Oceans 11 Part 3

At the time I was stressed about the logistics of the Oceans 11 episodes (logistics on many levels: the complex machinations within the story and how to make them entertaining, the mechanics of how to mic seven people in my little space and get half-decent audio, and the impossible tetris of everyone's busy calendars to try to get everyone together in the same room to finish recording Oceans 11), but now I look back on those first sessions of Oceans 11 with wistful nostalgia. We were all together! Crowded loudly into the same room! Even in that time it had been a while since we'd all together at the same time. And after recording these sessions we stayed up late drinking and catching up.

With the current quarantine, those evenings hum with a certain warmth in my memory. The next episode you'll hear was recorded remotely, the first time the reroll has been recorded in such a way. 

As for the current schedule. I will try to get the next couple episodes out more quickly. I expected to be somewhat underemployed in the current situation, but actually the last three weeks have been remarkably busy for me, as the projects I'm working on have started figuring out how to do story development remotely, and how to rehearse with actors in front of cameras. (Plus ongoing development and recording of an upcoming reroll which may be the most ambitious I've yet attempted.) Looking at my calendar I have a lull for the next two and a half weeks, so I'll try to squeeze out two episodes in that time.

The fact that the show's release schedule is such a slave to my own personal calendar has been something I've worked at resolving, and have slowly improved by farming out pieces of the pipeline to others (largely through the contributions of you fine people). But this show is stupidly complex to make and the difficulty of making this show is part of why I love it. If I'd ever decided to take the easy way out and just plan one route and shove the players through it, I'd have gotten bored of it by now. The difference for me is made most plain in these episodes: We could have had a perfectly acceptable set of episodes if I'd just made Jon use the same plan from the movie, and it would have been a fraction of the workload on him and me. But where's the fun in that? For me the reroll has to be a show where I'm constantly surprised. I hope you guys are enjoying these episodes as much as I have.