Channel-flipping preview

1/4The Outer Reaches trailer

Nine broadcasts, each already in progress and already leaving, then a channel that is not on the guide.

A delivery captain sits in an armchair beside a reel-to-reel and tells a documentary crew where he was that morning. He was taking a test. Then the channel changes. This trailer flips channels through the world of Brammel and Tosk: a regional news cut-in where a transparent weather anchor hands off to a reporter with no hands, a maintenance manual, a shopping channel, a training video for the ordering software, a community notice and a traffic report each get a few seconds before the dial moves. Nobody in any of them is where the thing they describe happened. It ends on a channel that isn’t on the guide, then on a card that asks why instead of who.

I wrote the first draft of the script. Once it was locked, every section was timed to the recorded voices rather than to the script, so the cut runs about four minutes against a planned two. Each character was designed once as a still, then posed and animated from that still so a face can’t drift between shots, and the space footage came from The RippleThe RippleTwenty-six short films made as the in-house news channel of a fictional space wholesaler, to invite coworkers into a six-week workshop season.Application. Three shorter trailers, cut earlier from the season’s films, follow it here.

The defects that mattered were found by watching the render, not by the checks that passed it.