Member-only story
Encounter Party: From Idea to Television in Under 5 Years
You can watch Encounter Party on demand for free, no logins or signups needed, on Plex. Click this link to watch!
The show is currently available in the US-only so non US viewers will need to use a VPN.
“I have an idea.”
- Brian David Judkins
When Brian David Judkins says those words to you, it’s always worth listening. It’s December of 2018, and I’m standing on the street outside my day job, where I’ve taken 30 minutes off work to take a call with a friend. For the next 15 minutes, Brian pitched me on an idea for a Dungeons & Dragons TV show he’d been mulling over. I got very excited. You see , separately I had spent multiple years developing an idea for a Dungeons & Dragons TV show that I hadn’t yet figured out the hook for.
Brian’s pitch proposed an answer to a problem I’d been stuck on for a long time. Excitedly, I set a followup call with him for after work.
That night, Brian and I had a call that lasted many hours where we bandied about ideas, debated aspects in the macro and micro, and when the dust settled we had a very defined outline of an idea. An epic fantasy TV show, with hour-long episodes, improvised for the audience in real-time through playing Dungeons & Dragons, captured using the visual stylings of a single-set unscripted/reality tv show.
As two actors with no clout in this industry, getting from idea to TV show was going to be nearly impossible at that point. Luckily I had been producing a very different fiction podcast where the capture style was somewhat similar. We decided to make a proof-of-concept podcast (set in Magic: the Gathering’s plane of Ravnica) to test the waters and see if audiences would respond well to our style of storytelling.
Next came a nationwide casting call to find our table. We put the word out through our networks, on some well known blogs and forums, and started interviewing people. In January of 2019 we locked in our cast. Joining myself and Brian at the table were Eddie Cooper, Sarah Babe, Andrew Krug, and Landree Fleming. Our cast was based in Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and New York City. We booked flights for everyone and set recording dates for mid-February in Brian’s living room.
