Producer Journal: Early Development
During the Kickstarter campaign, we talked a lot about how we’ve been developing Tabletop News for 18 months, but we didn’t fully elaborate on what we’d been working on. If you are interested in some of the nitty gritty about what early development for Tabletop News looked like from just a fledgling idea to a fully grown juggernaut of Tabletop content, you are in for a treat.
Brand Development
The Tabletop News production team is a small circle of folks who carefully collaborated on deciding every detail, from the show's branding to the flow of a potential script. The color pallet for the show was one of the first things to evolve, and we incorporated that heavily into our Kickstarter campaign. We decided on a three-color scheme, and our first two colors were immediately chosen: blue and white. Pink was selected as our third color later on. Another very early creative decision was the font we would use for all our branded materials. Any text we control appears in the same font across our materials, often leading us to import our selected fonts into any new programs we use. With our color scheme and fonts decided on, the only element we needed to finish building our brand was the perfect logo.
In truth, the logo was a pain. We spent a bit of seed money to hire a graphic designer because the logo had to be just right. We had a dozen slightly different variants of what was essentially the same logo. We spent time just sitting there staring at them and trying to decide which version of the hovering icosahedron was objectively and definitively better than the others. It got pretty granular. We had to consider the proper spacing between the individual shapes in the logo, the relative sizes of each shape, the timing of the animation in the animated version, etc. Looking at slight differences between six incredibly similar images and trying not to blur it all together is more complex than expected. After the second round of notes, it all starts to feel a little pointless, but you have to stick with it because once your logo is out there and people start associating you with it, it’s not easy to change.
Show Development
Our brand has a visual tone at this point in development, but what about our show’s tone? What does the show feel like, and how does it flow? Many of these decisions were easy decisions right out of the gate. We wanted to be funny, fast, and energetic. Tabletop News was not going to be the 6 o’clock news. However, while we say we want to be funny, we must also tread carefully. If we aren’t taking ourselves at least a little seriously, no one else is going to either. Credibility over comedy became the next debate. We’re a small team, but we have strong opinions, all of which have merits. The only way to settle the debate was to draw up a mock script. That means we had to research some stories, which also gave us an idea of how much news might happen in a given week. We also had to figure out what our non-news segments might look like. We saw how long we could spend on any one individual story or segment and how much news we could fit into our 12-ish minute show. One of our challenges was writing each story and segment to be “clippable” so that any part could be clipped and distributed as standalone stories while maintaining the flow of the entire episode. That, too, is a little bit of a balancing act.
Finally, we established our visual and creative tones, and while those were complex tasks, they didn’t take 18 months of work. So what else were we doing? We were having meetings, so very many meetings. Or even worse, trying to have meetings and hitting a wall of silence. We had our idea for a show but lacked the means to make it. While we eventually turned to Kickstarter, that wasn’t the initial plan. We started by looking for investors and sponsors, which meant cold emails to every gaming-related brand we could think of. It meant developing a pitch deck using those fancy visuals we decided on in step one. A pitch is a little bit like a performance all its own. You are trying to get someone who might never have heard of you to believe your amazing idea is amazing enough to support it. Now, you might be drawing some conclusions. If we turned to Kickstarter, it must mean that our pitching efforts failed. You would be mostly wrong.
We talked to many people who were very interested in Tabletop News but ultimately faced the tough decision to put a lot of money on the line for an idea that didn’t have a lot of hard data behind it. At the time, we couldn’t prove that the gaming community would latch onto our show. We needed that proof before sponsors and investors would be more comfortable jumping on board. That’s why we turned to Kickstarter. A successful crowdfunding campaign would provide hard data showing that people liked the concept of Tabletop News, wanted to watch it, and believed in it enough to back the campaign with their hard-earned money. The Kickstarter was a success, and since then, we have returned to many of those people we spoke with in our initial pitch meetings with renewed vigor and interest, but that brings us to the present, which is a Producer Journal for another day.
What other behind-the-scenes aspects of Tabletop News would you like us to write about? Tweet us @WatchTabletop and let us know!
