Four reasons its easier to succeed in internet media than film
by Matt · Leave a Comment
Producing an internet series can be substantially easier and cheaper than producing a film, and it is much more likely to succeed than an independent film. Here are four reasons internet video is much more accessible to the average filmmaker:
Seven more reasons to create a web series
by Matt · Leave a Comment
If you thought the last four advantages to creating a web series were good enough to get you started, here are seven more reasons to turn your film idea into a web series:
- No Rules - The only rule is to please your audience, and don’t break the law. Make a violent comedy, or a PG horror movie. No industry exec is going to tell you “That won’t work”. Which brings us to our next point…
- No Gatekeepers - There is absolutely no one between you and your audience. No one decides whether or not your series is released except you.
- Time of Return - If you make a movie, it might take you two years to get distribution, and then another 6 months before you see a cent…if you see any money at all. What if instead, you had actual cash in your hands only a month after you’ve released your first episode?
- Synergy - Lets say you really like this idea of making a web series. What if you make a new series with a different concept? You could advertise it at the end of the episodes of your current series. If your first series has run for 6 months, then you can capitalize on six months of promotion, and give your new series a huge jump start. Taken to the extreme, you could create a multitude of different series, and start your own internet tv channel.
- The low cost of “failure” - You are definitely going to get some views. If you keep your production expenses as low as possible, then there is a much much greater chance of breaking even….even with a total flop. Not to mention there is no intrinsic loss of face. If you got a movie green lit by a studio, filmed it, and it was a flop…you’ll have a tough time working in the industry again. On the net you’ll just be some person who made a crappy video, and if you make something better everyone will completely forget about it.
- Feedback - The key to success in any business is knowing your audience. The beauty of the web is the ease of organizing data. With a little web savvy, you can keep tabs on your fans and their interests. Not to mention, all of these video sites offer the ability for people write comments. You can interact with your audience, and find what they really like. If they like a certain character, your subsequent episodes could include more of them.
- Getting bought - As I mentioned in my article on the
Writers Strike , even though the WGA strike is now over, the studios will still be looking to the net for new content. They’ve already been doing so, and its only going to increase. What if you could have the studios coming to you? Imagine having the studios begging you for your product, where its you and not the studios who have the bargaining power. - Any main character dies - While it makes for great feature films, invariably your series will probably just start to catch on two episodes before you show the episode where he or she dies. The truth is, you’ll probably be shooting this series on a shoestring. You’ll have a few dedicated actors that believe in your project. Can you afford to kill off any of their characters? Follow the star trek logic…when the team beams down, the only person who doesn’t come back should be the random red shirt guy.
- Heavy makeup or prosthetic characters - If you do this sort of work, then it means you’ll have to schedule completely around this character. If it takes 3 hours to put the make up on, then that means that entire day has to be dedicated to that character. This can cause some serious scheduling problems. You may feel your script can’t work without breaking this rule…fine…but you’ve been warned
- Kiddie Mobsters - You and your friends are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five and you just love Tarintino. We’ll that’s fantastic, but no one is going to believe you are all wise cracking gangsters. If you can’t find actors that actually fit the part, then don’t do it. Unless you are doing it as a comedy, it simply won’t work.
- Zombies - It might just work, but good lord is it difficult. If you are working on a low budget its best to stay away from special effects ridden genres such as zombie flicks. Another downside to zombie films is that they require characters to die off to maintain a sense of high stress. As I mentioned before, killing off your main characters is bad for business. Maybe after you get a successful series under your belt you can go for zombies, but for your first series stay far away.
- Non-comedy musicals - It’s simply not part of the typical web audience. Something that is funny might work, or even something very dark and unusual like Sweeny Todd might work. But don’t expect Fiddler on the Roof to hit it big on the internet.
- Children’s programs - Its nice if you want to create wholesome children’s entertainment, but it probably won’t work on the web. Both at school and at home, many young kids have sites like youtube blocked by filtering software. Most teens know how to hack these programs, but kids under 10 don’t and don’t particularly care to. They are too busy playing webkinz, or whatever it is little kids do these days on the internet. Also, don’t forget that internet media is a one on one experience. I certainly don’t know many eight year olds with a whole lot of buying power. That means very few advertisers interested in using you as an advertising channel. As far as I know sugar coated cereals don’t advertise much on the net, so unless you get a ton of toy sponsors you probably won’t make much money off of your series even if it does become popular.
- Comedy - The Internet video world is built on comedy. It doesn’t matter if you are a single guy standing in front of a poorly lit white table cloth, if your writing is funny you will probably do just fine.
- Nerds - I’d call it a sub genre of comedy since most nerd shows are comedies, but shows based around people being nerdy tend to do quite well on the internet. Case in point the series, Pure Pwnage, which is about hardcore video game players. The fact is, the majority of 16 to 34 year olds on the internet (you’re target audience) consider themselves to be nerdy. Either they are gamers, played dungeons and dragons as a kid, or are expert programmers…they all consider themselves nerds. And as such, they can identify with a protagonist who is a bit geeky, who doesn’t quite fit in.
