Yes. (All over the world)

As the production scripts posted on the “Afterworld Theories” site indicate, not every written detail in the scripts finds its way into the episodes.  This episode is yet another case in point.   In general, though, it’s important to remember that, with 3 minutes episodes, not every story beat will be shown or even narrated.   Many details (that don’t directly move the story forward) are saved for the journals.   In the end, the most important aspect of the episode is not “How did the dart kill the Horseman?” but, rather, “Who is protecting Russ?” 

One of the interesting things about the EMP problem is that it presents an entirely theoretical situation based on known scientific principles.   None of the experts we spoke with in our extensive research for the show could conclusively say what would or wouldn’t work in a world where an EMP of unimaginable magnitude was blanketing the globe every 47 minutes.   It is our belief that certain diesel engines or pre-1980 automobiles would work… but certain modifications would probably be necessary.  The percentage of people capable of getting a car back on the road (not to mention those with the need for such) is relatively small.   Which means, the chances of Russ running into these people in his travels, is even smaller.   All that said, he WILL encounter running vehicles in the course of his journey.   And he will even hitch a ride several times…

Russ doesn’t “forget” the lessons learned on his journey.   He simply doesn’t change as quickly as you might like.   This is a common device on TV shows.   For instance, why did Scully seem to “forget” all the overwhelming evidence on the X-Files that proved there was more to the world than science could explain.   The simple answer is: there would be no show without Scully’s skepticism.   Similarly, there would be no Afterworld with Russ’s curiosity and, in some cases, naiveté.   He is our narrator and, in his search for answers, he must allow himself to consider every possibility… until proven wrong.   If you think about it, the events of the Fall are so fantastic that it would be imprudent to dismiss any theory out of hand.   As time goes on he will become increasingly wary of other people, but that attitude will also get him into trouble because, in the end, the world after the Fall is dangerous no matter what you do or how you think.

Although this seems like the “logical” response to the situation, you must ask yourself what would happen if everyone took this approach?  At some point everyone you met would be a threat because everyone would be armed.   Is that a series you really want to watch?   Everyone shooting at one another 24/7?   Bottom line: we felt it was more interesting to have our main character take a moral stance about violence and see how long he could maintain that stance.   If you watch the series until the end of Season One you will find out just how long.

Asked by: compiled theorum
If we were to assume that all other life on the planet is unharmed (plants seem to be fine, maybe animals are too)…is the human genetic adaptation not to survive the Fall but the exact opposite?

The intent of this question is not entirely clear. We’re assuming the question means: “Were those who vanished the ones with a special genetic trait?” And the answer to that question is… not necessarily. All we can say is that those who vanished were genetically different than those who survived. Why? How? Those questions will be answered. Eventually.

Asked by: darkurth2000
Does the Fall have something to do with all the calanders ending in 2012?

Not to sound coy, but… yes and no. The date has something to do with the “big picture” of Afterworld, but is not directly related to the events that caused the Fall. Confused? We hope so… ;)

Asked by: DragonAngel
Who came up with the idea of making AW?

As mentioned in various articles and interviews (many of which are available online), the story for Afterworld was created by Brent Friedman. The original visual design was created by Michael Decourcey. The concept of an interactive multi-platform series (broadcast, broadband and mobile) was the result of many minds including both the above names as well as the other Electric Farm partners, Stan Rogow and Jeff Sagansky. Additionally, much credit must go to Sony for building a global digital distribution pipeline to facilitate this vision.

Asked by: Gwynyvyr
Why would the the Polaroid type camera still be working after the fall when they have circuit boards?

After doing some research on this, we found that early models of Polaroid cameras do not have circuit boards. They were purely mechanical and/or powered by DC batteries. We are, admittedly, cheating when we show a “synch flash” on the camera, which implies a newer, chip-dependent model. We take this stylistic license because, well, it just looks cooler hearing and seeing a white flash before each photo materializes. ;) Also, it’s harder to find digital models of early Polaroids (which were also much more bulky) and it’s simply not feasible from a production standpoint to have one of our artists spending hours building a digital prop… when a similar (albeit anachronistic) model can be found for free online.

