This podcast gave me a really good insight into the creative process of writer and executive producer Damon Lindelof. It taught me a lot about the teamwork between all the key players in order to make Watchmen the tv show a reality. I also thought it was interesting that Damon Lindelof made a point to make the series make sense for anyone, even people who hadn't read the original Watchmen comics. For example, he relied on Nicole Kissel, the director because she hadn't read the comics before so he used her point of view to connect to views who hadn't read the comics. He used the people around him as input, he would take their interpretations of the story and include them in the story line. I think that is something that I really need to focus on in my project: making sure that anyone who uses/sees my project can understand it no matter how much background information they have on the subject.
Another input he used to learn more about the "deeply complex portrayal of race in America" was by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates. As a white man, he didn't pretend to know about a struggle he didn't experience. He learned through reading and learning. He read Between the World and Me, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' other essays, as well as the fact that he thought about Wakanda because Coates was a writer on the movie. Moreover, Between the World and Me is one of my favorite books and I found it interesting that Damon Lindelof finds inspiration from reading things and not "ideas just coming to him in the shower" as he put it.
Lastly, a third input was that he used his past experiences from filming Lost. He took the concept of origin stories which he used a lot in Lost and leaned into it. He wanted to show the idea of nature v nurture and about the concept of legacy. Legacy meaning what you inherit from your parent and their parents and how all of this relates to the beginning of where Watchmen begins. Another input he used was the world around him, he used the actual history of the world to shape his characters and their stories which I think is brilliant.
A few other inputs include: The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and Finding Your Roots with Henry.
Some inputs that I want to use to help shape my project is other people's point of views. I want to make sure that my project is representative of everyone involved. Obviously, it will be my point of view, but I want other people to be able to relate to it and to be interested in it. Another input that I want to use is literature. I want to have sources that help make sure the information I am going to use in my project is not only representative of the past, but also how it will be in the future. One last input I am going to use is social media. Social media houses the opinions of people all over the world, so I want to use that as a tool to see what I can find on my topic and how the information I find could be best presented to people with different perspectives.