Feature: Webserials.com
I’ve been following web series and original web content on this blog from just about the beginning: Strike.tv, Kyle Piccolo: Comic Shop Therapist, The Guild, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and Circle of 8 among others.
Recently I swapped some emails with Brian Walton about a web OP site he’s involved with called WebSerials.com. The site is home to a wide array of ‘serials’ including “Project X: The True Story of Power Plant 67, Cataclysmo and the Time Boys, Cataclysmo and the Battle for Earth, Nora Breaks Free, Trunk: A Love Story, and the latest serial The Black Dawn.
My interest in original programming on the Web is quite simple: As it expands, I’m hoping that it creates opportunities for writers, both as a creative outlet and to get paid to write (but we’ll see from Brian’s comments that I’m a bit too far ahead of the curve on that front).
Brian was kind enough to answer some questions about WebSerials.com and his responses are well worth reading as they provide insight from a web OP insider:
What is the concept behind webserials.com? When was it started? Who are the principal people involved in the endeavor?
Webserials began with a group of friends and film school grads trying to figure out what this new internet thing was and how we could use it to get our films seen by the widest audience possible. Three guys, Josh Sikora, Kevin Christensen, and Anthony Parisi were the creative brains behind the company. The impetus for it was that we had a feature film we had shot in college called Project X that had been languishing in the editing room for over two years. We realized that if we broke the film into episodes, the editing would be much more manageable, and it would be feasible to then put it online. You see, when we originally shot Project X our goal was to distribute the entire feature film online and uncut as a full-length feature film. However, this was at the outset of small sites like youtube. We had no idea how popular short viral videos would become and how much the attention span would continue to shrink. No one wanted to watch feature films online. They wanted what we began to refer to as “bite-sized” entertainment. And that is how we created the “webserial.” We didn’t want to do standalone videos or even an episodic series that lacked a strong direction in its plot. We defined the webserial as a story conceived as a feature film that could be broken down and “serialized” into manageable five-minute chunks and posted weekly on the web. To test our theory, a couple of the guys sat down and beat out Terminator 2. And guess what, there was essentially a new sequence every five minutes.
There are already several serials on webserials.com. Could you please tell us a bit about each of them and the chronology of when they were developed and produced?
As I mentioned above, Project X was a feature film that a bunch of us shot as college studnets back in January of 2005. By springof 2007 we had decided the best distribution model for Project X was as a webserial. But the guys didn’t want to release just Project X, they wanted two shows to release simultaneously. This was when I was approached. I had acted in several short films throughout college and they wanted me to play the lead in a new series that had conceived, a sci-fi comedy in the vein of Buck Rogers called Cataclysmo and the Time Boys. I can honestly say, at the time I had no idea what I was getting into.
When those two became successful we jumped right into filming a sequel to Cataclysmo, Cataclysmo and the Battle for Earth and shortly thereafter was when I co-wrote our latest webserial The Black Dawn. We knew there would be a few months of dead space between each series so we filled those gaps by serializing short films different friends of ours had produced. Trunk: A Love Story was a fun little short I had written that was produced as a student film. It turned out to have our best opening ever with 83,000 views on youtube.
How have you handled production on your various web serials? Post-production?
In order to manage the amount of material we had to shoot our production crew had to be incredibly small, mobile, and above all fast. Some days on Cataclysmo we would shoot nearly 15 pages. To put this into perspective, most professional shoots only tackle 2–4 pages a day, if that. Post-production happened in a small second room in Exectuve producer Joshua Sikora’s two-bedroom apartment (which he already shared with his wife). Nearly everyone involved in the project was also an editor. The post-production was much like any other television show. We had different deadlines for each episode. Someone would do the rough cut, someone else would do the visual effects. As soon as picture lock was done we would send it off to sound and then to music. It’s worth noting that much of this happened on the same computer, other then sound and music, so there were times when editing was happening nearly 24–7. It’s also worth noting that nobody was getting paid, not a dime. Did I not mention that already? We had to work these projects around our full time work schedules and, for some of us, a school schedule as well.
The Black Dawn is your latest effort. It’s also the most sophisticated series. What size crew did you work with? How long did production take? What were some of the unique challenges that came with attempting to tell such a global / big story — where millions of people have suddenly died — in such a limited format?
Like our other series, we never had a crew of over ten people. Nearly everyone who wasn’t an actor had multiple roles. When I was on set I took turns being a grip, a sound guy, and occasionally even a camera operator. This makes for an extremely, hectic and stressful shooting schedule. On many larger sets I’ve been in, people tend to have a lot of down time during shooting. Downtime on a webserials set was usually a foreign word. The story was appealing to us for a number of reasons, but a large one was convenience in terms of production. We wanted to make full use of our resources, and the fact that we still had strong ties to our film school was definitely a strong resource. The campus was both readily available and interesting as locations go. Conceiving it as a post-apolyptic film in which a black cloud carrying a virus covers Los Angeles killing all but our thirteen college students… will that was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because we could shoot at night without having to worry about things like extras or sunlight. A curse because… we had to shoot at night. Production took place primarily with two separate shoots, each about a week and a half long. We were able to schedule those over school breaks, Easter break and Winter break, so that the campus could be as empty as possible.
