Aidan 5 the web series takes on the difficult world of Sci-Fi in short format noir. The creators and director chose to work with drawn backgrounds in order to facilitate small budgets and turning it into a living comic book. I talked to the director and a creator about their experience creating the environment as it is unlike the other projects currently debuting on the web. Here is a bit from my conversation with director John Jackson.

What is the most challenging part in telling a film noir story in short segments? 

I don't think the challenge is really limited to "Noir" style of storytelling so much as it is trying to tell "any" story in short segments. You need to build to certain moments and you have story beats that you just need to hit much quicker and shorter. We set out from the get go, with our team of writers, and we designed this story with each individual episode in mind, to have cliff hanger moments as well as other crucial story set pieces and fit it into an over all season story arch. What we ended up with was an ambitious two and half hours of finished story in this 15 part web series. It was a lot of work up front on story but I think it was well worth it.

As a director did you spend more hours in the editing room creating the sets as they were all drawn or did you do that during prep?

Actually after some small initial storyboards before the first shoots, all the background drawings were done in post by the individual artists.  I would love to spend more time with each episode than I do, because there is a freedom to direct again. Shot control, motion, lighting, pacing, world design but as this is an all volunteer cast and crew I have got to respect the time commitment by each artist and allow a certain latitude. Everyone on board has a good idea of what we were trying to achieve based on the original short and the early series episodes by lead illustrator Ben Brown really help set the tone for that. 

Do you think a web series can be truly successful in this genre or do you want to use this as a launching pad?

I think any story that finds an audience can be successful and that is certainly one of the positives of the ever-growing online world, it has greatly increased exposure to projects like this. I also think the Sci-Fi community can be a very loyal fan base, when they latch on to something they really support it and I think we have struck a chord already with a lot of those people and hopefully that will translate to a much larger audience for us. As far as a launching pad for other things, I think since I have been a director for the past 15 years it is the classic "over night" sensation story. I am interested in launching season two and three of Aidan 5! 

How was it directing actors with no sets? For that matter one actor often playing against himself?

You know, you approach the story elements with the actors the same way but a lot more attention needs to be paid to the non-story elements. You hope you get the balance right. In this case I actually had the assistance of executive producer Ben Bays (who is an accomplished director himself) so while one of us concentrated on technical things the other focused on story and that seemed to work well for us. We did have many on set discussions about camera position and the 180 rule and when to break it or not, as well as telling people where the "door" was in a scene.  That seemed to be the biggest concern. I would give a brief description of what we were intending visually and to the actors credit they just went with it. I can't say enough about our lead actors, Bryan Michael Block and Maya Sayre, they are just pros. They both acted opposite themselves several times and what a great job they did.  I think we all went a little green screen crazy at times though. I remember swearing I was never going on green again, I wanted to shoot a real movie with a real old lady and a real old house and with a real old dog.  

Episode 3 will be out on Friday, March 18^th, so check out episodes 1 and 2 today. Look out next week for my interview with Ben Bays.