yulinkuang:

When we first announced Shipwrecked’s upcoming project, Kissing in the Rain, I said that the project was, at its heart, a kind of inverse fanfiction.

The structure of the series pulls a lot from the fanfic concept of “missing moments”, and as a result each episode is intended to be a small slice of a bigger narrative we aren’t necessarily seeing on screen. One of my favorite things about the world of fanfiction was the feeling that I was coloring in a part of the story that had been left for me by the creators. We’re leaving you guys the larger areas to color in between each episode.

There was a practical reason for this too - at this point, every Shipwrecked project is funded out of pocket by us, the creators. We do it with the hope that if enough of you enjoy and engage with our content, this won’t always be the case. Because of this reality, we were limited in how many episodes we could produce while maintaining the overall quality of the production. We filmed 12 total episodes for Kissing in the Rain - seven episodes for Lily & James, five episodes for Audrey & Henry.

If I’ve done my job as a director, every episode will leave you wanting much, much more than it was in our power to give this time around. Hence the idea of inverse fanfiction - there is a larger infinity of missing moments for this series than most others. We announced the series with an open-invitation for fanmade content to fill out the story. Today, it occurred to me that we can do one better.

During filming, the actors asked me if I had any kind of headcanon for their existing relationships. I had some answers but not all of them. Together, we created our own headcanon that worked within our larger story arc. Which brings me to the point of this post - I think we can continue this collaboratively written headcanon over the course of the series, integrating fanfiction and fan-created content in a way that hasn’t quite been done before.

My one superpower as showrunner is declaring what’s canon, and this is what I’ve decided to do with that power. For every episode of Lily & James of Kissing in the Rain, I’m going to write a short character drabble that fits within the canon of the series. The series can be appreciated without reading them, but I somewhat selfishly want more time to play with these characters and a reason to excercise my non-screenwriting writing muscle. These drabbles will be reblogged to the main Shipwrecked Tumblr and linked with each released episode on YouTube.

Here’s where you come in:

1. We’ll continue to read posts under our tracked Tumblr tags for this series, “kitr” and “shipsters ftw”.

2. If we reblog your post to the main Shipwrecked Tumblr, it becomes canonical. That means fanfiction, fanmixes, one-line headcanon, whatever else you can think of.

The goal is to use Tumblr to create one long, curated, community-written, canonical fanfiction companion piece to Kissing in the Rain. I have a theory that the audience for this series is just crazy, talented, and engaged enough to make this experiment in transmedia work - particularly for two characters named Lily and James. But whether this experiment sails or fails, the content we upload to YouTube will remain unaffected and can be enjoyed without following the companion fic.

So yeah. Thanks for reading this, and thanks to prettyfaroutman for making the first fan-created post under the “kitr” tag and indirectly inspiring this Tumblr transmedia experiment. If you have any thoughts/ideas on transmedia and your experiences in other webseries/fandoms - reblog this post and add them. Or feel free to message me directly with your thoughts, my ask box is open. I would honestly love to read them all.

And just a quick status update on the Kissing in the Rain trailer - we’re very near picture lock, it should be out towards the tail end of this week!

Much love,

Yulin Kuang

creator, Kissing in the Rain

youtube.com/Shipwrecked Comedy

youtube.com/yulinisworking