In terms of the bigness of the story, it was a tension that was on my mind a lot. Certain effects, such as creating explosions or painting out objects to make a street look empty, are actually relatively easy to do on a budget. On the other hand, effects that needed to be practical were much harder to achieve on a budget. For instance, crashing cars, rubble, and debris. We could blow up a city in a wide shot but showing someone doing something as simple as smashing in a vending machine would cost far too much on our meager budget.
So, we focus our efforts on the effects we know we can achieve. For one of our bigger effects shots in the first episode, we shot a few people falling over and dying in front of a green screen, and then placed them over and over again into the wide shot. As a writer I had to be aware of this. Thankfully, our effects team was so fantastic that in the end there were very few things we couldn’t do.
For The Black Dawn, you came up with a number of clever interactive ways to promote the serial. Could you describe those and what was the inspiration behind them?
At the time, we thought The Black Dawn could very well could be our last webserial so we wanted to throw as many eggs into the basket as possible. That meant creating as many online avenues into the world of The Black Dawn as possible. We created videoblogs for the characters that could serve as flashbacks of sorts, providing more depth to the characters and their world before the Black Dawn. We also created an online comic, as well as a short film that provide background to various minor characters as they enter the story later in the series. The Adam and Ben Show was easily the most effective of these efforts. It was conceived as a political talk show about the campus hosted by our main character Ben and his roommate Adam. It was largely improv, and the mix of humor and politics seemed to work well for the general youtube audience. The Adam and Ben Show actually ended immediately where the webserials begins which I think may have come as a surprise to many viewers.
I think this was certainly helpful in promoting our show. In the online community, a regular flow of content always seems to do better in drawing people to your site. In short, your site should be productive. I couldn’t give you guess as to how often you should be posting up new video content, but two to three posts a week is certainly better then one a month and will keep people visiting regularly.
Who did the writing for The Black Dawn? Can you describe what the process was like?
William Hellmuth and Abe Sherman, who were the director and producer respectively, and myself were the three writers for The Black Dawn. William was producing a different project as a webserial and it had just fallen through. He and I were brainstorming ideas for a project to replace his when we came up with the idea for The Black Dawn. I wanted to do something simple, so I suggested setting it on the college campus we had just graduated from. William, in a fit of inspiration, said “let’s make it a post-apocalyptic film set on a college campus!” He brought on another writer he had worked with previously, Abe Sherman, and they spent an entire weekend brainstorming the basic plot and characters. Less then a week after coming up with the concept, the three of us met with our Executive producer, Joshua Sikora to outline the entire project as a webserial.
Our approach to outlining a webserial is somewhat of a hybrid between writing a feature and writing a TV series. This was because in the long run it had to be both. Part of the appeal to the webserials format was that we could release weekly episodes and then later edit them all together as a feature length film. This meant each episode had to have an arc, but it also had to fit into a longer three act structure.
However, for The Black Dawn we also had a third element. We wanted to make chapters available to purchase at the beginning of every four episodes. So that when the first episode aired our viewers could either watch them as they are released or, for two dollars, purchase the next four episodes in advance as a twenty-minute “chapter.” So the additional difficulty was that each chapter had to have an arc satisfying enough to get a viewer to come after a whole month of waiting. So we knew we wanted 24 episodes and each fourth episode had to have a cliffhanger of sorts. Once we know the necessary structure, we wrote it all out on a white board and just started filling in plot beats.
After the structure was set, we divided the episodes between the three of us. Abe and I took the more dramatic scenes and William, the director, wrote the action heavy scenes. After the first draft both Josh, the executive producer, and I did a few polishes. Again, it was more like television in terms of the heavy amount of collaboration. Even though there were three to four writers, we rarely battled over anything.
There was actually only about two months between when William and I came up with the idea to when cameras started rolling. Because of the time constraints — we wanted to start posting episodes shortly after Cataclysmo 2 ended — we only had time to write the first half of the script before production started. Of course, this an absolutely horrible way to go about filmmaking, but it actually had some hidden benefits for us. We shot the first half of the film over Easter and wrote the second half as post production started. While editing, we discovered some things that weren’t working and were able to do then essentially rewrite large portions of the first half the script, and then reshoot them during production of the second half. It was better then having to schedule reshoots after the whole project was wrapped, and gave us some flexibility during the post-production process.
What keys did you discover about successfully writing original content for the web?
We decided from the outset to write serialized, rather than episodic, shows. The ideas was that each episode should be plot heavy with a strong hook at the end to keep audiences coming back for more. I think this approach can be very successful, but is exponentially harder to pull off as web series go. Most other web shows out there are episodic. Ultimately, I think episodic series are more fitting for the typical Internet audience; they want a quick laugh, they aren’t interested in committing. We, however, wanted a committed audience. We wanted subscribers and we wanted people to buy the dvd’s once our shows were re-edited into features.