Asked by: lilwillie
Why weren't animals effected by The Fall?

Animals do not have the same genetics as humans. But make no mistake, animals are affected by the EMP in ways both small and large.

Asked by: Phenix
Did the PG really send Russell to shut the EMP off or are they getting him to find more out about Team Alpha?

PG’s agenda will be an ongoing concern for Mr. Shoemaker. To give away their intentions at this stage of the series would be disservice to the 100s of hours of writing we did on Episodes 66-130… where you will find some (but not all) of the answers embedded within this loaded question.

Asked by: RangerSergeant
We all love Afterworld, what are the AW team's favorite online series?

Prom Queen! (kidding) Seriously, there is only one other series we feel compelled to plug here: the granddaddy of all web series – “Broken Saints.” If you have not seen this animated epic it’s definitely worth checking out.

Asked by: RangerSergeant
Did the fall really cause the birth defect in the twin, or is that due to another more mundane cause?

To further expound on the animal question, it’s not the Fall per se which caused mutations or aberrant behavior – it’s more likely the EMP. But the full effects of the EMP (both positive and negative) will be another ongoing series of revelations that continue well into Season Two.

Asked by: sevens
How do the New Edenites communicate so quickly over vast distances in a world without technology?

“Quickly” is a relative term. If you read Mr. Shoemaker’s journal you will notice that there is more time elapsing than the episodes often indicate or imply. What sometimes seems like a day or two later may actually be a week or two later. And you have to remember that the WordWall existed BEFORE Russell learned about it, so that method of communication is the most obvious answer. Another is simply explained by the fact that word on horse travels faster than word on foot. So with a few horsemen riding around, they create a dynamic information grid servicing just JD and New Eden. Also, you will eventually come to learn that JD has opened “missions” in other areas, increasing the number of horsemen from four to… (insert your guess here)

Asked by: timtodd
What is AW looking for in a winning video remix entry?

A winning video remix should have evocative music that, when played over re-cut visuals, reveals a new tone or texture to Afterworld that wasn’t conveyed in the original video. For instance, the first Acid Planet winner’s video used an original song that emphasized the loneliness and emotional desolation of Russell’s journey, then it overlaid that song on scratched/distressed video that implied archival footage, adding a sense of nostalgia and loss already inherent in the song. So, in short, we’re looking for a remix that works on both levels – audio and video – to create a fresh and fully realized representation of our show.

Asked by: timtodd
Can the sample video and loops from AW's first contest be used in the second contest

That is a question for Acid Planet, who makes the rules for the contest.

Asked by: timtodd
What criteria does AW use in judging? Creativity, Immersion, Authenticity, etc...?

At the end of the day, it’s all very subjective. If a video has the aforementioned qualities it will probably elicit this response from our writing staff: “Coooooool!” The video eliciting the most responses of “Coooooool!” will win.

Asked by: timtodd
What new elements (games/contests/features) can we look forward too?

We have a couple more in mind but nothing concrete at the moment. Soon as we nail something down you will be the first group to know.

Asked by: timtodd
What unique challenges were involved in creating Afterworld?

A book could be written on this topic! First and foremost, the challenge of creating a new business model in the entertainment industry has been both incredibly satisfying and incredibly frustrating. Our learning curve has been vertical. And every day we make more discoveries through simple trial and error. The other challenge worth mentioning is the production process itself. While the writing of three minute episodes has proven deceptively hard, producing three minutes of “non-animation” has turned out to be a monumental task for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is the incredible level of design artistry which goes into every episode. Other challenges involve the daily distribution of episodes to multiple portals (all of which require different formatting)… the production of the journal (which was never intended to be as complex as it’s become)… not to mention the marketing and messaging of a multi-platform series to an audience not even sure what that phrase means!

Asked by: timtodd
What has been the most unexpected development, from production to publishing and user involvement?

