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Josh and Joe (I Mean Bryan)
4 March 2006
Contents: Introduction | Station Exterior | Station Interior | Final Episode | Conclusion
Introduction.
During the four years that I attended Whitmer High School there was a daily news report by some of the students. It was called WTMR, and it could be pretty rough at times, especially in the beginning. Bryan MacAfee and I, the creative souls that we were, began brainstorming on how to improve the news presented to us each day during study hall. Our solution was to drop the whole WTMR concept entirely and start fresh with a newscast presented from a space station in low earth orbit. Our working title quickly became Josh and Joe (I Mean Bryan). That title never changed, so I guess that makes it official. MacAfee designed the titles, with "Josh and Joe" written nicely in cursive, with "Joe" crossed out and "I Mean Bryan" spelled out beneath with driftwood.
We never got very far into actually producing this show, which would have been ten to fifteen minute segments filmed each day. In retrospect I think this would have been prohibitively expensive to produce. Plus, I could never think of a reasonable explanation for why MacAfee and I would be in class each day and yet also be reporting from a space station, meaning that we would have to be shuttled back and forth on a daily basis for the sole purpose of doing a newscast. Of course, it had to be a space station for two reasons: 1) The proximity to various satellites meant that we could provide the best, most recent news possible, and 2) Space stations are really cool.
A bit of pre-production artwork and design was done for this show, most of which hasn't actually been seen by anyone. So my posting this here is the first time anyone but me is seeing some of this stuff.
The Space Station (Exterior).
Initially our setting wasn't a space station, it was an actual spaceship capable of leaving orbit at its leisure. At this point the actual setting wasn't that important since we were still working out the kinks. My first design in this direction was only a small part of the vessel, a docking bay. There would be several of these bays extending from the ship on long arms. I didn't actually have a design for the ship yet, and they would never turn up on any subsequent designs, but this was a start.
After that start, I went for the larger whole, and the spaceship that I designed would become very important for me personally. The vessel, which I took to calling Magellan, would become the basis for every single JG Enterprises starship to follow. This was the beginning of a design trend, the ship eventually evolving into the Columbus class starship once it lost the solar panels and the enormous docking ring amidships. The docking ring was a replacement for those earlier docking arms.
This spaceship design lingered around for a while until I claimed it for the JG Enterprises fleet. At that point the show lost its setting for a couple of years. Work in planning this was fairly on and off for about three years, the early concepts beginning around late 1996/early 1997 and the following few coming in 1999. Needless to say we weren't fully dedicated to this project.
It was in 1998 that the space station was finally decided upon. The following two designs were drawn on 30 January 1999 and were meant to depict a modular station with a dedicated command section in the bow. The cylindrical modules were inspired by parts of the Mir space station, which was still in orbit at the time. The second design features a slightly raised command deck borrowed from the original Battlestar Galactica. I still rather like this second design.
Two days later I decided that the command module should be capable of atmospheric reentry, so I redesigned it to resemble the nose of the space shuttle, complete with thermal protection tiles, similar windows and airlock, and thruster arrangements. I also covered them in various antennas to emphasize the station's purpose as a news center. The detachable command module would serve its purpose in the final episode, which I'll talk more of later. The last two of these show the clamps on the rear that held the module to the rest of the station.
That's all of the work I did on the station's exterior. This was also pretty much the last bit of effort placed into the show before it finally died its protracted death. But let's take a look inside, shall we?
The Space Station (Interior).
The main purpose of the station would be to serve as a newsroom in orbit. Therefore, the most important interior set would have been the newsroom itself. Despite the importance of this particular room, very little design work went into it. This might seem like an oversight, but part of the rationale was that only a small part of this room would actually be seen, and its actual proportions would be dictated by the space we found to build it in and by how much would fit into the camera. It became a "play-it-by-ear" set, that its actual design would come about as it was being built. Our first piece of design artwork was of this set, and the awesome ones among you will probably see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 design elements thrown in, particularly the three lights above the doors. This was because our earliest thoughts featured a MST3K-style sequence with MacAfee and I commentating on news playing on a large screen, with our shadowed figures at the bottom. Hey, I didn't say that everything we did was original.
That set would have been built in my bedroom using my closet doors, which would have been paneled in posterboard to cover the wood grain. We even pulled down the posters and stuff that I had hanging on the walls and began building the set. We had painted some boxes silver and even hung the box in the top right corner. The yellow tubes were made from painted toilet paper rolls. This partially built set remained around for a few months before I took it down because it wasn't going anywhere. The "Dock 14" sign still hangs there today. MacAfee lobbied for the "Kill the Wabbit! Part #53" poster, which I thought detracted from the set, but I did get the Flux Capacitor, so I guess we were even. I even constructed the MST3K-style theater, with one whole wall in my room given to a screen, with a row of seats in front with a light set up to cast the shadows. We hadn't worked out the mechanics of how to film it at that point. It didn't take long after this to lose the MST3K ideas, and the doors along with them. A smaller, purpose built set was designed to closer resemble an actual newsroom, but with a few sci-fi flourishes, like the panels on the desk.
