Save the Cat!®

Our thanks to Aaron Pope, Los Angeles-based writer/director and senior analyst for www.coverageink.com, for this guest blog on LIBERATOR, a very cool project he’s working on with his partner, Jim Cirile.

Launching a new superhero franchise without source material is impossible. No question about it. These movies get made because Marvel and DC have created a brand that can be perpetually cashed in on. And anyone who thinks they can create a new superhero without a major-label comic brand is crazy.

The Liberator writes his tell-all book. Sometimes, the pen is mightier than the superpowers.

Call me crazy. My writing partner Jim Cirile too.

Two years ago, Jim and I set out to invent LIBERATOR, a brand new superhero franchise about a disgraced, washed-up superhero who, in hopes of reconnecting with a long-estranged daughter, writes a tell-all book and finds redemption when that choice draws him back into action against old foes and former allies. Jim and I both knew getting this thing off the ground was impossible. We’d never get this thing made.

But guess what? We just did.

It shot this summer in L.A. with Lou Ferrigno (The Incredible Hulk) delivering the performance of his life and Peta Wilson (La Femme Nikita), Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation), and the legendary Ed Asner (Up) filling out the cast. In addition to these luminary actors, we loaded up the movie with an ambitious fight sequence, a ton of visual effects, and two superheroes-turned-villain in Don “the Dragon” Wilson and Tara Cardinal.

Told you we were crazy.

The incomparable Ed Asner as the President of the United States

So how did we pull this off? How did two superhero movie fans find a way to make this happen? First, we set out to do an ambitious project. Anyone who was scared off by the size and scope of this thing we didn’t need. Or want. Jim and I wrote it together, with Jim producing and me directing, and we surrounded ourselves with people who were just as psyched about bucking the system and doing something great. Second, we made sure the script was bulletproof.

And that came by way of Save the Cat! Jim and I are both big believers in structure, in the idea that the more solid the skeleton of the story, the more room we have to do something artistic and amazing on top of it. And so, as we set out to take on an impossible task, we knew we had to do it right. We had to hit all the key STC! structural beats.

Ah, but therein lies the wrinkle. See, LIBERATOR isn’t a full-length feature. It’s a short/presentation pilot. It’s a 20-minute proof of concept for a character and a story world, which will later be expanded into TV, movies, graphic novels… you name it. So we had to, in 20 pages or less, write something that could stand alone as a story but also transition smoothly into a fuller narrative down the road. And that’s where it gets tricky.

Do we just hit the first few STC! beats and then fade out? Opening Image, Theme Stated, Setup, Catalyst, Debate, and Break into Act Two? That would be easy. But would it feel finished? Nope. We quickly realized that we had to hit all the Save the Cat! beats within our smaller story, in ways that also worked as these First Act beats in the fuller narrative.

No small task but hey, like I said, we’re all about being ambitious.

A hero suits up.

Opening Image? That was simple. Comic book art. Actual comic panels from former Marvel Comics Art Director Darren Auck to open and close our story.

Theme Stated? Another no-brainer. This story’s all about shining the light of exposure on the dark deeds of the world. Our hero’s writing a tell-all book that everyone’s afraid to touch except for one intrepid publisher, Duke Deckard (played by Darwin Harris), who tells our hero that he learned a lesson years ago from his now-dead mother that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Catalyst? The Liberator steps into a trap, what he thought was an interview to hype his book but ends up being a clandestine debriefing by the government and subsequent capture.

Debate? How’s he going to deal with this? Accept capture or fight his way out of a massive compound full of armed guards? Well, this is a superhero action movie, which choice do you think he made?

And Break into Two? With Liberator on the run and his old team in hot pursuit, this former superhero suits back up, teams with a new ally, and steps into the battle of a lifetime.

So there’s our First Act for the feature. But what about hitting all the beats within our self-contained version? Well, many of the beats are the same, like the Opening Image and Theme Stated. But from there, we needed little beats all along the way that signaled the key turning points, the key moments of engagement, defeat, rebirth, climax, and resolution. And we filled each and every one of them in.

Want to know how we did it? Want to know what those beats are? It’s easy to find out. All you have to do is check out… LIBERATOR.

See behind the scenes footage and more on our Kickstarter page. Then come aboard Team Liberator and help make the Liberator fly!