Most unexpected? Probably how unforgiving fans are with free entertainment! ;) When a promised episode is a couple hours late, man do we hear about it. Of course, we try to take fans’ impatience as a compliment. After all, the worst thing that could happen would be that no one cares…

Asked by: X
Is the "Positive" in the genetic testing related to evolution in mankind, this evolution is a resistance to the electro magnitic charged atmosphere created around AC powered technologies?

Great question but the answer is simply too revealing. Here’s a hint, though: the genetic testing (found in Hastings’ house) is not necessarily related to the EMP, at least not in the ways you’re probably thinking (yes, we can read minds here.)

Asked by: Anna
We always come into the story after Russ has escaped from the danger somehow, but just how does he manage it? We never actually see his escape, and yet in the next episode, he's far from his captors."?

It’s a fair question and, sorry to say, this answer is going to seem like a cop out. But the truth is, Afterworld does not do “action” and/or escape scenes well. We’ve tried a few and just were not happy with the results. We do know what scene has bothered you (yes, we read the Wall regularly) and that scene was scripted to indicate that while Charles was turning to shoot at Ellen, Russell wisely disappeared into the nearby brush. So that when Charles turned back… Russell was gone. After Subu extricates himself from Ted, he and Charles search the brush for Russell, but he’s vanished. In real life, this scene probably would’ve played out in 2-3 minutes… the entire length of an episode!

The point in all this is that we usually conceive the scenes in a realistic manner (or as realistic as most TV shows portray) but in our medium it becomes impossible to visually represent all the “action” beats in a given scene. And at the end of the day, our show is not concerned with the small details of escape so much as the emotional and psychological impact of the events on Russell. As writers it is not hard to contrive ways to escape almost any given situation – can you say MacGuyver? – so, in an effort to keep the story moving along, we often take the liberty of jumping you to the next meaningful encounter.

Asked by: Anna
Just how is it that Bryson was unaware of the Fall itself, and yet knew that Russ had a bounty on his head?

Again, this detail does not move the story along so it did not make it into the episode. But an explanation was written in one of the drafts. And the answer is simple: he saw a “Wanted” poster somewhere on the fringe of the woods. The language on the poster is just vague enough that, we believe, Bryson could have just assumed Shoe had done what he’d done – committed a crime and fled into the Ozarks. Nothing about the poster says that the Fall has occurred.

And here are the most prevalent generalized questions I received in the latest round of emails and private messages...

Have they ever reworked an episode because of forum posts?

Reworked? Not exactly. But we have “borrowed” some ideas from the Wall, as well as various suggestions on YouTube and MySpace. For instance, a fan pointed out early on that, with no one to put them out, there would probably be rampant fires burning in drier parts of the country – a fact we, admittedly, hadn’t considered. So we added that wrinkle to some latter episodes. Another example is many fans’ belief that Russell would be better off with a gun(s.) This was never a consideration in the early episodes – we had a point we wanted to make about violence begetting violence – but we decided to challenge this point of view in the second half of the season. We haven’t changed the point we’re making, but we have certainly modified our approach to explore this issue on a much deeper level… examining the emotional and psychological ramifications of murder (justified or not) on Russell.

Have forum posts influenced the direction and feel that the story takes?

The forum posts have been incredibly enlightening. We have learned not only what fans like and don’t like about the Afterworld experience, but we have learned what details you focus and fixate on… what your expectations are for certain characters and subplots… and, most importantly, what kind or answers your are seeking. All this information has greatly influenced the way we wrote the last two weeks of Season One – it did not affect the facts as we have always known them, but it did affect the extent to which revealed or didn’t reveal certain facts. And ongoingly, we will continue to read the Wall as it will no doubt influence Season Two.

Are any of the theories out there, close to the mark?

