Came across this web phenomenon, only after a few of years of trying to describe how people can collaborate on a series. It also proposes an answer to the question:
"How do you share 'points' or profits with contributors on works that are still evolving?"
-- They seem to call it The hitRECord Accord.
What is hitRECord?
HITRECORD.ORG is a project (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) started almost five years ago now, and in 2010, we evolved into a professional open collaborative production company. We create and develop art and media collaboratively here on our site. Even this introductory video is the remixed result of a great many contributions. So rather than just exhibiting and admiring each other's work as isolated individuals, we gather here to collectively work on projects together. Videos, writing, photography, music, anything -- we call them all RECords.
Now and then, when I think something we've made has come out especially well, I approach the traditional entertainment industry to turn our work into money-making productions; and then we share any profits with the contributing artists.
I've found one of the best ways to explain what we do here is just to show some of the "RECords" we've made together. So I've curated this small selection, many of which were recently screened at Sundance and SxSW. Now, the larger purpose of this place isn't merely to post and play the work of isolated individuals, but to collaborate as a community. So if you like what you see, check out our recently Featured RECords and Collaborations to join in and contribute to the next project.
This one isn't a webseries - it was a one-off web event - which, in itself is an interesting take on how to use online release to create a buzz and possibly a community around your project?
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a 43-minute musical film, initially produced exclusively for Internet distribution. It tells the story of Dr. Horrible, the aspiring supervillain alter ego of Billy; Captain Hammer, his nemesis; and Penny, their mutual love interest.
The movie was written by writer/director Joss Whedon, his brothers Zack Whedon (a television writer) and Jed Whedon (a composer), and Jed's fiancée, actress Maurissa Tancharoen. The writing team penned the musical during the WGA writers' strike. The idea was to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would circumvent the issues that were being protested during the strike. On October 31, 2008, Time Magazine named it #15 in Time's Top 50 Inventions of 2008.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon’s web series, is a bold experiment in online distribution — the series will be available for free for just one week before becoming available on DVD and possibly download — but it’s also damn entertaining.
The tale of an aspiring supervillain told mostly in song, this WGA strike-spurred project treads an odd line between the professional and the amateur, making full use of Whedon’s considerable resources while still carrying a whiff of we-don’t-need-no-stinking-permits filmmaking. The end result is kinetic and inspired, while still bearing the trademark wit and pathos of a Whedon project.
After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences, with a complex story universe involving "trait positive girls" who are sought by an evil organization called "The Order".
Lonelygirl15 first came to international attention ostensibly as a "real" video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube. The show was eventually proved as a hoax by suspicious viewers as featuring a fictitious character played by American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose.
The three creators of Lonelygirl15, first revealed by the The New York Times, were Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney with Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, LLP.
The series began on June 16, 2006, and was slated to run through August 1, 2008. New videos appeared, at a clip of four to five a week, first on YouTube and lg15.com, also on MySpace. As of July 2008, the series has had more than 110 million combined views."
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried - creators of Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern and founders of new media company EQAL - talk with Josh Cohen of Tilzy.TV about LG15: The Resistance, why the series is different, and how the LG15 world comes to life.
"We call the shows that we produce 'social shows,' and they're very different from a TV show or a film,"
"The way that you actually construct the narrative, the way that the plot points flow over the course of the week, the way the site interplays with the video, the way the community works together and talks to the videos and talks to the characters, is all different,"
Partly to pick out anything useful, partly because some have gone missing from my blogger search box. This is so Google doesn't forget me.
The reason this is a favourite is because I wrote on Season 2. It's what got me into web series.
The Lonelygirl15 creators gave me a glimpse into a world where you can have a two-way interaction with the audience.
It's nuanaced. Somewhere between a focus group and being heckled on stage.
Everyone who works on the show are fans of the show - alongside the other fans of the series.
The mistake I made, and alot of people in the TV industry still make, is to compare webseries to TV Drama.
If you're disparaging about this show - the writing, the acting, the quality of production... then surely the traffic and number of video and profile views it gained in one year is all the more disproportionate and remarkable.
I think it, and Lonelygirl 15 shows the way for having good interactive storytelling technique. The production values are intentionally low - it was meant to look as if the characters were uploading themselves - but that aside, I think these shows are landmarks in showing how a community can be built around a show, rather than a one-time-viewing audience figure.
