"They say the life of a detective is full of mystery and intrigue... I wouldn't know, I'm a witer." Sound familiar? Then chances are you've seen Killing You... A Week Ago!. I always wanted to make something live-action with the premise, and KYAWA was really an exercise in exploring what could come from it while playing The Movies.

Meet Rick Mogan, wildly unsuccessful writer about to become a mildly successful detective. Not that he knows it of course. RMPI will be a series that follows Rick from his first day in his new home - the abandoned office space of a detective who's gone missing. He is soon thrust into his new career by a Mysterious Client who sets him to the task of tracking down the World's Worst Rapist!

2009 Production Diary

Hey everybody! 2009 for ICE means the production of Rick Mogan: Private Investigator. For real. We have the first episode totally scripted and tight, which isn't something we can often say. We've started shooting, editing as we go, and things are looking pretty good so far. We're shooting in HD, even! So here's what we've been up to...

Sunday 19 July 2009
Morgs, Jessie, Jarrod, Gary, Sam
This was the first day of shooting, covering some of the closing scene in the Office. We started kinda late, and ran long - we learned some valuable lessons this day. We came away with enough quality footage though.

Monday 27 July 2009
Morgs, Jessie
Strangely enough the next thing we did wasn't to continue shooting. With a day off from my job having worked 7 days in a row, I hung out with Jessie and we ended up writing an entire episode in a day. Stranger still, it was the Season 2 Premiere - now I guess we should go back and write the rest of Season 1!

Saturday 1 August 2009
Morgs, Jessie, Jarrod, Gary, Moni
Here's where we continued shooting - getting better coverage and correcting some audio issues we had last time out, re-shooting about half of what we attempted the first time out. We also organised a particular prop that will hopefully be a highlight of this episode for some people.

Sunday 2 August 2009
Morgs, Jessie
Jessie and I headed up to the Office to shoot a bunch of the early scenes with just Rick, and also record some Voice Overs. In editing, we stumbled across a new way of presenting a certain piece - everyone so far feels it works much better than the way we had it written.

Wednesday 5 August 2009
Morgs, Gary, Jessie, Jarrod, Moni
On sort of a whim, and with Gary having time off we set out to shoot his outdoor scene. The location turned out to be noisy and very much swarming with bugs - which kind of worked with what we were trying to achieve, but we lost the light before we got anything we were really happy with.

Thursday 6 August 2009
Morgs, Gary, Jessie, Jarrod, Moni
Luckily though, we realised that we were all available again much earlier the next day. We reshot everything we had attempted the day before, and came away with some good footage. Thinking we had plenty of time, we moved on to our next location, but discovered that even sleepy ol' Durie Hill suffers from way too much traffic around 5pm.

Saturday 19 September 2009
Morgs, Moni, Jessie
We did some trial shooting for Moni's scene, had a hell of a time finding a suitable location. By the time we did, we didn't have a lot of sunlight left. We know what we need for next time we attempt this.

Friday 27 November 2009
Morgs, Jessie, Jarrod, Moni
With some new props and a costume change, we reshot the Office scenes between Rick, Lucy and The Shaker. To make it not seem like a total redo, we also went further ahead in the script and got all of our shots done right up until the end credits. There's one more character to cover in this scene, but we'll get to that when we have a bit more money to splash on it.

Thursday 10 December 2009
Morgs, Jessie, Jarrod, Moni
Thanks to my boss, we now have access to an empty former church. It doesn't look all that churchy now, but it did provide a nice location for the scene where we first meet The Shaker.

Monday 14 December 2009
Morgs, Jessie
Time for a writing update. We've been working quite broadly across Season 1 - coming up with plenty of ideas we like, riffing and improvising, then deciding where they would best fit in the timeline we've mapped out. We're still developing all the character arcs as well, but we do have start and end points where everyone needs to move between. And yes, we have started properly writing Episode 2 of Season 1 now!

Sunday 28 March 2010
Morgs, Jessie
Jessie and I finished writing Episode 2 of Season 1. In this episode, Rick is on the case to track down a jewel thief who preys on children. Also a surprise visit from someone from Rick's past, and has Lucy become any less strange?