You can watch a video version of this blog post here.
Hi! This is Zach, creator of Nearly Human. If you’re reading this, it means we’ve officially gone public, which is pretty nerve-wracking! I’ve put on a brave face in our official publicity material, because, well, it’s my job to make that stuff look super professional to attract viewers. But in this blog I am going to speak a bit more candidly, so you are warned in advance if you keep reading!
The goal of this crowdfunder is to get people familiar with the show’s characters. Nearly Human is a character-driven show, and part of the intrigue, I think, is that there’s such a large variety of them, and you can sort of start speculating, which of these characters are going to meet up and have plotlines together, how does this all come together? I’m the type of person who, when I start a video game, I’ll open up the menu and look through the character bios before I even leave the first screen. I’ll watch all the Meet the Cast videos for every season of Survivor before I watch the first episode. So that’s why I chose this format for our website and crowdfunder – you can start picking out your favourites already.
I didn’t wanna launch until we had a trailer to show, because, y’know, we’re (mostly) first-time creators and I wanted to give people something that proves “You can trust us”. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and we’ll be showing more preview snippets throughout the weeks of the crowdfunder. The downside to this strategy is we had to put in a ton of money on our own without any guarantee that we would actually make anything, which is pretty stressful!
I absolutely hate the idea of asking for money, but I’m sort of trying to reframe it in my mind like, I’m not begging for money for no reason or whatever – this is a product. And to me, it’s about value – so if you think this show looks good and that you’d want to watch it, or just generally you want to support new people creating stuff like this, then it’s hopefully a worthwhile investment. And I remind myself I’ve put literally countless hours into making this already, as well as members of the team who’ve made major sacrifices to get this far.
I’m incredibly nervous right now. I was never an extrovert even in the best of times, but with the pandemic sapping a lot of my momentum, I’m really not in a place where I want to put myself out to the world and say “Hey, look at me! Look at this thing I’m making!” Have you ever seen that statistic that says people are more scared of public speaking than death? That kind of sums it up for me right now. I’ve acted on stage before, many times; that doesn’t scare me – it’s playing a role. But putting myself out there, the real me, and showing people a thing I’ve put my heart and soul into it? Scary.
I don’t think I have it in me to be a really good promotion person, but until we have the money to hire a publicity team (we don’t), it falls on me. I’m stressed about it, and there are parts of it that go against my personality – I think, as a “public figure” there’s sort of a pressure to just, always say the right thing, be positive 100% of the time, don’t ever say anything that could offend anyone or be taken the wrong way, etc. I think it drives people to act sort of fake, not out of any character flaw, just because they have to – to succeed, and I really don’t like being fake. So I’m going to attempt to be “real”, as much as possible, while promoting this thing. Not speak only in pre-planned, corporate-approved publicity statements. I sort of hope its true what they say, that “all publicity is good publicity” because I’m like, well, if I say the wrong thing and get an angry mob on my case… Maybe that can only help, in the end!
I’m going to use this blog to talk about the process of creating the show, and about crowdfunding. Once the show goes up for real eventually, maybe write about some of the ideas that went into the episodes and the story. I’m not sure. I’m sort of a believer that a piece of art should stand on its own and that a writer should never need to tell you stuff about it, or if they do, you can ignore it because if it’s not in the actual show, you can make your own interpretation. But also it’s interesting to talk about, so, we’ll see.
Though I will warn you in advance, I’m not a particularly artsy person. I feel people often ask writers, like, “Oh, what inspired you to write this, what was your thought process with this theme…?” etc and you’re supposed to answer like “Oh it was really the beauty of humanity, you see when this character says this it’s a metaphor for this poetic imagery from my childhood…” but for me it was honestly just like “Idk??? I just tried to make a cool thing???” …So don’t expect too much.