How to Pull Off An Apacalyptic TV show with 3 Timelines

The story structure of the Amnesia TV show is designed where there are three timelines going on.  The flashback to the main character's past (that tells him in pieces what happened to him and his love interest), the "Event" timeline t(hat comes in pieces telling us what led to the world) and finally the present day apocalyptic timeline of some time in the near future.

Writing that was hard, trying to figure out how to pull that off without ballooning the budget was even harder.  I kept wrestling with how to do it.  One part is shot on mostly a city/college campus location, another is one is a road full of smashed up cars near a major city and the third is in the forests near the mountains.  Racing back and forth to the different locations per episode would just be too time consuming and expensive plus it would run the mistake of forgetting things or making small mistakes that would end up turning into bigger ones.  The more I looked at the concept it seemed like a nightmare.  How could I pull this off?

I had another issue.  Andrew Roth, who is playing the lead Allan Carter, has to go through 3 major hair changes.  These changes would be much easier done naturally than faking it.  In one timeline he is a clean cut college student another one he's older with a gottee and then another he has long hair and a beard.  All I could think was "continuity nightmare".  A TV episode is about 45 minutes long when you take away the 15 minutes of commercial.  In a 45 minute episode he's going to go through 3 hair changes and be in 3 different "worlds".  If the studios did this on a per episode basis each episode would be expensive.

That's when it hit me.  Don't shoot per episode.  Shoot per timeline.  Shoot the "Event" timeline first to draw in more interest.  Then shoot the "flashback" timeline second and then third the present day "apocalyptic" timeline.  By shooting it this way I would save huge on transporation, time, money and the massive headache of trying to make it work.

The other catch, spread the production schedule out so that there are months between each timeline shoot.  This gives ample time to just focus on finding the locations and lining up all other necessary components per timeline.  This also means that each actor just focuses on where there character is at this moment in their character's lives.

With this in mind the execution really comes down to 2 major forms of organization: the script and the storyboard.  If I know exactly how the story is told per scene via the storyboard than I don't have to worry if things will flow between the timelines when they are edited together per episode because I would have already played out how the match up on paper in the drawings.


JWB