Audition Round-Up

With a week to go, and more than half of our audition slots accounted for, I'm trying to get a bead on our options for next season's casting.

In the past, I had specific ideas in mind of the characters I was casting for, and I went into the audition process looking specifically for those character types. If anyone else happened to stand out but didn't fill an immediate need, I considered writing them into the show or opportunities to use them in a future sequence that hadn't been plotted in yet. In fact, one actress from last season's auditions -- Clare Fogerty, who plays Chloe -- was such a standout that I wrote her in on the spot, assigning her the role of Dierdre's little sister despite not actively expecting to include that character in this past season.

Sometimes, someone's just that good.

This season, I'm taking a different approach. I still a few roles in the back of my mind that I know I'd like to fill, but I'm not scripting anything until auditions have taken place. That way, instead of looking past the immediate talent in front of me, I'll be better equipped to evaluate the actors in front of me on their own merit and see what opportunities they provide for new plotlines in this upcoming, as-yet-unwritten Season Four.

Granted, I'm always plotting potential storylines in my head. Every person I see, every song on the radio, every conversation I overhear sparks a new idea. But if the two or three characters I'm technically "looking for" don't walk through the door next Saturday, I won't be alarmed; I'll just roll in a new direction.

Adaptibility: the key to producing a web series on no budget.

Save the Internet

There's been much talk lately about the Net Neutrality Act and what it means for the future of the web. Will the government gut the Act and allow carriers like Verizon and At&T to begin charging everyone who uses their pipes, essentially rendering the concept of a "free" internet archaic and driving small business offline? Or will common sense prevail and allow the powers-that-be to realize that free commerce is what made them all millionaires in the first place?

I'm not sure how much of this is a scam and how much of it is legit, but I figure if Ask a Ninja is worried enough to ask its fans to visit MoveOn.org, we here at STBD can do the same. I signed the online petition yesterday, and today I see the following in my inbox, from MoveOn:

"Dear MoveOn blogger,

This Wednesday, an important House committee caved to big companies like AT&T and voted to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment. Net Neutrality makes sure all online speech is treated equally, preventing AT&T from choosing which sites you go to.

Your representative, Michael Doyle, courageously voted FOR Internet freedom every step of the way. Fortunately, the fight's not over. The vote is expected to go to the full House next week, and now's the time to let members of Congress know the public has their back if they do the right thing."

Cheers to Michael Doyle for doing the smart thing and keeping the internet playing field level. His may have been the voice of the minority on this issue, but that doesn't mean the issue is all wrapped up. Hopefully wiser heads will come to their senses during the next vote.

If you'd like to call your representative and let him or her know how you feel about the issue, you can get the numbers here.

Read the summary of the vote here.

My two cents? I can see big companies nickel-and-diming small business off the internet, but it really doesn't make sense at all. Without those small business using the internet, who would? The net is the one place we can currently go to escape the corporations, so if they force the little guy off the map, the freedom fighting geeks around the world will simply make a different internet workaround and the smaller businesses will migrate there.

Let's just hope common sense prevails.

If a Web Series Is Filmed in a Forest and No One Subscribes to the RSS, Does It Make a Sound?

Since the dawn of the web video age (well, since 2002), I've been searching the web high and low for continuing web series that do what we do. I haven't found many.

I've found lots of vlogs, and lots of tech-oriented how-tos, and lots of stand-alone spoofs, but very few actual original content-based series.

Channel 101 (and their New York counterparts, Channel 102) have toyed with competitor-created "series" that are heavy on spoof, but their shelf life is determined by votes from the audience, not an initial dedication to the material. (Though it's hard to argue that something like "28 Day Slater" was produced with anything BUT authentic dedication to the material.)

As near as I can tell, these are the other ongoing original content web series online. If you know of others (who've exceeded five episodes and, ideally, are still going strong), let me know.

1. Something to Be Desired -- The lives and loves of the hapless DJs at WANT FM. [AKA "Our Show"]
2. Tiki Bar TV -- Dr. Tiki, Johnny Johnny and Lala make liquor, deadpan delivery and outtakes fun for the masses.
3. Ask a Ninja -- You got questions? Ninja got answers!
4. Jim Dupree: Enthusiast -- Droll mockumentary in which Jim Dupree really digs something new twice a month.
5. West of Denman -- The first web series I ever noticed while researching the concept prior to launching STBD, it was a sitcom that followed the ongoing exploits of the queer culture in Vancouver. WOD's popularity helped launch numerous spinoffs on the WayOutWest web channel, also one of the web's first. [WOD has since ceased production.]
6. City's Edge -- One of the other longest-running web series, this soap opera from Denver has been updating since at least 2003. Due to infrequency of updates, I'm not sure if they're still live.

Any others?

YouTube Is a Blog?

I logged on to Technorati today and was startled to see Boing Boing knocked from the top blog spot in their Top 100 rankings... by YouTube.

Since when is YouTube a blog?

Granted, YouTube users control whatever content they choose to upload to their personal pages, so I suppose you could technically consider them blogs... but by that rationale, every personally-owned and operated webpage is a blog, no?

Frank Gruber seems to think this is a positive move for Technorati, in that it'll bolster their growth. I'm not so sure. I think it broadens the playing field to an alarming degree, and forces people who are writing legitimate content to contend with people uploading home movies of their dad for the same pairs of eyeballs. Not that legitimate bloggers aren't already competing with LiveJournal users and people writing about why Debbie made them cry, but still; let's not add fuel to the fire with videos too and make finding specialized content even more difficult.

