56 THE LIVE LIFE Orbital Redux
cience fiction is often referred to as the ‘literature of ideas’, which means asking “what if?” What if a world existed in which this or that
weren’t true; or what if someone created a live broadcast of two pilots in charge of transporting a critical resource from the moon to Earth? Orbital Redux is about a former astronaut, Max, in the year 2050, an age in which Nasa has been defunded and climate change has run rampant. In order to keep civilisation going, Max has to deliver Helium 3 from the moon to Earth, but it’s no glamorous job in space exploration: he’s a truck driver, burned out in his career and struggling to maintain a relationship with his husband. Max is assigned a new trainee, Tommie, a fiery young hotshot who has been hired to be Max’s replacement. Max is about to get fired from the only opportunity he still has to fly – and then, all hell breaks loose with the ship, meaning Max and Tommie have to work together to survive. The eight-episode web series is the brainchild of Butcher Bird Studios’ Steven Calcote. The executive producer, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, whom we met at NAB Show, wanted to make it stand out. “Steven had come up with this great idea and at the same time, as a company, we had started dabbling in the live space, so it felt like this fortuitous opportunity to take something that was small enough to achieve ourselves, testing the limits of where new media is, while also relying on techniques that have been around since the beginning of television,” she explains. “All television used to be live, so it was a deliberate throwback to that early era of the medium, combining what was possible then and what is possible now with new technology.”
Orbital Redux was pitched to Legendary Digital Networks. Producers there liked the story, because there was an attempt at scientific accuracy, as well as a use of technology in plausible ways, which, as Diaz-Przybyl explains, “appealed to its science-orientated fanbase, who really care about getting the details right”. Legendary was also working on an interactive platform, with not only a chat feed at the side of the video, but prompts for engaging the audience in quizzes or polls. “Before we came along, it was using this platform for live-play D&D and other board games, so fun and creative things, but not necessarily in the narrative space,” says Diaz-Przybyl. “We had written all eight episodes before pitching the show, so Legendary was kind enough not to make it a full ‘choose your own adventure’ series.” For instance, the audience weren’t given the option to choose whether a character would live or die, but they had a lot of control over narratives that could change the course of the series in slight and interesting ways. Diaz-Przybyl explains: “In episode two, when Max and Tommie are just getting to know each other, the audience had an opportunity to suggest a line in the chat feed that would be the ice breaker for them. They came up with ‘cake or pie?’ and so Max turns to Tommie, asks the question and she responds, off the cuff, with ‘bourbon pecan pie’. Her answer then became a touchstone later in the series.” Some prompts were more rehearsed than others, for example when a
THE AUDIENCE WEREN’T ABLE TO CHOOSE WHETHER A CHARACTER WOULD LIVE OR DIE, BUT THEY HAD A LOT OF CONTROL OVER NARRATIVES
TIGHT SPOT Cast and crew
make efficient use of the limited space on set, managing live practical effects on top of everything else
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