Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet-2nd edition. Ross Brown

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ PREFACE

      Every writer, producer, network, studio, and cable channel in Hollywood is spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars trying to figure out how to connect with the YouTube audience and make a hit web series. But it’s a solid bet that the next breakout short-form hit will come not from Hollywood but from the mind of someone outside the established media power structure — someone like you.

      That’s not to say this trailblazer will necessarily be a rank amateur. Maybe he’ll be a writer who’s been trying to break into network television but hasn’t succeeded yet. Or maybe she’ll be writing for another medium that Hollywood or the Internet suddenly discovers (can you say Diablo Cody?). Or maybe it will be a veteran writer who has been churning out bland sitcoms for decades, someone seen as over the hill, someone who throws caution to the wind and creates something totally new and original because the traditional doors to employment are now slammed in his face (can you say Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives?). Or maybe it will be someone now in film school, or even in high school, who came of age during the digital era, thinks visually, and intuitively knows what her peers crave in the way of short video entertainment, in part because watching short videos is a normal part of her daily experience.

      The point is that everybody knows there is a huge, game-changing, hit web series lurking on the horizon, but nobody knows where it will come from. They know only that sooner or later, there will be a breakthrough smash hit in the Internet TV realm, so it might as well come from YOU.

      Webisodes are the Wild West of Hollywood, a vast expanse of territory with unlimited potential just begging to be explored and mined. The territory is open to anyone with a dream and the moxie to follow that dream. You may strike oil or find gold, or you may end up with a handful of dust. Either way, the journey will be exciting and rewarding for its own sake. It will challenge you, expand your creative horizons, and open your eyes and mind to all kinds of new skills you never knew you had lurking inside.

      But before you head out on this quest to create your own Internet TV series, you need a few vital supplies: some basic equipment and know-how, a workable series premise, a pilot script, a shooting budget, and shot list — in short, you need a plan.

      This book is designed to help you draw up that plan, step by step. You are HERE. Somewhere on the Internet is a place for a television series created by YOU. This book is the map that can lead you from where you are now — a person with a lot of creative ideas in his head but no clear idea how to turn those buzzing ideas into reality — to THERE, the creator of your own unique and exciting TV series designed for the Web.

      I know it can be done because my students at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University have been creating innovative, entertaining web series since 2007. You know it can be done because you’ve surfed the Net, seen the good, the bad, and the ugly out there, and said, “I can do better than that.”

      You’re absolutely right. You can do better than most of what’s out there. And you don’t need a million-dollar budget or a Hollywood studio full of equipment to do it. Anyone with a digital camera and an ordinary computer has all the equipment he needs right now to make a web series.

      What you probably don’t have is exposure to the thought process involved in taking a raw idea for a short-form TV show and shaping that vague notion into a clear premise, defined characters, a story to introduce those characters in an engaging way, and the professional know-how to take that story through production and postproduction and end up with a polished and marketable pilot episode.

      Make no mistake: It won’t be easy. You can’t just slap together some half-baked notion, grab a camera, and point it randomly at things that strike you as interesting or funny. That’s just video masturbation. All you end up with, as Mike Judge suggests in his film Idiocracy, is a show called Ow! My Balls!

      You may also need some help understanding the best way to market your web TV series — that is, the best way to let the audience know what you’ve created and get them interested in watching your new TV show. Simply posting something on YouTube is not enough. The Internet is a cacophony of voices screaming, “Watch me! Watch me!” You have to find ways to make your voice, and your web series, stand out from the crowd. A great series concept and superior execution are only good first steps. But to get the eyeballs to your show, you’ll need to apply a little Web 2.0 marketing savvy, which is what Chapter Thirteen is all about: promoting your series AND yourself.

      But if you have a sincere desire to create high-quality humor or drama in an episodic form for the Internet and to commit the time and energy necessary for marketing your work, then read on. As my students have taught me over and over again, there is an unlimited and untapped supply of fresh, compelling ideas out there begging to find their way to the screen. This book will help you to tap into that vast reservoir of creativity and give your ideas form and professional quality. It’s the ultimate win–win situation: You get a shot at creating a hit TV show for the Internet, and we, the millions of daily consumers of short-form Internet videos, get a shot at watching something more compelling than Ow! My Balls!

      For the sake of all our days and nights, read on and create something fantastic for all of us to watch.

       1 WHAT IS A WEBISODE?

      Simply put, a webisode is an episode of a television series designed for distribution over the Internet. It can be comedy like Boys Will Be Girls or its companion series, Girls Will Be Boys, or compelling drama like The Bannen Way. It can be live action or animated (see John Woo’s Seven Brothers), fiction or reality-based (see Start Something, a social media documentary series presented by the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization). It can be a high-budget, intricately filmed sci-fi extravaganza with dazzling special effects like Sanctuary, which cost $4.3 million or approximately $32,000 per minute, one of the most ambitious projects to date designed for direct release over the Internet (which later became a cable TV series on the Syfy channel). Or it can be as low-tech as a static webcam shot in front of a convenient and free background like your own bedroom. It can be made purely for entertainment purposes, or it can be branded entertainment or “advertainment,” like dozens of web series now produced by Fortune 500 companies including Kraft, Toyota, and Anheuser-Busch who hope that a little entertainment will go a long way toward getting you to buy their cream cheese, Camrys, and Bud. And the length can be whatever you choose, from a quick joke (check out the incredibly clever 5-second films on YouTube) to however long you can hold the audience’s attention.

      The key word is series. A webisode (or web episode) is an individual installment of an ongoing premise with recurring characters. A single, stand-alone short video — say of the hilarious things your cat did after she lapped up your Jack Daniels on the rocks — is NOT a webisode. Neither is that brilliant spoof of Sex and the City you shot at your grandmother’s retirement home — unless you shot a series of short Sex and the City spoofs with grandma and her horny pals, in which case we should take the Jack Daniels away from you and your grandma and give it back to your cat.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SHORT EPISODIC VIDEO ON THE WEB

      In the Mel Brooks movie History of the World Part I, Moses (played by Brooks) descends from a mountaintop lugging three stone tablets chiseled with 15 commandments from God — until Moses trips and drops one of the holy tablets, shattering it beyond recognition. Having promised 15 commandments, he covers by swiftly declaring, “I bring you ten, ten commandments.” Five sacred commandments smashed into a pile of rubble just like that. Who knows what wisdom was lost? Maybe the missing commandments said things like “Thou shalt not wear spandex after age 40” or “Covet not thy neighbor’s iPad2, for he is a tech СКАЧАТЬ