of days, and now she's dead, and she's mad as hell that she's trapped in the future, and not alive back home.
The sixth and final ghost represents acceptance. Neither guys have reached this phase yet, but no.1 does at the end of the episode. This ghost is no.2's best friend, the one they're been looking for all along. However, the ghost has new friends (as a ghost), and is angry with their old friend for trapping them here (a salt circle inside an abandoned building). No.2 and the ghost argue for a bit, then no.1 gets jealous and breaks the circle, allowing the ghost to leave. No.1 and no.2 have a big final fight, and split up for good. No.1 goes home, and realises that her method of coping with grief (surrounding herself with death to feel closer to her dead twin sister) isn't working, and she smashes all the ghost jars, finally reaching acceptance.
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