Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet-2nd edition. Ross Brown
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sequences for different platforms: one configuration on the Internet, another when the segments are grouped together to make a miniseries in foreign markets, and so on.
The Internet also offers financial opportunity. Most sites match advertisers with content and share the revenue stream generated by popular videos and web series with creators. Among the biggest success stories is Ray William Johnson, whose YouTube videos posted under the name RayWJ have attracted 1.5 billion views, netting him, according to the Wall Street Journal, a million dollars from YouTube’s ad revenue sharing plan and the sale of his merchandise. Although it is highly unlikely you’ll reach RayWJ’s millionaire status, it is entirely possible to take in enough ad money to pay for the ongoing production of your series. Moreover, video makers are invited to post their work at no charge, as opposed to most film and video festivals that charge an entry fee.
Another huge plus for webisodes is that they provide career opportunity. Many students in universities, community colleges, high schools, and even junior high schools are bursting with creative ideas and video talent. They are ready, willing, and able to make films today. But rare is the film studio or traditional media business willing to take a chance on unproven talent. The aspiring filmmaker, even one with a degree from a prestigious film school, usually finds he must start at the bottom, fetching coffee and running errands. It can easily be 10 years or more before you’ve paid your dues and earned the opportunity to do what you set out to do in the first place: make films. On the Internet, however, all that matters is your work. You create your series, make your webisodes, post them, and let the audience decide whether you’re ready to direct.
Career opportunities also abound for working film and video professionals who want to stretch their creative boundaries. Maybe you’re an assistant director, grip, gaffer, editor, or other worker in the film or television business who yearns to tell stories of your own but who will never be taken seriously as a potential writer or director because the industry has pigeonholed you as “crew” rather than “creative.” The Internet makes it possible for you to sidestep the narrow-minded gatekeepers of Hollywood by investing your time and energy in making your own film rather than toiling thanklessly on someone else’s vision. When you read the interviews with creators in Chapter Fifteen you’ll find three vivid examples of actors who created their own web series to promote their performing careers, only to find that it also opened up opportunities for them behind the camera (see Chapter Fifteen interviews with Courtney Zito, Jen Dawson, and Christine Lakin).
Creative people in a variety of artistic pursuits are discovering the enormous power of the Internet to provide what might be called exposure opportunity. The Groundlings, a legendary Los Angeles improvisational theater troupe that has helped launch the careers of Lisa Kudrow, Will Ferrell, the late Phil Hartman, and others, has spent decades performing in their 99-seat theater. But after they shot the spoof David Blaine Street Magic in the alley behind their theater and posted it on YouTube, the video racked up 18 million plays. That’s the power of the Internet. If the Groundlings performed the sketch in their theater to sold-out audiences every night, it would take 181,818 performances or more than 6,000 years to reach an audience of 18 million. On the Internet, it happened in a matter of months and scored the group a contract to provide 50 webisodes for Sony’s Crackle site.
For screenwriters, the Internet offers what might be called craft improvement opportunity. The chance to see your work on screen, rather than just churning out spec scripts and never seeing them get made, helps developing writers get better — a lot better. It helps developing writers learn how to be more economical with story and dialogue, how to use the visual more fully, and how to truly write for the screen instead of merely for the page. Similarly, actors who have created their own web series all rave about how spending hour after hour in the editing room watching themselves (with their producer and director hat on) has informed and improved their acting tremendously.
On the Internet, with dozens of hosting sites open to all, there are no gatekeepers to tell you why you can’t do what you know you can and virtually no limits to the size of the audience you can reach if your work goes viral and becomes a phenomenon. If you make a great web series (and you market it well; see Chapter Thirteen), the audience will find it. To paraphrase the mysterious voice in the corn field in the film Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.”
In short, the Internet provides unlimited opportunity for anyone with the desire to create video content. In fact, the hunger for content is so voracious that the Internet is not just opening the doors of opportunity; it’s begging you to come in and make yourself at home. But you need a bit more than desire and an idea. You need the fortitude to follow through on that idea. And you need the craft and skills to turn that vague idea into a high-quality, polished pilot ready for digital distribution across the World Wide Web. Many have inspiration, but few have craft and know-how. That’s what the following chapters are about: helping you acquire those tools.
Are you ready? Good. Let’s begin.
FOR TEACHERS
If you taught creative writing, you’d surely insist that your students study the techniques of the masters as a foundation for their own creative work. Music, art, and film instructors also require their students to study outstanding works in the field, past and present. Short video is no different. Those who seek to be top creators should begin by studying the best work already done in the form. As an assignment in conjunction with Chapter One of this book, ask your students to watch three episodes of a current web series and write a short paper (two or three pages) analyzing the series.
For this analysis to be of depth and value, the student should not just casually surf the Net and stare blankly at a few videos but must think and write critically about the work she views. At Goddard College, where I obtained my MFA in creative writing, we were required to write weekly annotations, two- to three-page analyses of works of fiction, narrowly focused on a specific, noteworthy area of craft such as how the main character was introduced, or image motifs, or use of location as a character. The idea was to train us, as readers, to examine in detail the underlying techniques used by the writer in constructing the work.
For short-form Internet series, students could focus on aspects of craft such as compelling main characters, or economy of storytelling, or techniques used to maximize audience engagement. The students could also be asked to parse basic elements such as number of characters, genre, production value (low, average, or high), or length of episodes.
To help students understand the type of analysis and specifics you’re looking for, you might try an in-class analytical exercise first. Screen an episode or two of a web series, or maybe a pilot of a web series, then ask the students to say what the strengths and weaknesses of the series are. Force them to be more precise than “It’s funny” or “I just like it.” Force them to articulate and analyze the underlying architecture of what they’ve watched.
This assignment should be given not just during Week One but regularly throughout the semester. Students of music study other musicians as a regular part of their ongoing training. Aspiring webisode artists should be equally committed to the study of their form.
2 THE SERIES CONCEPT
In early 2007, when I first began teaching courses on making short-form TV series for the Internet, I was hard-pressed to find even a handful of examples to screen for my students. The early prototypes like lonelygirl15 and Sam Has 7 Friends were around, but not much else. Now, at last count, there are approximately 187 gazillion web series to choose from, roughly one web series for every 18- to 30-year-old in the world currently cruising a bar looking for Mr. or Ms. Right, or at least Mr. or Ms. Right Now. Unfortunately, despite the abundance of web series and barflies, precious few are worth your time. In most cases, you can tell within seconds that your best move is to move on.
In the case of web series, there are