Ultimately, I think the kind of show you write depends on which audience you want to reach. You might get more viewers if you write shorter, more episodic style shows, but you probably won’t get as many repeat viewers. We had some rabid fans for our shows and have even gotten to know a few of them personally. So ask yourself, do you want the kind of show people will forward around the office for a quick laugh or the type of show you want people to invest in? One isn’t necessarily better then the other. The downside is that with a plot heavy show you will probably never hit thirty million views on a single episode.
Re typical web viewers, what do you think is the ideal length of time for a webisode?
The length of episodes depends largely on the genre. Dramas will probably need longer episodes then comedies. But my suggestion is to not pay too much attention to the audience on this one. If an episode is three minutes, people will always say it’s too short. If it’s seven minutes, they’ll say it’s too long. Bottom line, don’t let it be boring. The sweet spot we always tried to hit was 3–7 minutes.
What about the economics of web serials? If most Web users consider “free” to be the norm, how can a company like webserials.com sustain itself financially?
You won’t make money. Get used to it. Say it to yourself before you go to bed. You won’t make money. We used Google ads and content sharing on youtube, as well as a few other web advertisers (I don’t really know the details on all of them). Even when our views were in the hundreds of thousands, we didn’t make enough money to pay back our previous projects, let alone to fund our future projects.
Since we’re talking about money, let me try and put this in perspective. We spent between one or two grand on most of our shows. But that was because no one was paid. Almost all of the money went to transportation, craft services, and a few pieces of equipment. If people were paid properly, the cost would easily have been in the tens of thousands. Most people may not have the time or energy to do this much work for free. I would recommend what most other sane web show producers do. Shoot an episode or two on spec, and then show them around to advertisers to get upfront funding. Even then, no one should expect to make their money back. I attended a new media panel at Sundance last year and the consensus was more or less the same. Professional filmmakers like Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow) were ecstatic that they could practice their craft for so cheap, but no one held the secret for making big bucks on the web.
What’s the future of original programming on the Web? Where do you see webserials.com in the next 5–10 years?
Don’t get too disconcerted about the economics of new media. For now, I would consider your webseries to be like your reel. It’s a calling card, a way to show your skills as a filmmaker. But thankfully, sites like hulu and netflix are changing everything. Blu-ray players can access both youtube and netflix, and because youtube now has HD capabilities, I can stream a webserial episode from the web onto my friends 100 inch projection screen and it looks just as good as any other film. As technology continues to bring the Internet into our living room, average viewers will find it harder and harder to distinguish between professional and independent productions.
Distribution is no longer then issue. As always, the problem will continue to be marketing. If anyone can shoot a film and post it online available immediately for the masses, how will we allow our production to stand up above the crowd? A lot has been said about the ability for some videos to hit a nerve on the cultural zeitgeist and so become “viral.” However, try as you might it is impossibly to qualify or quantify what made caused these videos to become so popular. In the end the answer will always be marketing and as far as I can tell, marketing will always require money.
What’s up next for webserials.com?
Webserials has had some pretty exciting developments. A television distributor approached us for The Black Dawn and we’re now on two different networks in the US with multiple International networks showing interest. Maybe we’ll finally start to make back all that money we spent. I’m happy to say that The Black Dawn has also given us a foot in the door at a very large and well known studio. Pitching to a large studio was a new experience for me, and my best advice to new writers is to go in with multiple projects. We went in with six, had to change one pitch on the fly, drummed up solid interest in two, watched that interest die for various reasons, and have since been asked to bring more ideas to the table. Suffice it to say, we’re treading carefully with that relationship, but I share it with you to say that producing a webseries can get you somewhere. But what it will probably get you, rather then a sweet development deal, are relationships and connections. which take time and care to use to their best potential.
In the meantime, the webserials team is developing an improv-based sitcom entitled Best Laid Plans that will hopefully be premiering on the site in a few months.
Here is some of Brian’s background:
Brian Walton has a BA in screenwriting with honors from Biola University. He went on to study screenwriting with Act One under Chris Riley (author of “The Hollywood Standard“).
Brian is the co-writer of the critically acclaimed web-series “The Black Dawn,” which has since received syndication on several national networks in the US. He has written numerous short films, including the award winning action comedy “Trunk: A Love Story.” In 2006, Brian consulted for the short film “A Shopping Cart Named Desire” which went on to screen at the Sundance Film Festival.
Currently, Brian is writing full-time, working for money whenever he can, and is otherwise trying to navigate the spec script world of Hollywood just like everyone else.
You can go here to friend Brian on Facebook. And you can visit his screenwriting blog here.
Anybody else out there involved in producing ongoing web content? If so, care to add any thoughts? And are any of you fans of web programming? What are your favorites, best ones, etc?