- 9:42 pm - Mon, Jan 30, 2012
- 2 notes
Where Is The Drama?
erikurtz:
The web is choc full of comedic web series and shorts. Some are funny, most are not, but as I discussed previously, it is easier to be funny on the web. Creating characters and drama is difficult when you have little time. That said a web series has potential for great characters, yet I have not been able to find many people up to the task. So I’d like to ask you guys, what are you working on? Have you found decent online dramas? Where and what are they?
There are some good dramas on the web, but they’re most definitely both rarer and harder to do. Some of the ones I’ve enjoyed are:
Mark Gardner’s Cell: the Series
Bernie Su’s Compulsions
Tony Valenzuela’s Black Box TV
Tina Ward and Susan Miller’s Anyone But Me
Daryn Strauss’ Downsized
Chris Preksta’s The Mercury Men
Machinima’s RCVR
Christopher Kubasik’s The Booth at the End
also The Confession with Keifer Sutherland and John Hurt, which was on Hulu but has apparently been pulled down in anticipation of its release on Blu-Ray.
That said, dramatic webseries are few and far between and, if well done, offer a great opportunity for filmmakers to distinguish themselves online.
- 6:26 pm - Fri, Jan 20, 2012
- 70 notes
God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests. There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us. This is a very important time for Hollywood. The issue at hand — piracy — is a legitimate concern. But Google and those Internet guys have been swiftboating the entertainment industry by saying we’re trying to shut down the Internet just because we don’t want them to advertise pirated movies.
Hollywood’s Obama Donors On President’s Piracy Stand: Not Give A Dime Anymore (via joshuanguyen)
The irony is that The Media Companies are behaving as if Google, Netflix, EBay, Amazon, and the like DON’T dominate the Internet. They do and the digital space is a neighborhood with different leadership and a different set of rules than that of an Internet-less society.
One of those rules is if you put a couch out on ther curb in this neighborhood, you are signalling to everyone in the neighborhood that anyone is free to take it. Like it or not, that is what digital files are online.
Traditional Media puts digital files out on the curb and is shocked to find them “taken”, so they do it again, and again are shocked when they’re “taken”, so then they do it AGAIN. At this point you’d have to assume that they like this happening because they do have the choice to NOT place it out there digitally but continue to do it anyway.
Conversely, they are not attending to developing effective ways to monetize the way in which Internet distribution functions. (They just want Internet distribution, monetization, and promotion to work the same way as it all has by traditional means.) What they’ve needed to do for a long time is to get wise about their files and hire smart digital minds to invent (YES, INVENT SOMETHING NEW!) ways to make the Internet custom of distribution WORK for them. With 75% of all video watched online via people passing it around, that’s a distribution opportunity you cannot ignore.
Unfortunately, instead of developing ways to make the wonderful world of the Internet work for them, they are trying to combat it. The very last item on their list of options is “adapting”.
It’s sad that it’s becoming so laughable.
(via tanya77)
(via ericmortensen)
- 7:15 pm - Sat, Jan 7, 2012
- 2 notes
operationbabe:
As I stood washing dishes, thinking of all the things I needed to do, I wondered why they show our future tech as one big touchscreen. Our brains can multitask, our hands can’t.
Neural interface FTW. Jack me in.
- 1:08 am - Fri, Dec 30, 2011
- 2 notes
This is an anime/manga called Yu Yu Hakusho.
Little known fact: In another life, I helped make a collectible card game (CCG) for this.
Other CCGs I worked on in one capacity or another over the 90’s (mostly community management, playtesting, and game design):
Star Wars (Decipher)
Star Trek (Decipher)
Highlander (Thunder Castle Games)
Imajica (Harper Prism, based on the Clive Barker book)
Aliens vs. Predator (Harper Prism/Precedence Publishing)
Buffy: the Vampire Slayer (Score Entertainment)
Angel (Score, never published)
Dragonball Z (Score)
Dragonball GT (Score)
Inuyasha (Score)
And maybe one or two more that I’m forgetting.
Here’s a secret: creating a successful gaming product is about engagement, community building, and customer support. Casual players make up a significant percentage of the revenue, but the real momentum is driven by a core group of hardcore evangelists and fans.
In other words, there are lots of principles I learned during my time in the CCG industry that I apply regularly to my current focus in original online entertainment.
While web video and webseries are in their infancy, most of the fundamentals of what we’re doing are not new concepts. Success in this space may come from studying related principles in other industries that came before, from television to gaming to the pre-feature serials that packed the theaters in the 30s and 40s to who-knows-what-your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine.
Learn from the past, live in the present, dictate the future.