KateModern is the sister series of lonelygirl15. The series, which was announced on April 16, 2007, began filming on July 9 and the first video, Fight and Flight, was released on July 16. The show is produced by LG15 in partnership with Bebo. It ended on June 28, 2008, slightly less than a year following its original release.
KateModern is set in East London, England, and bears many similarities to its parent series. Both Kate and Bree are avid video bloggers and carry a dark secret. There is an alternate reality game component of the series as well.
"KateModern ran from 16th July 2007 to 28th June 2008 and was produced by the creators of lonelygirl15 - EQAL. During it's highly successful year long run it was nominated for two TV Craft BAFTA awards, a Webby Award and won the Broadcast Press Guild Award for Innovation 2008."
Kate Modern herself was killed off at the start of the second series; a bit of a bold move you might think, but the format of the show means it is constantly breaking new ground.“You can interact with the story, talk to the characters, comment on the plot – we get feedback all the time,” explains Rushton.
“What I find so interesting is the fact that people are coming together and discussing the show, but they’re also coming together to discuss things that lie outside of the show that affect them. People actually come to you on Bebo and share their experiences and they feel like they’ve got a place to do that. It’s the way that communication is going.”
We told you last month about the planned wrap-up of KateModern, the very successful Internet television show exclusive to the AOL-owned Bebo social network.
Well, today’s the day that all is put to pasture. KateModern is having its finale, and it’s going out with 12 episodes in 12 hours. The countdown to the series close began earlier this morning and will stretch to 7PM EST, with hourly videos releases complemented by live chats with and among the fanbase.
In fact, due to its viral achievements EQAL was able to secure both a $5 million Series A funding round and CBS partnership in the space of a single month.
BEBO's Kate Modern has become an internet sensation since being launched a year ago.
More than 66 million people have logged on to view the interactive online drama's 'webisodes' since July 2007.
TV Biz has an exclusive preview of this week's season 2 finale for your pleasure. It features Ralf Little and man-of-the-moment Noel Clarke - who wrote, directed and starred in the Kidulthood and Adulthood films.
Who killed KateModern? It's the question that has been occupying several million minds since the beginning of the year, when the heroine of the eponymously named online drama met her end. Kate, for those who have been living in a bunker since July 2007, is, or rather, was, a troubled teenage university art student living in London. She had a dark past that she was unable to remember and was somehow connected to a secret organisation called The Order.
Social networking site Bebo is to shock fans of hit online drama Kate Modern by killing off its eponymous star in the first episode of its new series.
The series' first sponsors - which get to see their products placed within the video - will be Cadbury's Creme Egg and Toyota's youth-targeted car Aygo. Sponsors of the first series included Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Warner Music, Paramount and Orange, which each paid up to £250,000 to appear within the show.
No figures have been revealed about what each company might pay to be involved with the second series.
However, each company stumps up cash based on the amount its brand is integrated into the storyline, which includes monitoring the number of times it appears in the video and is mentioned in the script.
KateModern, the flagship online drama broadcast by social networking site Bebo, will wrap up for the last time at the end of June, it was announced today.
The last part of series two will air on June 28, with Bebo promising a "high octane" ending with multiple episodes.
Featuring Royle Family star Ralph Little, the interactive drama has run for more than 300 four-minute episodes since it launched in July last year, racking up more than 57 million views.
Bebo wanted the show to "encourage unprecedented interactivity" with its audience and has also tried to distinguish itself from rival social networking sites by building up original content.
Users are given interactive tools to "talk" to KateModern characters and producers from the series, suggest storylines and solve puzzles in the plot.
The Bebo president, Joanna Shields, said KateModern has "created a new genre and demonstrated the power of media on a social network with gripping storylines and peerless production values".
I once read a post where a blogger said that they had seen the creator, Felicia Day, putting up a flyer for her webseries in a coffee shop somewhere in LA, even though it was a couple of years after the launch of The Guild, and well after it had many many followers.
Such is the dedication of a successful web series creator.
The Guild is a independent sitcom web series about a group of online gamers. The show started in the late summer of 2007, and for the first season was financed solely by Paypal donations from LOYAL FANS. Since season 2, The Guild has been distributed by Xbox Live and Microsoft and sponsored by Sprint.
Episodes vary from 3-8 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.
Click here for the story behind The Guild.
