For him, I wanted a normal guy. Not too big and muscular but not an out of shape slob either. The “regular guy” needed a nerdy scientist feel. We went with jeans for the casual look but then a black ribbed turtleneck and jacket for the nerdy, smart guy appearance. We needed him to blend in.

Tim Lai did a great job with my rather spartan detail. He presented a bunch of options and we kinda picked what we liked best from the images. Here are the four that we chose from.

The second character was the reporter. For the majority of the first arc, the reporter plays the role of the viewer. Hopefully, you will find that he is asking the questions you would ask. After all he is a reporter. However, we also give hints that he may not be what he appears. He needed to look like a relatively poor, rumpled reporter. I used to work as a reporter so I had a good feel for what I was looking for. I wanted him to have a more rugged feel, so for the look I really was looking for a photographer more so than a reporter. We decided on a vest with a lot of pockets, jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. He is an older African American. By age we say mid to late fifties but for reasons explained later in the story, a man who looks much younger than that. However, his hair was to be speckled white to make sure we do not get too much age confusion.

Here was the first draft…

At the end of the day this is what we decided on...

I won’t comment on the thing with Ryan Spencer’s eyes. You will just have to read the story to understand. We also made a conscious decision to remove the eye scars when he was wearing his glasses.

Oh, the glasses. I guess that is really important. For the beginning I wanted generic glasses. In time we may upgrade that a little but for now generic big black sunglasses.

You will also notice that there is a third character. However, miscommunication between Tim and I saw a male character created. Since she does not arrive until the third story we decided to shelve that sketch for now. Once we get green lit we will go back and fully render her character sketch.

In preparing the packets, there is an awful lot of bobbing and weaving. Nothing seems linear. We would get ideas on the logo but not really be able to come to a decision so we would put it on the back burner and concentrate on something else. When you start up something there are so many other things to do. I wanted to just write scripts each night, instead I was buying domain names, negotiating with a webmaster, doing an exhaustively comprehensive character timeline, approving character sketches. Most of these things I never considered when this started. Now they were vital, especially the timeline.

Now we had characters, now we need a whole bunch of things I really never knew we needed.

Next Time… A lot of other things I never knew how to do