“…you’re in Angel Grove…”
June 27, 2012, 2:47 PM
So now that Falcon is done and pretty much just waiting a few more days to launch on July 1, I’m starting to turn my mind towards other endeavors again. First of all, I significantly curtailed the amount of Wikipedia contributions that I would make while doing Falcon. I want to keep the level of my contributions at that lower amount, because Wikipedia has started to annoy me as of late, and I’m happier making far less edits. Plus I spent too much time on Wikipedia before, and that caused work on Schumin Web to suffer, and so it’s time to spend more time taking care of my first creation. The time between shooting and publication on photo sets had become far too much, with many months between becoming the norm. And that was unacceptable.
But looking at what I want to do, aside from the aforementioned Transit Center update, I’m thinking about doing some creative writing. I’ve been watching a bunch of Power Rangers episodes lately, and I want to try something in that vein (you wondered why I mentioned Angel Grove in the title, didn’t you?). No, I’m not dressing up in spandex and fighting monsters. Though that would be kind of fun – three guesses as to what Power Ranger costume I would be wearing, and the first two don’t count. But no. I want to do something along the lines of the adapting of stock content into a completely new story and making it believeable. Realize that the way Power Rangers works is that first the Super Sentai television show is made in Japan for Japanese audiences. Then Saban acquires the rights to the season, and cuts the episodes up to make a completely new show, adding their own original scenes, and recording new audio to go over the Japanese footage of the suit battles, zord battles, and (sometimes) villain scenes. A careful viewer of Power Rangers can usually notice when it changes between original footage and the source material from Super Sentai, because the quality of the footage is a little different with regard to lighting and colors, the Power Rangers’ costumes are shiny in the Sentai footage but not in the American footage, and occasionally elements of some costumes are changed (like Elgar’s face in original Turbo footage, vs. in Carranger footage).
In adapting this idea for Schumin Web, I would do a photo set along the same lines as a Life and Times photo set. Lots of narrative text, and lots of photos. For source material, I’m thinking of going two ways on it. Either I’m going to take old material of my own and adapt it for use as source material, or make arrangements to use someone else’s photos as my source material. To go for more authenticity would be to use someone else’s source material, with only a vague explanation about what the material is about, and no information on locations. After all, the Sentai source material was shot in Japan. But Power Rangers from back when I used to watch it was produced in California. Thus I would need to figure out how to choose photo locations to make the transitions between source material and new material more believable. Since they never went to Tokyo in the show. Everything happened in Angel Grove. Therefore I would need to make everything appear coherent.
But the biggest challenge would be to decide on what the story would be. I would have source material, and then come up with a story to tell, plan out how I would present it, and then tell it. Whether or not it is connected to what the source material was about is irrelevant. That would determine what new material I would need to make and then go about making that new material. And no, the story would most likely not have anything to do with anything about Power Rangers. I just like the idea of mixing source material with original material and creating something new that is unrelated to the source material.
So I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve laid out a pretty good challenge for myself. I think it will be pretty fun to do, too, once I determine what the source material is going to be, and then what to do for it. Leave suggestions in the comments!
Web site: Sentai vs. Power Rangers - what's the difference?
Song: Theme to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on Mario Paint
Quote: And of course the first step to a successful project is a catchy name. Considering what I'm doing, I should call this project "Operation Angel Grove".
Categories: Power Rangers, Schumin Web meta