Seems like a bunch of writers and actors got together... and just made it, and uploaded it themselves...
"The guild was inspired and written by Felicia Day, an avid gamer, who until 2006 had been playing World of Warcraft.
After a 2 year gaming addiction Day decided to make something productive from her experiences and wrote the series as a sitcom pilot. Day hoped to show that the stereotype of a man living in his parent's basement is not the only kind of gamer.
Due to concerns that a wider (television) audience would not be receptive to the comparatively niche setting, she decided to follow through with it online with Jane Selle Morgan and Kim Evey. Day already knew Sandeep Parikh and Jeff Lewis from the Empty Stage, a Los Angeles based comedy theatre, and their roles were written for them. The rest of the cast was filled through auditions.
After filming the first 3 episodes in just two and a half days they faced the problem of funding. After putting a donation link to Paypal the 4th and 5th episode were almost solely financed by donations"
Great example of how a closed narrative
(R.L. Stevenson's book, Kidnapped!)
can be turned into a live event - streamed on the web.
Tim Wright followed the route covered in the novel, in real time, streaming the journey as he went.
How a book begins
'Kidnapped' is a fantastically exciting book.
The story of David Balfour running for his life across the Highlands, sometimes accompanied by tough and rebellious Alan, sometimes pursued by the English army, seemed so visceral and exciting to me that I wanted to try it for myself.
So that is exactly what (Tim Wright did).
From 30th June to 25th August (2009), (He followed) a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’.
Ian of the Ship Inn in Limekilns has had many people come into his pub and talk a good game about 'Kidnapped', but we are the first people he's been prepared to actually take across the river in his boat.
What a guy! He even cooked us a bowl of white pudding because that's what the 'fine lass' behind the bar does in the book. The rest of you, I'm afraid will have to take the bridge.
It doesnt surprise me at all to find comments on the blog referring to journeys and physical challenges currently in the news that mirror precisely what were doing here in terms of following a prescribed route, using manuals, never stopping despite what is thrown at us and unspooling a compelling narrative for others to enjoy and emulate.
Yes, Im talking about the moon landing of 40 years ago involving Armstrong *N* and the Tour de France involving Armstong *L*. If only an Armstong had won the Open also, we would have had a triumvirate of parallel events.
KateModern is the sister series of lonelygirl15. The series, which was announced on April 16, 2007, began filming on July 9 and the first video, Fight and Flight, was released on July 16. The show is produced by LG15 in partnership with Bebo. It ended on June 28, 2008, slightly less than a year following its original release.
KateModern is set in East London, England, and bears many similarities to its parent series. Both Kate and Bree are avid video bloggers and carry a dark secret. There is an alternate reality game component of the series as well.
"KateModern ran from 16th July 2007 to 28th June 2008 and was produced by the creators of lonelygirl15 - EQAL. During it's highly successful year long run it was nominated for two TV Craft BAFTA awards, a Webby Award and won the Broadcast Press Guild Award for Innovation 2008."
Kate Modern herself was killed off at the start of the second series; a bit of a bold move you might think, but the format of the show means it is constantly breaking new ground.“You can interact with the story, talk to the characters, comment on the plot – we get feedback all the time,” explains Rushton.
“What I find so interesting is the fact that people are coming together and discussing the show, but they’re also coming together to discuss things that lie outside of the show that affect them. People actually come to you on Bebo and share their experiences and they feel like they’ve got a place to do that. It’s the way that communication is going.”
We told you last month about the planned wrap-up of KateModern, the very successful Internet television show exclusive to the AOL-owned Bebo social network.
Well, today’s the day that all is put to pasture. KateModern is having its finale, and it’s going out with 12 episodes in 12 hours. The countdown to the series close began earlier this morning and will stretch to 7PM EST, with hourly videos releases complemented by live chats with and among the fanbase.
In fact, due to its viral achievements EQAL was able to secure both a $5 million Series A funding round and CBS partnership in the space of a single month.
BEBO's Kate Modern has become an internet sensation since being launched a year ago.
More than 66 million people have logged on to view the interactive online drama's 'webisodes' since July 2007.
TV Biz has an exclusive preview of this week's season 2 finale for your pleasure. It features Ralf Little and man-of-the-moment Noel Clarke - who wrote, directed and starred in the Kidulthood and Adulthood films.
