Peer Production: The 25 Best Web Series Right Now

…According to Brenden Gallagher of Complex.Com:

webseries
Click the image above & enjoy the shows

We posted the selections above because, ahem, we disagree with almost all of them. But of course we don’t want to ram our choices down your throats.

If you want to see our list from January, though (which also includes TV series choices because we believe in 1 level playing field),  it’s HERE. read article

Is It Ever OK for a Professional Writer to Write for Free?

We admit it. We write for free all the time, but mostly just because we can’t get many people to pay us. Fortunately, the interweb sometimes lights up with articles like this, which assuage our guilt. (Well, a bit of it anyway.)

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Freelancing for Free
by Ann Friedman

I used to be an editor with a tiny budget who was constantly apologizing for our rates. Now I’m a freelancer who pays my rent exclusively through writing. And sometimes, I allow my work to be published for nothing, or next-to-nothing. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the deterioration of journalism! read article

The Changing Game of Short Film Distribution

We’re really starting to like ShortoftheWeek.Com because they know just about everything about, um, shorts. (Short films! Short films! Not, you know, shorts.)

This year marked an interesting milestone for the Oscar nominated animated short films. For the first time in recent memory, people actually watched them. On January 29th, my Facebook feed blew up with posts about a short film—that’s right, a short film! Disney kicked off a decidedly unusual trend when it released its Oscar-nominated short Paperman online. Soon, others followed suit—Head Over Heels and Adam and Dog hit the internet within the week. Suddenly, an award category usually only visible by a very select few could be seen by the masses.

Then, abruptly, a few days before the big night, the shorts vanished. But, why? read article

Indie Film: JO JO IN THE STARS

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What can we say? This little gem has haunted us since we first saw it. Sooo creepy…and yet so filled with love:

read article

Why the TV Industry Needs Its Version of Steve Jobs — and Fast

The Hollywood Reporter has been surprising us lately by doing 2 things:

  1. Biting the hand that feeds it (i.e., the entrenched Hollywood powers-that-be and their business-as-usual-ways)
  2. Being right (i.e., understanding that because of technological innovation change in the Hollywood biz paradigm is essential to the survival of the industry)

Here’s a good example:

steve jobs as Hollywood savior read article