- 10:02 pm - Sat, Dec 24, 2011
- 481 notes
Twin Peaks Cast — 12 Days of Christmas
- [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
- 1,799 Plays
oh-itsdana:
12 Days of Christmas - Twin Peaks Cast
Nothing else is relevant.
I am SO in the Christmas Spirit now.
“8 dancing midgets…”
- 1:07 pm - Mon, Dec 5, 2011
- 17 notes
rafimama:
Last week a Credit Suisse analyst reported that paid TV services like Cable and Satellite will lose 200,000 subscribers next year citing that there is a generation of viewers called ‘Cord-Nevers’ that will never subscribe for those services.
In a follow up article titled, “TV’s Scariest Generation: The Cable-Nevers’, Bernard Gershon digs deeper into this new generation:
Cord-nevers - This is the most troubling group for the traditional operators. They are graduating college, leaving the nest and have become comfortable finding their viewing choices online. They don’t recognize networks - they know “shows.”
Before ‘on-demand’ viewing became prominent, the only way to ensure a viewer would have access to their favorite content was to bucket them into networks. This was the great allure of cable. A channel dedicated to music, comedy, sports, cooking, etc. Cable networks found that there was a growing number of viewers interested in niche content and that those viewers would watch their network as long as they knew that they could find content that would appeal to them on that specific channel at any given time. They were the Independents. They were underdogs.
Now that viewers can watch pretty much anything they want on demand, the position on the dial is less important. I can’t remember if ‘Mad Men’ is on AMC or Bravo. Or if ‘It’s Always Sunny..’ is on Fox or FX or TBS… no idea.
The new generation of viewers know shows, not networks.
This will continue to be true for network TV programs as well as independently produced web series. It won’t matter if a show was created for FX, TBS, HBO, or if it was distributed online only. Great shows will reach their audience no matter how remote and quirky they are. As long independent web series continue to be creative and unique in their approach to creating content, these cord-nevers will find the content they want.
I agree completely. Unfortunately, we don’t operate in a limited, closed system like cable TV. With web shows, what I’m seeing is a similar pattern but exacerbated by our inefficiency as an industry to brand ourselves outside of networked silos like Blip, YouTube, MyDamnChannel, Koldcast, Revision 3, etc..
By that I mean, audiences identify primarily with shows - I agree. However, video portal discovery is in its infancy and platform cross-promotion is basically non-existent. A viewer may discover a show on a particular network and thus find other shows they like on that network, but cross-site audience sharing by content genre and audience vertical is an uncracked nut. For the most part, this is in the network’s interests (better to keep the viewer on that site watching a “related” show they may or may not like rather than send them somewhere else to watch a highly relevant recommendation on another site). But it has a damaging effect as well:
If a viewer knows about Revision 3, they probably know of most of the shows there but may have never heard of other portals like Blip or The Escapist. Blip’s new layout definitely improves discovery within other Blip shows (as does YouTube’s) but due to the massive scale of those sites I doubt there’s anyone (maybe Eric and Steve, but not on the customer side) who is familiar with ALL the shows, or even all the related ones. If I like You Suck at Photoshop (MyDamnChannel), how do I find other shows like it I would enjoy as well if they’re not on MDC?
If you look at the cross promotion The Guild (MSN/YouTube) did with The Legend of Neil (Atom) you have a rare instance of cross-network familiarity (due to shared cast members), which may have led to Guild/LoN audiences discovering Video Game Reunion (also Atom), but those fans don’t necessarily know about gaming related shows on other networks like Project:LORE (Revision 3), Gold: the Series (Blip), Zero Punctuation (The Escapist), etc. ad infinitum.
So, yes, viewers identify with shows over networks. But the web is a URL destination based delivery system with very few ways to discover content from one site to another (Google is useless for this). Until someone solves that discovery problem, a casual viewer who finds a show they like will have a difficult time finding the best related content in that vertical or genre. Similarly, advertisers cannot currently buy audience at scale based on cross-site aggregation of interest segments (i.e. I want to run McCormick Seasoning ads across all the best cooking and food-related shows on the web).
It’s not up to the distribution networks to solve this problem even if they could: on the viewer side, you need a cross platform curator (Tosh 2.0 or Ain’t It Cool News for web series), a TV Guide (Clicker started this but lost steam), or an industry representative with cross channel interests (the IAWTV, perhaps) to be vested in optimizing audience aggregation around shows on the web. Running cross platform advertising on web shows is a much more technical issue and I’ll leave that opportunity to some other entrepreneur. ;)
No one asks “where can I find the best networks online?”, but they DO ask “where can I find the best shows online?” and, for the moment at least, there is no easy answer: the best we’re offering them is networks, not shows.