Who killed KateModern? It's the question that has been occupying several million minds since the beginning of the year, when the heroine of the eponymously named online drama met her end. Kate, for those who have been living in a bunker since July 2007, is, or rather, was, a troubled teenage university art student living in London. She had a dark past that she was unable to remember and was somehow connected to a secret organisation called The Order.
Social networking site Bebo is to shock fans of hit online drama Kate Modern by killing off its eponymous star in the first episode of its new series.
The series' first sponsors - which get to see their products placed within the video - will be Cadbury's Creme Egg and Toyota's youth-targeted car Aygo. Sponsors of the first series included Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Warner Music, Paramount and Orange, which each paid up to £250,000 to appear within the show.
No figures have been revealed about what each company might pay to be involved with the second series.
However, each company stumps up cash based on the amount its brand is integrated into the storyline, which includes monitoring the number of times it appears in the video and is mentioned in the script.
KateModern, the flagship online drama broadcast by social networking site Bebo, will wrap up for the last time at the end of June, it was announced today.
The last part of series two will air on June 28, with Bebo promising a "high octane" ending with multiple episodes.
Featuring Royle Family star Ralph Little, the interactive drama has run for more than 300 four-minute episodes since it launched in July last year, racking up more than 57 million views.
Bebo wanted the show to "encourage unprecedented interactivity" with its audience and has also tried to distinguish itself from rival social networking sites by building up original content.
Users are given interactive tools to "talk" to KateModern characters and producers from the series, suggest storylines and solve puzzles in the plot.
The Bebo president, Joanna Shields, said KateModern has "created a new genre and demonstrated the power of media on a social network with gripping storylines and peerless production values".
"lonelygirl15 was an interactive web-based video series which began in June 2006, and ended on August 1, 2008.
The show focuses on the life of a fictional teenage girl named Bree, whose YouTube username is the eponymous "lonelygirl15", but the show does not reveal its fictional nature to its audience.
After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences, with a complex story universe involving "trait positive girls" who are sought by an evil organization called "The Order".
Lonelygirl15 first came to international attention ostensibly as a "real" video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube. The show was eventually proved as a hoax by suspicious viewers as featuring a fictitious character played by American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose.
The three creators of Lonelygirl15, first revealed by the The New York Times, were Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney with Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, LLP.
The series began on June 16, 2006, and was slated to run through August 1, 2008. New videos appeared, at a clip of four to five a week, first on YouTube and lg15.com, also on MySpace. As of July 2008, the series has had more than 110 million combined views."
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried - creators of Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern and founders of new media company EQAL - talk with Josh Cohen of Tilzy.TV about LG15: The Resistance, why the series is different, and how the LG15 world comes to life.
"We call the shows that we produce 'social shows,' and they're very different from a TV show or a film,"
"The way that you actually construct the narrative, the way that the plot points flow over the course of the week, the way the site interplays with the video, the way the community works together and talks to the videos and talks to the characters, is all different,"
Building on its huge success, In The Motherhood, the first-ever online series for, by and about moms, is back for a second season! With a star-studded cast, newcomer Jenny McCarthy joins Leah Remini and Chelsea Handler as they portray the ever-hectic, yet always humorous adventures of Motherhood as told by real moms.
At www.inthemotherhood.com moms can submit their stories, vote for their favorites and watch as the winning submissions are turned into new episodes starring Jenny McCarthy, Leah Remini and Chelsea Handler!
The rallying of the community around the show to feed content back into the show. From bittersweet.com:
Each episode is being based on a theme and readers are invited to write in their stories on subjects like Bribing Your Child, or Explaining the Birds and the Bees, and entries are posted on the web.
If you don’t want to write about your kid using your lipstick on the cat’s rectum (photo above) or toddler taking a poop in a hardware store display toilet, you can still participate by reading and voting on the submissions.
Research determined that moms were hungry for direct contact with other moms and wanted to have real conversations about real topics that affect their daily lives.
We discovered that many marketers were talking at moms and telling them how to be the perfect mother, but none of them were talking with them.
What real moms wanted was to engage in a dialogue and they were willing to do so via an unique consumer generated comedic online series created by moms, for moms, and about moms, brought to them by Sprint Nextel and Unilever's Suave.
