» Posts Tagged ‘webseries’
Much is being made of The Confession, an original web series starring Kiefer Sutherland that just concluded on Hulu after premiering in March. The hype isn’t limited to the show itself, instead centering on reports that it has already turned a profit through Hulu’s free ad-driven model. There are plenty of additional revenue streams available for the show, and so the question on everyone’s mind is: does this mean original web series are a viable business model now? Because back when Zack Lieberman and I won the Webby for The West Side, that was not the case. Every studio we met with felt that the online revenue streams were not mature enough to support a decently-budgeted web series, with or without recognizable stars. Is The Confession a “watershed moment?” More »
There’s a growing number of video producers that enjoy creative and financial freedoms today whose job description didn’t exist a few years ago. I’m talking about YouTube channel producers, who employ a skill set that is often very different from what they teach in film schools. We’ve covered some audience-building tactics in the past, but here’s some advice on building a successful YouTube channel directly from YouTube exec Bing Chen, via Daisy Whitney’s interview on New Media Minute: More »
This is not a sponsored post! These are amazing! What are amazing? Glad you asked! Webishades are amazing new technological glasses that allow you to watch web series in 4K resolution in glorious 2D (note how there is only the red color of red/blue 3D glasses). I don’t need to sell these things when they sell themselves: More »
If the web series is the DIY version of a TV show, then it follows that we should expect DIY versions of all different genres of TV programming. Missing Reel is essentially a web version of At the Movies focused exclusively on grindhouse films from the ’70s. Hosts David Walker and Kurt Loyd do a great job of profiling gems that might otherwise fall by the wayside, reviewing films like Ms. 45
If short films should be replaced by web series as the indie filmmaker’s go-to calling card, what replaces a film festival’s aggregated audience for promoting said calling card? Tubefilter, one of the top web sites focused entirely on web series, recently posted an articled titled How to Build Buzz For a Web Series. I could probably write a much longer post on the same topic, simply by pointing out all of the things we didn’t do on The West Side (such as making videos embeddable and posting them to sites like Vimeo, YouTube, and blip.tv). But for now, here are some tips from Tubefilter for building an online audience, including this passage on hitting the message boards: More »
This is a guest post by Mike Jones, Lecturer in Screen Studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
Filmmaking is full of traditions. These traditions are the “way things are done,” they are what is “expected,” they are “industry standard,” they are “default” and “accepted.” This is all fine and dandy until we recognise the innate implication of such Traditions is to imply Right and Wrong – that there is a correct way to do things and deviations are “incorrect,” not “acceptable” or, worse still, not “professional.”
These traditions manifest themselves in all manner of guises – creative, technical, business, logistic. I have written previously about how the tools of filmmaking (particularly software) possess internal philosophies that enforce traditions – traditions which may or may not be a good fit for your own creative processes. In a similar light, there occurs to me to be another long-standing and entrenched tradition (one that may not be serving emerging and indie filmmakers as it should) that needs to be questioned. That is the significance of the Short Film. More »
One of the things I was most proud of when it came to my web series The West Side was, quite frankly, that it should’ve sucked a lot more than it did. If you took the challenging concept and combined that with our utter lack of resources, it really should’ve been a laughable home movie. The fact that we were even able to suspend disbelief at all was a minor miracle. I had a similar “it should suck more than it does” feeling while watching the latest Machinima.com web series to premiere, Dragon Age. This is a credit to the directing and editing, because if you think Hollywood’s video game adaptations are bad, imagine trying to make a movie using the video game engine itself. Not easy, and the unitentionally risible moments are surprisingly few in Dragon Age: More »
The 2nd Annual Streamy Awards took place last week, and while I was already familiar with many of the award-winners, some I’d never heard of. Every year when new-media awards like the Streamys or the Webbys are announced, I watch the nominees and winners in hopes that I’ll discover something that truly embodies the creative freedoms offered by the web, something unique and unlike anything in Hollywood. But every year I’m disappointed. This year’s Best Drama winner, The Bannen Way, won specifically because it was the best of the bunch at emulating Hollywood. And while I feel there are a lot of brilliant comedies on the web — You Suck at Photoshop, Wainy Days, The Onion News Network — it’s much harder to find compelling drama.
The most interesting drama series I saw via the Streamys was Compulsions (Streamy winner for Best Writing for a Drama Web Series): More »
UK-based author Russell Evans has a book on web filmmaking coming out in April of next year from Focal Press. I answered via email as best I could his questions about The West Side, and while doing so realized this neglected blog is long overdue for some updates. Why not kill two birds with one keyboard? These excerpts will have to suffice until I step away from the screenplay I’m toiling on (priorities, priorities) to write a proper, hopefully meaningful, update. More »
From my (disad)vantage point as an ex-MTVer, the new web series The District, from Newsweek of all places, is particularly hilarious. Most of the time. I think. It’s either hilarious or sad. More »
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