I also did a series of bridge designs. The first just resembled a Star Trek bridge way too much. It was uncanny, and I tried to move away from that with subsequent designs. I actually needed a set that wasn't the main bridge but rather an auxiliary control room. You see, in the final episode the main bridge was going to be rendered inaccessible forcing our gallant crew to use the controls in the auxiliary bridge. The following design is closest to what we could have hoped to build, but even then it's way too big and still too Trekish. Bear in mind that the show was still set aboard the larger spaceship at this point. When it became the space station the bridge would have been shrunk into a cockpit-like design, with the auxiliary control room being much smaller still.
You know, I keep bringing up this final episode. It's probably time to go into detail about this.
The Final Episode.
From the start I knew how I wanted to end our run. I wanted the final episode to be a gigantic, pounding, special-effects driven action-packed event. Basically everything I wouldn't have been able to do in a regular episode.
We would have began with a standard newscast, like it's a normal day. All of a sudden alarms begin going off and the lighting switches to red. The newscasters are shocked at first, staring blankly at the chaos. It takes a second for them to snap into action, checking monitors, running back and forth trying to confirm the danger. They come to a startling realization at the same time: the station is being boarded by a hostile alien race. Attempts to regain control of the station fail, as the enemy crew outnumbers our own hapless heroes. Weapons fire drives our newscasters through an access panel as they attempt to reach the main bridge, which they quickly come to discover has already been taken by the enemies. They flee to the auxiliary control room in the original spaceship version.
In the revised space station version the crew return to the newsroom rather than going to auxiliary control. Not only does one of those panels on the desk have to do something, but also building a control room would have been too expensive and time consuming on top of everything else planned for this episode. In the newsroom our crew activates the station's destruct charges. Taking one last look around the room they beat a hasty exit. They manage to get off the station just as the charges begin going off. For the first time we see that the enemy vessel dwarfs the station that it's clinging to, and the two go up in a massive fireball, our crew being rattled in their escape vehicle by the shockwave as they enter Earth's atmosphere.
The actual escape vehicle was never decided upon. I was trying to design the front of the station to be a detachable command module, as already shown. But that wouldn't have the drama of having the enemy crew in the main control center. I also figured there should he a dedicated escape pod tucked away somewhere. I never designed any escape pods, but I did a bit of work on the enemy ship.
Actually, the enemy ship was tied into a movie project at the time. Since these two were being developed concurrently I figured that alien starship designs from one could also work for the other. In other words, the designs I didn't decide to use in that movie could be taken by this show. In the end neither ever got made, so I have a bunch of decent alien ship designs lying around.
Conclusion.
I still feel that Josh and Joe (I Mean Bryan) had promise. It would have been ridiculous, but I think that MacAfee and I could have brought our own mixed bag of esotericism to the show. I do have to admit that a strong driving force for me was the prospect of blowing up the model at the end of the series. I'm a bit of a tech guy, so making the space station as real as possible was important for me, and I really wanted to show everything: living spaces, sleeping quarters, bathrooms, engine compartments, everything. I wanted to depict as realistic a space station as possible ... and as realistic an exploding space station as possible, too.
This project never saw fruition for a number of reasons. The biggest being a general lack of interest. I may have given an impression in this article that a lot of effort was put into the show, but it was spread over more than three years. After the first year MacAfee wasn't even really involved anymore and I was just developing concepts in quiet and not doing anything with them. Second, we simply did not have the time or budget to pull this off. It would have involved building sets, constructing models, making costume items, and coming up with props. Trying to depict a functioning space station would not be an easy task at all, and that's not even figuring in the added work on the final episode (aliens, alien ship, pyrotechnics, escape vehicle, possible new sets). Third, I didn't really want the attention. MacAfee and I would likely have wound up being the newscasters, and I didn't want that. I rather liked my anonymity in high school and I didn't think we'd be able to bring enough people on that I wouldn't have to act. Finally, and probably most important, was the crew of WTMR. They did a lot of work on their show and were proud of their efforts. Who were we to criticize their early efforts at making a news program? We began developing this in the first couple months of WTMR, when they were still finding their legs. Their show did improve greatly with age, and it was hugely presumptuous to think we could produce something better, set in space no less.
As I write this, it's been almost ten years since MacAfee and I did that first design using my bedroom as a newsroom. WTMR disappeared for some time, and recently I learned that the program was restarted by a new generation of Whitmer students. I'm pleased to hear this, and wish them the best in their daily news casting. How much seriousness actually went into Josh and Joe (I Mean Bryan)? It's difficult to say. I mean, we did actually begin building stuff for it, and writing out partial scripts, not to mention all the design work I just showed you. But our hearts weren't completely into it, and it became, when all was said and done, more of an intellectual exercise into what we could come up with. I'm still happy with the stuff I did for this project, even if it took nearly a decade to see the light of day. I hope you enjoyed browsing through it. Though I really hope even more that at some point you thought to yourself "that could have been kind of cool."
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