Conception: What if God was One of Us?

Inspiration can strike at any time, and I tend to find it is a combination of a variety of ideas you may have been cooking away with in the back of your mind combined with whatever major influences are floating around you at the time. When you set out to make a webseries there are often two routes you can go – the desire to make a series but needing to then have a good enough concept for your show or to have a good concept and decide to make a webshow from it.

Urban Numina has definitely been a case of the first. I’ve been cooking away with a number of ideas for low cost web shows but struggling with concepts that felt “right.” I’ve certainly had more than my fair share of concepts – but it was taking time to reach “the one” for what I wanted to do for my next series.

As with most inspiration for me, Urban Numina crept up on me while listening to music on one of my walks around Wellington city. I was listening to One of Us, as performed by the cast of Glee, and I began to get images of a possible show.

Taking the cue from the line “What if God was one of us?” I started playing with the idea of what if a woman found God lying in the street. This grew into a story about God trying to get back to Heaven – kind of in a Dogma sense. Then the concept really took off.

I had been watching a fair bit of the UK version of Being Human, and while the comedy worked for that series, I felt the drama was too heavy handed. Urban Numina was still conceptually about a Woman and God having a serious storyline – with some neat and dramatic twists coming into the core concept as I played it over in my head. I then thought, what about a Being Human set up – God flats with this woman. This then changed to a thought about needing an antagonist. Well who better than the Devil. So it became God, The Devil and this Woman all living in a flat.

While this sounds like a great set up, it also skirted close to Mr Deity for me, and still lacked a certain spark. Not to mention that other parts of the concept weren’t gelling with this idea too well. My main challenge was using God. While I do like to push boundaries, I didn’t want to alienate the audience by making fixed moral decisions about God’s nature and personality. I needed to keep the god without being God explicity.

Thus Deus was born. And once I changed God to Deus, the rest of the series idea came into tight focus and ended up blending with a much older idea I had played with called “The Return.”

The concept became three flatmates having to deal with the sudden appearance of a man named Deus who claims to be a god – although one of the flatmates initially mistakes Deus’ words to be “I am … God.” The series is about how the three flatmates deal with the new addition to their household and the others who come looking for him.

As for the name for the show, I toyed with the title “Urban Gods” but that felt too close to American Gods. A little search around the net led me to the word “Numen (pl. Numina)” which is a divine being or the divine presence within an object or area. The final part of the series fell into place. Deus and the other Numina who show up will be revealed to have more to them than just being gods.

When working through the concept phase it is always an evolving thing. Even now, as the series develops in my head, I’m making changes.

Of course gods and flatmates doesn’t sound like a low budget concept. Unless their powers are subtle rather than flashy. I have access to talented compositors and visual effects folk – and they will be used to do the more flashier effects, but I want the Numina’s powers to be subtle. When they create something, it just is there. So we will be using a lot of camera trickery rather than FX to get the result across. That should also manage to cut down on the expense in time and resources.

I hope… ;)

Next: The Plan.

Conan