Hendstrom

Hendstrom is a fantasy web series that I started working on in January with my wife Kierstyn King, and my two sisters, Hannah and Amanda King. We’d been wanting to produce something with a fantasy spin for a while, but we kept putting it off because we couldn’t come up with a story.

Hendstrom is our attempt to stop procrastinating and start practicing the craft with the resources that we have. We came up with the script for the first episode in a limited amount of time, to help us actually get something down on paper. From there we made props, costumes, did some color and effects tests, and started shooting. Once we had some footage to work with, we started to edit, grade, and add the effects as we went along. We’re currently working on finishing the edit for the first episode, getting started on the score (we used Garageband on the iPad for the trailer), and writing the dialog for episode two.

Our inspiration for the project came from two places – Jonathan Coulton, on the Nerdist podcast -

If you’re ever stuck creatively, make it your goal to create something that is bad and worthless. Because as you start doing it, you’ll realize you’re actually making something good.

We’d been waiting to come up with the perfect premise – but all the time we were waiting was time spent not practicing the rest of the process. That was our second inspiration – Ira Glass in this video on storytelling – the gist of it is, lots of practice is important. While we were shooting videos on a regular basis, it wasn’t narrative content, and we felt like there were quite a few things we weren’t practicing at all (that was true – we discovered exciting things like shot lists during the course of shooting).

So hopefully that explains what we’re trying to do with the project. I’m hoping to share more of the details in future blog posts. In the mean time, check out the trailer on vimeo or youtube!