One text ahead of the reaper: A new dark comedy that passes the Bechdel Test and echoes Buffy, Sherlock, & Doctor Who.
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One text ahead of the reaper: A new dark comedy that passes the Bechdel Test and echoes Buffy, Sherlock, & Doctor Who.
About this project
OH HEY THERE. SUPER SNEAKY PEACEKEEPERS UPDATE.
The first episode is down below if you still haven't seen it yet, BUT!
If you want to know a bit more about the mythology behind the show, here's a storyboard for a chunk from the third episode about the history of the peacekeepers.
WATCH EPISODE ONE HERE:
What would you do if you were getting texts from God?
Peacekeepers is about a group of personal assistants in New York City who get texts about things before they happen and go about preventing grisly accidents—car crashes, peanut allergies, lion pit mishaps, jumpers on the Queensboro bridge, knife fights, etc etc yadda yadda yadda. It's a pretty frickin' tough job, but what would YOU do if you were getting texts from God?
Alana isn't buyin' it. She likes the money, but the whole God thing kinda weirds her out. Her friend Sophie hooked her up with this job about six months ago but the gig's starting to seem a bit... off. Why now? Why can't they save everybody? If the Peacekeeper she works for IS actually God with an iPhone, why the hell does he need a bunch of twentysomethings to help him divinely intervene?
It's a bit of a clusterf**k to say the least, and it's becoming clear that even a Peacekeeper has enemies.
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So we made a first episode! It cost us $26,900.
If this campaign is fully funded, that $60,000 (even after Kickstarter and Amazon take their cut) will allow us to shoot two more episodes in the first season, which, when completed, will be six episodes long.
We've gotten an awesome response to our first episode. The entire first season has been planned out, and the next two scripts are written and cast and ready to be shot. Now we need your help to start shooting!
Here's our main cast, in case you didn't recognize our stars.
Maria's our resident Spitfire Redhead and co-creator of the show. She's mainly got a theatre background; you can tell because she can do acty things with her face. See all those face movements! That's how a pro do. You probably saw her in A Piece of My Heart and Eclipsed where she busts her feminist ass to help participate in the production of plays in which there are more roles for women
Maddie is The Fanciest Lady on Set at any given time. Her character didn't get NEARLY enough screen time in this episode (y'know, ugh, pilots having to introduce everybody) but Sophie has some serious business this season on Peacekeepers. Hey, you probably saw Maddie as Lisa on Whatever This Is! I bet she was your favorite character.
Tommy is The Face That Launched A Bazillion Tumblr Fanpages. You were probably a fan of Scruffy in The Outs and Toby in Whatever This Is. Well he's back! And very solidly a main character. Spoilers.
Jacques smolders pretty hard in this first episode. He has more stuff goin' on in the future. Again, spoilers. We can't even talk about it. You'd be mad that we ruined it for you. He was in Tom in America which we are pretty stoked about. We are MORE stoked for him to kick ass on this show but that's just because we're biased. Sorry everybody.
SOME UPCOMING STUFF:
AWESOME CAMEO ALERT: Welcome To Night Vale's Cecil Baldwin is going to be in the second episode! More spoilers: He doesn't die, because we wouldn't kill off Cecil. That voice. THAT VOICE. But pretty soon you can see that face all over the place!
MUSICAL NUMBER. No, we haven't gotten Megan Hilty to be on the show yet (though Megan, if you want it, you're in). We've gotten permission to perform Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman's They Just Keep Moving The Line, which was our favorite song from NBC's Smash. Quite a few of us worked on Smash back in the day and we're excited to carry this tiny little torch on. We can't divulge the plot details surrounding this number quite yet, but we CAN say it's going to involve some New York musical realness, a la Funny Girl:
We don't see a lot of awesome sweeping establishing shots of the city these days, which is why we've worked a quadcopter into our budget:
And we're planning on upping the ante when it comes to capturing the essence of New York (which, if you've seen the first episode, is a pretty big deal to us).
Par exemple:
So, back to business:
It takes an army to shoot something in New York City.
Each and every member of our production team is a pro. We've all been making a living in film and TV for years and we're experts at this sort of thing.
Many of us come from a studio background, which includes the big guys like HBO, Warner Brothers, NBC, CBS, ABC, MTV, ESPN, Bravo, basically everybody. And we've all seen what television can cost.
And we're not happy with that.
$27,000 can get you coffee for a season, or a wrap party, or a single walk-on role in a single episode. It regularly costs the big networks upwards of $5,000,000 to make an episode of scripted television.
We want about 1% of that to make two episodes for you, because we believe we can make something thrilling, beautiful, and world class for just that much money.
It's not completely a passion project. We still need to eat. We still need to pay our laborers enough to make it worth their while, because they all need day jobs too. But we can make this happen!
Check out those rewards over there on the right, watch the episode again (and again and again), share it with your friends, and help us finish what we started!
P.S. If you build it, there will be t-shirts:
(Courtesy of insanely talented comic artist Jackson Eather.)
Risks and challenges
Shut up! We're invincible!
Okay fine. There are always unexpected hurdles to overcome. Shooting in NYC is an incredibly expensive endeavour, and after mapping out how to produce these episodes for under $27,000 each, we know we're going to have to do reshoots, add extra shooting days, hire extra help-- the first episode took several months more to complete than we thought it would, because we got to the end of shooting and decided we needed a proper score and better graphics and an animated sequence. We live, and we learn, and we get better as we go.
We got it done. And we will never not get it done. This project means too much to us to not follow through. We've got some big dreams and some big stories to tell, and an incredibly supportive network of very, VERY talented artists in this city that will help us tell it. All we need is the ability to empower those artists to feed and clothe and house themselves while we crank out this series.
We promise transparency every step of the way. Please ask us any and all questions you have and we will answer them with excruciatingly extensive detail.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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Quite so!
@peacekeepersnyc -
Indeed.
peacekeepersnyc.com
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Funding period
- (30 days)