- Teen Drama - Most people would assume drama doesn’t do well on the net, but it does when targeted specifically for young teen girls ages 15 to 23. This is the sort of show where Shelly cheats on Ben with Kellie, then Kelli finds out, and so on. The greatest benefit of this type of show is the social nature of your target audience. Girls in that age group are much more likely to forward your clips, discuss it on forums, or link you all over myspace than your average male audience. Make a good show and your audience will be very loyal. The only downside is its probably much harder to make good merchandise for this sort of show.
- Action - Action is probably the genre that requires the most skill, and thus hasn’t been utilized very well on the web just yet. Action is a cinematography heavy genre, so I’d recommend brushing up on your skills, and buying a good HD camera before jumping into an action series. However, if you can really get an intense action series going (think 24 type of intense), then there is a good chance you’ll enjoy pretty rapid and viral success.
- CPM Advertising - Video sites like Revver and Metacafe offer you money based on the number of views you recieve. And just recently, YouTube even announced it would expand its Partner Program to include even more users, and thus you could even make money on YouTube. Each site has its own policies, but fortunately most of them are non-exclusive. So you can actually upload your video to all of them.
- DVDs - Just like a film, you can easily sell DVDs of the whole series. In fact, if you provide enough content you can probably charge even more than a standard film.
- Merchandising - Develop interesting characters, catch phrases, or plot elements and you can turn that into all sorts of merchandise including T-shirts. The beauty of a web series is that it provides a unique “in the know” feel to your fans, and thus having T-shirts with your characters on it is more appealing than a very small indie film. It wouldn’t even surprise me if you’d sell more T-shirts than DVDs
- Website Advertising - In addition to the advertising embedded directly in your videos, you could also put advertising on your website. This could be CPC advertising (you get paid for each click, like google Adsense), CPM (you get paid for every 1000 views), or affiliates (you get paid when someone buys something through your link). If you put advertising on a website for an indie film, most people would be turned off by it. For a series where they are viewing content for free, people pretty much expect advertising to be present.
How to convert your feature script into a web series
So maybe you’ve been reading this blog so far, and your really interested in going the web series route. But maybe you already have a feature film script, or worse…maybe you’ve spent money optioning a feature script. Never fear, because in most cases you can convert that feature film script into an entire first season or more for your new web series.
First there are a few things you absolutely have to toss out:
Converting your screen play into a web series
The most important thing to remember when converting your screen play into a series is length. The ideal length for most series is less than five minutes. I’ve seen a few that make the fifteen minute mark, but you’ll have a much harder time finding video hosts that support video files that long. If you stay tuned to this site, you’ll begin to see just why this is so important.
So you are now going from a 90 to 120 page script, to a ton of five page scripts. In order to keep your audience interested, something major has to happen on every fifth page…in other words near the end of every episode. This doesn’t necessarily mean a cliffhanger, but something big has to happen that will keep your audience interested.
Remember that many of your viewers will discover your series after several episodes have already played. Sometimes a person will randomly stumble on episode 3, when episode 6 is online. Having something big happen at the end of each episode will convince them to watch episodes four, five, and six.
It’s also important that you’ve structured your series such that a person could come in at any point during the season and still find it interesting. It needs to be interesting enough for the person to keep watching, but also raise questions in the viewers mind that make them want to go back and watch earlier episodes to better understand the characters.
And above all, expand on your characters more than the plot. People watch series because they have strong feelings about the characters. Just think how soap operas work. They have about a dozen plots they repeat over and over again (i.e. Has amnesia…its his twin…cheated with my sister). But these programs have developed huge fan bases simply because people have a strong emotional reaction to the characters themselves. The same should be true of your series.
Four web series you should NOT create.
by Matt · Leave a Comment
I’ve been talking quite a bit about how to create a successful web series, and the types of content that work well on the internet. The honest truth is, there are probably a ton of great ideas I’ve never considered. Even more likely, there are a bunch of things which I would say are outright stupid ideas, which if done right would end up being huge successes. However, here are a few things I absolutely know won’t work, so don’t make the mistake of creating these types of web series:
Four genres that make for profitable internet series
by Matt · Leave a Comment
The internet is an unusual place, so its best not to automatically assume that what works in the movie world will work well on the internet, or vice versa. However, there are several time tested genres that work great for fictional web series:
Want to be a filmmaker? Maybe you should start a web series…
by Matt · Leave a Comment
Everyone knows that breaking into the film world is tough, if not nearly impossible. The cost of creating a film is enormous, and the likelihood of making a profit on your first feature is extremely small. But over the past few months, I’ve realized there is a better way. That way is to create a web series…
Think about it. No trying to convince a big studio to finance you, only to subsequently destroy your vision. No shifty distributors to deal with. Just grab a DV camera, find some actors, buy lots of pizza, and start filming.
But what about the fame, the money, and the admiration? Well, I don’t know about the fame (unless you consider the numa numa guy to be famous), but lets talk about the money.
Four ways to make money with a web series
Is it possible to make money with a web series? For the longest time it was my intuition that it wasn’t. Boy was I wrong. In fact, I wonder if its possible not to make money with a web series. Think of these various streams of income:
So you can certainly make money, but how much? Well, from my research I’ve found that $5/CPM is pretty much the low side of video advertising, in fact Metacafe pays that rate. That means for every 1000 views, you get $5. They may not seem like much, but consider the fact that many web videos get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.
I have a ton of new posts coming up that could help you create you own web series, so make sure to subscribe below either through email or RSS…(if your into that sort of thing.)
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