It’s Only Cricket

In Which We Meet Roxanne…

Finally, we are introduced to the mighty Roxanne, who holds our heroes lives, and more importantly their weekends, in the palm of her hand.

Synopses (Spoiler Alert!)

This one picks up right where the last one ended, with the office staff shuffling into the lounge for Roxanne’s announcement. Roxanne marches up, and in her affectation of an English accent, announces that the staff will get the rest of the day off… but they have to come in on Saturday to make up the work. (Ruining Guy’s chances of attending his niece’s birthday and giving her Brooke’s nameplate. See last episode.) With no sign that Roxanne is the least bit upset with Brooke for bringing the bad news to her, she invites Brooke to pop back into her office, so they can finish their talk. Brooke confesses to Alice that he didn’t get fired. Well… if it’s not that, what other dark secret could Brooke be hiding?

Brooke joins Roxanne in her office, decorated with a massive photo of a naked Roxanne wrapped in the Union Jack. She sneaks some gin out of it hiding place and pours herself a healthy dram. And with that, they’re back into it. This is the terrible secret that Brooke can’t tell Alice… Roxanne offered him a promotion.

The Martin-Wells presentation is Monday morning, and with Cake’s death Roxanne needs someone to jump in and make sure the presentation goes well. And that person, she has decided, is Brooke. She hasn’t counted on Brooke absolutely refusing the promotion. Why can’t she just force him to do it? Is there something else going on here?

And with that, Brooke walks out…

Production Notes

We get to see a little bit of our office, including Roxanne’s office. Incidentally, that painting was made special for our shoot by Stephanie Avery.

This episode highlights one of the biggest changes that was made between the scripts and the finished series. We wrote 6 episodes, and ended up with 12.

The rule in script writing is that one page of properly formatted screenplay equals one minute of screen time. People hold onto the rule pretty savagely, but the truth is that everything depends on the rhythm that happens on set. Some movies run really fast, some like to take their time. Ours was the latter.

Once we started to assemble our footage, we found that each of our six episodes was growing longer and longer, some of them topping out at ten minutes or more. Still really short compared to a sitcom’s half hour (technically, 22 minutes of actual scripted show, the rest being commercials) but too long for our purposes. And our attempts to wrestle the story down to manageable lengths were stealing the life out of them. It was a stressful time. We were way behind schedule, with no end in sight, and the material just did not seem to be working.

I think it was Christopher, who was editing it at home at the time, who first thought about cutting each episode in half. That way we could actually let everything find the pace it seemed to like, double our episodes, and keep each of them nice and short. It was the best decision we could have made.

We approached the material anew. We weren’t about to simply saw them randomly in half, each break needed to be dramatically appropriate. To our great joy, we found each script had a natural turning point midway, which - while never intended to be such - worked great as a place to cut. And so each episode was carefully split.

The only place that it didn’t work so well was around the scene in Roxanne’s office. Since the first script broke nicely into three pieces, at one point we had thirteen episodes. But the scene in Roxanne’s office felt a little too claustrophobic on its own. In the end, if you look at the shooting scripts, the top of this episode is the end of the second script, and the first half of the third! It’s the only one of the new episodes to straddle two of the shooting scripts. And we think it works pretty well.

Another interesting tidbit about this scene is that it was shot in a real office at Radke. When we sent into the location, Stephanie Avery and her crew took hundreds and hundreds of digital photos of the entire office, so that anything that was moved could be put back in place. And we did that twice - for two weekends. For Roxanne’s office, we pulled out almost all of the office furniture, and put our own dressing in. In the script, it reads that Roxanne is sneaking an illicit cigarette. Just before we went to shoot, we realized it probably wouldn’t be political to smoke in a borrowed office. Especially considering we were still hoping to return the following weekend. One false step and we would be without a location in the middle of our shoot, and we’d have to reshoot everything we had originally shot when we got a new office set!

So we changed it to an illicit drink. Trouble was, we hadn’t planned on that. No booze on hand. We sent Stefan racing out into the night, looking for an LCBO open late enough to buy a bottle of gin. (For our international fans, in the province of Ontario, Canada, you can only buy alcohol from the government run stores. Needless to say, they don’t feel the need to keep very late hours.) When he finally did come back, we promptly emptied the bottle and filled with water, leaving us with a pitcher of gin. That pitcher was mysteriously emptied shortly after the last shot of the day.

The scene still worked, some felt the gun was an even better choice than the cigarette, but it highlights yet another potential pitfall of low budget productions. If you ever wonder why movies cost so much to make, it is partly because they pay enough so you don’t care if your house or office reeks of cigarette smoke after they’re done with it.

And Roxanne’s illicit cigarette habit makes an appearance in episode 11. So it’s all good, dude.