Interestingly there are a few theories out there that contain bits and pieces of what we consider “truth,” but we can honestly state that no theory yet posted comes close to explaining the Fall. That said, you must understand our job as writers was to create a complex and, hopefully, compelling backstory/mythology for our universe. To that end, we have taken great pains to build a narrative “swiss watch” with a lot of moving parts that would be very difficult (but definitely not impossible) to figure out. One hint: many important details have already been revealed by Episode 65… but those details may not have seemed as important to the big picture as they actually are. ;) Might wanna go back and watching some old AW episodes… oh, and read those journals again…

Are there other stories being developed or to be developed? If so, will there be a beta test group?

By “other stories” we’re not sure if you mean other Afterworld stories… or other Electric Farm stories. If it’s the former, we will continue to reveal other characters’ stories in Afterwords. Through the “locked” sections of these stories we will be not only advancing alt storylines, but also planting clues to the bigger picture. Upcoming storylines include: Luther… Travis… Alice… and Ted (just to name a few.) If you’re talking about the latter, the next series from Electric Farm will be “The Gemini Division” starring Rosario Dawson. For more information on that show try a Google search…

When the series finishes, will it be released to other media types (DVD/BluRay, etc?) If so, what extras might it include? (Timtodd phrased this the best)

We are planning a DVD release of Season One some time after the conclusion of the show’s distribution on web and mobile. On the DVD we are talking about including not only the original 2-3 min episodes but also the 15 min and 30 minute compilation episodes (one and two weeks, respectively, of episodes artfully cut together) – watching the show in larger clumps is, curiously, a much different experience.

We have plenty of “behind-the-scenes” footage on the making of Afterworld which will be included, along with some satiric remixes of certain episodes, a couple “lost” episodes and the original 8-minute “trailer” for Afterworld that launched the entire show two years ago. There will also be audio commentary tracks on select episodes and, Powers That Be willing, a preview of Season Two. Oh, and we might even throw in our secret recipe for Egg Salad (let’s see if anyone can guess the movie reference to that one…)

Duane Loose reponded to a post on the Australian Sci-Fi Channel Forum about Afterworld artwork and the AW team thought the repsonse would be excellent to share with everyone.

My name is Duane Loose...and I am the Sr. Art Director/Production Designer for the series afterworld. It's great to read your posts. You're passion and knowledge shows through!! Great comments all the way round.

As of this writing our team is working on the final 10 episodes: 121 through 130. We're scheduled to finish next Wednesday - the day before our Thanksgiving Day in the USA. And I for one will be giving thanks that we're done...believe me. The project has been challenging for many different reasons...some of the factors have been quite unexpected. The speed and pace of production for example. Our saying is that a day in 'afterworld' production is like a week or 2 on any other production we've worked on. We literally move at a speed and pace I've never experienced anywhere before. It's fun, exhilarating and very challenging.

We've worked very hard to bring this show to life - and much of that time we've been inventing the process and creating the pipeline at the same time. I call it - running the race while I'm tying my shoes. You might think that as professionals we would have had it all figured out before we started. Nope. Plus it's not like anything any of us have done before. Similar - but deceptively difficult and very easy to underestimate how challenging it is to tell a story visually with 4 poses, a 2 1/2 D parallax BG and some moving mist and skies. Hah! Easy? Nope. Fun and challenging? Yes!

Our rule of thumb is to keep each episode to 10-14 shots with 5 to 7 backgrounds. We found this to be a produce-able number- allowing us to currently pump out 10 episodes in 10 days or less. We have achieved an episode a day for the past 20 episodes...but we don't recommend it. Many things break at that pace - usually the artists.

It may sound like an excuse but there is quite a difference between a single one-off render and the number of elements that go into a full episode. When you look at the actual time it takes in each phase - the math is never simple addition or subtraction - always multiplication and division. Multiplication when we see an order of magnitude greater time when rendering a 20 second shot with 4 characters - each one with 4 poses. That's 16 poses at 4 to 8 K resolution - 30 minutes a pop render time and 8 CPU hours later you have your renders. Multiply that number by 12 for the average number of shots times 5 for the number of concurrent episodes being worked on and you...well you get the picture. We are happily busy and that includes running a 10 am to 8 pm and a 2pm to 12 am double shift.

