Who says that the interwebs can’t take on traditional genres and do just as good (or bad?) a job as network TV? If you’re a cop procedural fan, then this is the series for you. Every beloved writing and directorial cliche, plus a dash of interweb tastelessness to add “realism.”
And you thought we automatically loved every web series. Ha!
Of course we could be wrong. Have a look for yourself and let us know whatcha think:
Chapter 54 – Navigating Hollywood 101: Just Say NoLast week, a print issue of The Hollywood Reporter showed up in my mailbox. I didn’t subscribe, yet somehow got on the list. That’s right. For FREE!! The comedy gods are either smiling at or mocking me.
The first article I noticed really hit home. It was about the nearly universal way Hollywood executives reject pitches (or you, for that matter). Versus saying “no” or the old school standby, “Wow. This is great! We really really love it. Unfortunately, we’re not doing, uh, anything that involves writing this year”, instead, they just POOF! vanish into thin air. That’s right. You never hear from them. Possibly ever again. You know, kinda like, “He said (sob), he was going out for a pack of cigarettes and I NEVER HEARD FROM HIM AGAIN.” Only worse, cause it’s your career. Or, in some cases, “career”.
This applies to phone calls, emails, texts and, most notably, flinging yourself into someone’s office and begging (i.e. pitching.)
What’s that? You’ve seen this video and don’t think of it as “peer production” at all? It’s just…”art?”
Holy crap, gang, that’s exactly what peer production should be. An unsupervised, unrestrained take on…well, erm, on whatever the hell this is an unsupervised, unrestrained – and to us fascinating – take on:
When we saw the article below we knew we wanted to run it with a positive “woman driver” type punny pic. Soon we found out that was almost impossible because all we could find were images mocking women drivers. We decided to look for an action photo of the world’s most well-known woman racing driver, Danica Patrick – and lo and behold, 99% of those we found were beauty shots. The closest we could come to a pic where a renowned sports figure could be identified engaged in her sport was this: (And it ain’t exactly close at all! Kee-rist!)
As creators of new web series content, we’re constantly excited by the multitude of diverse female-focused series on the web. It would seem that the internet affords us viewers with styles and situations we can’t find on television and in turn it would seem that the most successful series tend to bring something very unique to the table. As we began pre-production on our new series Sisters of Mercy, with a focus on women and diversity as well as storytelling, we looked to some of our favorite series for inspiration. Here’s a list of five, how they inspired us, and why we think they’re worth a watch for any web creator.
Burning Love
Burning Love is a technically brilliant parody of the Bachelor that has run for three seasons skewering everything from the banality of reality tv competition to the wild personalities of those drawn into the spectacle.
Chapter 53 – More on the Tween FrontSo I met with Kai yesterday. I’ve been SO busy, working till midnight most nights animating and in post, working on THE TOP SECRET project, but had promised him we’d get together to discuss the project we’re doing.
Before we got into it, we discussed the Disney buying Maker for $500 million news and, on the heels of that, AwesomenessTV buying Big Frame for $15 mil. Big Frame has more than 300 creator-run YouTube channels and more than 3.6 billion views to date. And it’s projected that together, AwesomenessTV and Big Frame will deliver 80 million subscribers and nearly 1 billion views a month.
Maker is huge and much bigger than Big Frame, but Big Frame has a couple of hit shows like DeStorm Power and Squaresville. AwesomenessTV, the digital media arm of Dreamworks Animation, was created by Brian Robbins, who’s an actor (among other things, he starred in Head of the Class), director and producer whose focus is mainly, you guessed it, tweens. Did a mention AwesomenessTV is also now a tv show on, where else, Nickelodeon.