******

So what does all this have to do with producing a web series? Well, I've been thinking: YouTube is obviously the MySpace version of an eventual web channel; it's simple, easy to use, hard to search and completely democratic, which tends to fly in the face of established big media wisdom. When web channels eventually become the norm -- and I fully expect YouTube to be monetized into the next business model shortly -- we'll see tiered varieties of content aggregation, quality and interactivity. People who want to upload, edit and interact will be shepherded toward something probably owned by AOL or Yahoo, while people who just want to watch a vintage episode of Matlock will be drawn toward Google Video. [Loose predictions, but you must see where I'm coming from.]

Where does that leave video content producers?

Obviously, producing a show that stands alone will still be completely viable -- HomestarRunner have been doing it profitably for years now -- and probably even moreso than it is now. YouTube, etc., can always be used as viral marketing platforms to direct viewers to a show's homebase, whether it's Fox.com or my own personal site. But the bigger corporately-funded channels will always have a leg up on marketing and distribution, and the ability to package like-minded shows together in a way that the independent producers won't.

Take Tiki Bar TV, for example. They manage to produce a show every two weeks, on average. Jeff Macpherson, aka Dr. Tiki, has said in an interview that he wants to raise the money to produce a variety of web series. He's in a fascinating position to do so; as one of the most popular podcasts on the planet, Tiki Bar TV pulls down more eyeballs per month than anyone except Rocketboom or possibly Ask a Ninja. He has genre-wide name recognition, and can parlay that into the clout necessary to spawn a handful of new series via a Tiki Bar-centric channel if he so chooses.

But why not sell Tiki Bar TV to the highest bidder? Sure, he'd lose his most marketable asset -- a veritable brand name, as the field emerges -- but the would the money he gains from the sale AND the likely ancillaries (tell me YouTube can't afford to produce more Tiki Bar T-shirts in 6 months than Macpherson can in five years) shake out better for his own channel plans in the long run?

It's a dicey proposition. If the indies give in and sell out to the corporations in order to fund their own production companies, we could very easily see the playing field of Web TV split between the big money and the new money, with the originators of the biggest podcasts able to fund their next ideas or potentially indenture themselves to the powers-that-be. But if they hold out and each forms its own mini-empire, or partners individually with other indiecasts, the collective buzz around such a braintrust could force the corporations to scramble for new talent (and likely overpay in the process).

Emerging business model? Your time is nigh.

"How's It End?"

We started filming Season Three of Something to Be Desired in May of 2005. Here we are in April of 2006, nearly a full year later, and I've just now realized how it ends. That's funny, because I wrote it.

Here's how Season Three came together: we started brainstorming ideas in early 2005, and those ideas coalesced into the first scripted episode around April. Then I built outward from there, figuring out how to lead into the various subplots I'd planned. This grew into a massive database of scenes that only loosely held together, with various notes (such as what needed to happen before one certain or event, or after another) and continuity tips (who needed to be wearing what for day-to-day overlaps, etc.).

In theory, this should have been a perfectly useable plan, and it was, except for two wrinkles.

1. Ann Turiano, who plays Caroline, was scheduled to leave for grad school in London by mid-September 2005. That meant I had to film everything she was involved in before then, with little room for error in case I realized I wanted to reshoot something or add an extra scene not in the original outline.

2. I planned on updating STBD on a daily basis this past season, with a new 5 minute episode every weekday. Thus, most scenes were filmed under the impression that they'd be standing alone or mixed alongside one other scene, which meant we allowed many of the sequences to run longer than they would have otherwise, in order to justify their standalone length.

Once I realized I couldn't update 5 times a week without working myself into an early grave (how does Rocketboom do it, anyway?), I backtracked to one episode every Monday. This meant we filmed FAR more than we'd actually use in the new, shorter season. The new challenge became selecting the scenes I would need to tell the heart of the story, without all the peripherals.

In that sense, we've been mildly successful. There are a few scenes that "made the cut" which wouldn't have otherwise if I'd had a clearer plan, and several that should have been included but were left by the wayside due to other chronological choices I've made -- most notably being a lengthy Dean & Jessie sequence in which they finally find their working rhythm, which is hysterical in its raw form but which was bumped when I needed to achieve a certain milestone before our Christmas uploading break.

However, the Dean and Caroline relationship that became the spine of the season provided my biggest logistical challenge. I'd filmed at least two sequences that could have stood as the season-ending scene, since Ann left for London before I'd put all the pieces together. Now that I'm sitting here staring at our last two episodes of the season, I finally understand how best to sum it all up, but I know it would be ending differently if I'd had even one more scene filmed with the two of them.

The lesson learned? Well, you could be practical and say "Plan small, plan early and stay ahead of schedule," or you could be a realist and say "Adapt!"

So, how's it end? Stay tuned: you have two weeks to find out.

Blogging Legitimacy

It occurred to us that a MySpace blog just wasn't official enough, but we didn't want to make the jump to a fully-funded Moveable Type account (because we have no funding), so Blogger seemed the most likely solution. We won't be killing the MySpace blog, but there will be a difference between the two. What that is, exactly, we're not quite sure, but we expect the Blogger blog to be more of an insider-y, behind-the-scenes-ish blog (hence the name), while the MySpace version will be more of a public announcement and marketing blog.

I'm sure this will all become clearer as we continue dabbling. In the meantime, here's a picture of Caroline and Dean kissing:


(Courtesy of Macwagen)