We use a very basic production design process - beginning with a solid produce-able script, a beat outline, storyboards and animatics - then into background creation, character posing and rendering, shot compositing and editing. We usually iterate twice at each production step to make sure that what we make in the next step is well informed and correct.

Our team is composed of a great mix of mostly senior artists with a combined credit list and years of experience that are pretty amazing in their variety and quality. I've enjoyed this experience perhaps more than any in my career. I hope you don't mind me putting in my thoughts on your thread - I think I can shed a little light on some of the comments.

As I read your comments I found all of them to be more or less accurate in their intent and I would probably make the same assumptions if I hadn't been on the inside of the production experiencing the production pipeline first hand. So, here's some data.

Poser: By the time we are finished with afterworld we will have created over 80 characters for the show. Most of those have been created in the past 4 months. Poser is perhaps the best procedural tool for quick character creation ever created. It's enabled us to create the cast for each chunk of episodes - usually in a matter of days, a week at most for each. We have a very close relationship with the Poser folks. They've given us some fantastic support including fixes and tools for some of our needs. We use the latest version - poser 7. Poser lacks a network rendering capability - so we've written some custom scripts and utilities to allow us to batch render. While this is not ideal- it works. We will absolutely continue to work with Poser for character creation - but will probably use another package for animation and rendering in the next season. We've investigated some promising tech that would allow us to bring Poser assets into Lightwave for example.

One factor that we deal with every day is render times. We typically have multiple characters in a given scene- sometimes we have many characters. To keep the heartbeat cadence of the style we change poses approximately every 3 to 5 seconds. We also render our images very large - a minimum of 2K and usually 6 or 8K resolution. This gives us maximum flexibility when we composite - starting tight and close then pulling out wide for example in the same shot. So we work hard to set up the lighting and geo elements to get the best quality we can at that size while optimizing render times. We use a lot of image based lighting - -which speeds things up dramatically.

Another factor in our look is that we are not trying to be a movie or animated TV show. Because of the speed of production we've chosen not to execute cloth or hair simulation - yes it would be beautiful but ultimately those things don't help or hinder the story telling and always slow us down on the render side. We have artists that are experts in those areas but that's not an element we choose to focus on. In the end we lean hard into color, atmosphere and animated atmospherics with good looking characters exhibiting specularity and solid expressive acting.

In addition to Poser we use Lightwave, After Effects, Final Cut. Maya, Premiere, Particle Illusion and several other support tools. On the database side we use a library version-ing software called perforce and a render manager for our 20 proc renderfarm - Qube. We also use Vue D'esprit 6 infinite for many of our BG plates and matte paintings. We use 2 sets of Sapphire plugins for after effects - those are awesome. We purchase models from Turbosquid, DAZ and Content Paradise as well as using free models wherever we can scavenge them. As you can see- Poser is an integral but ultimately very small part of our pipeline- albeit the single greatest factor affecting our production speed in regards to rendering.

Another factor in the pressure of production is actually related to afterworlds release in Australia. When Sony told of us of their plans we barely had a few dozen episodes 'in the can' and a similar situation on the scripts - (did I mention that the final scripts were finished a few weeks ago?) Sony, of course, asked for a commitment from us to meet the rollout plans for SciFi AU. We looked at the schedule. After our nervous laughter subsided and we all had a stiff drink or two - we hitched up our britches and went to work . That was July. Since that time a team of 15 artists and 1 to 4 writers have written and produced 100 episodes to the quality you see in all it's glory before you. Are they perfect? No. Do some of them suck? Yes. And the vast majority of the episodes continue to be a fascinating convergence of graphic novel, anime art with a great story that we all, well most of us anyway, find engaging, relevant and worthy of our devotion...not only as an audience...but worthy of our time as artists and creators as well.

That's a lot of information. I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. You can reach me at duane.loose@gmail.com .

cheers

D_