MSN ADVERTISING case study document here When marketers can transcend the transactional and enter into authentic conversation, moms respond... Whenarketers develop innovative solutions that cater to moms’ online behavior – as they make connections, find information, get things done, or seek entertainment – and then present those solutions in a way that honors the experience of motherhood, moms respond.
Starring 30-something Playmate/sitcom star Jenny McCarthy, King of Queens‘ Leah Remini, and E!’s Chelsea Handler, the series’ 7-minute(ish) vids recreate toddler-centric vignettes from stories submitted by real-world moms.
Each episode is basically a concentrated shot of jokes you’d hear from sitcom mothers, those overworked and frustrated (yet still affably sardonic!) foils to their husbands’ childish excesses — but without the contrived plots, laugh tracks and boring supporting characters.
Instead, each show features three, real-life, self-contained stories (toddler craps in show floor toilet, grandma fake-bakes unsuspecting 3-year-old, etc.), with the moms’ yuk-it-up banter segueing between segments. Some of the vignettes even go beyond antiseptic family sitcom fare, e.g., the first episode, when McCarthy’s kid uses lip balm on the family cat’s behind.
ABC has given a 13-episode order to “In the Motherhood,” a half-hour laffer based on the online series about the perils of parenting. Alphabet net announced at its May upfront presentation that “Motherhood” was being fast-tracked for development. The online series was conceived by brand entertainment firm Mindshare, which remains involved with the TV sitcom version
The skew of the article seems to be that it is difficult to achieve legally.
My sense is that it's difficult to achieve editorially.
The depth of an online community IS the show - rather than something a TV series would graft to itself.
Here's a thought: Was Television seen as a "way to develop shows" for radio... back in 1950? So are we right to apply that logic to online shows today?
This tale of three moms, which has its debut on ABC on Thursday, was created by a marketing company as a Web video series. After drawing millions of views online in the past two years, it was transformed into a traditional network sitcom, making it the first Web show to be remade for network television. But what made the Web series unique — an interactive style of storytelling — was quashed by the legal engine of Hollywood.
On the MSN.com edition of “Motherhood” (since discontinued), short segments about funny, frazzled mothers were inspired by the real-life stories that viewers submitted via an Internet forum. ABC, similarly, asked for story submissions on its Web site (itm.abc.go.com) and said that they “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”
But ABC’s call for ideas from moms drew the attention of the Writers Guild of America, which said this type of request for submissions was “not permissible” under its contract with the network. This week ABC abruptly removed the language about “inspiration” from its Web site, effectively saying that the writers may not be listening to viewers’ ideas, after all.
Easy to Assemble follows Illeana Douglas as she quits her Hollywood career and goes to work at IKEA Burbank in an attempt at a ‘normal life.’ However your past is often more difficult to leave behind than you think. Especially when Hollywood craziness with its gossip columnists, stalkers and celebrity friends follows you. Can Illeana assimilate in "civilian" life and prove that "art is where you make it?"
Episode 1 of Easy To Assemble. Illeana Douglas's first day on the job. Can she survive?
Easy To Assemble costars Jeff Goldblum, Tom Arnold, Justine Bateman, Jane Lynch, Craig Bierko, Kevin Pollack, Robert Patrick, Ed Begley jr. and others.
IKEA is promoting the line, “Easy to Assemble” with an online video series starring director Illeana Douglas and co-starring Jeff Goldblum, Tom Arnold, Justine Bateman, Jane Lynch, Craig Bierko, Kevin Pollack, Ed Begley Jr. and Robert Patrick. Twenty co-worker training videos, initially rolled out online on the SVX channels at YouTube and Metacafe, feature playful if slightly embarrassing moments for staff and guests at an IKEA store in Burbank, California. The campaign is supplemented by a specially designed site, www.easytoassemble.tv.
Los Angeles Actress Illeana Douglas has moved from starring in big productions such as Cape Fear, Seinfeld and Ugly Betty to try her hand at writing and directing. Most recently, she is the creator of an original web series called Easy To Assemble, sponsored by Swedish furniture giant IKEA...
...It has now been picked up by CBS's online component TV.com. In this interview, she talks about why she thinks that branded content is the way of the future, her vision for Easy To Assemble and the quirky band Sparhusen as well as what it means to be an artist in a digital age. Interview by Jay Baage.
The winner of IKEA's coveted 'Co-Worker of the Year' is revealed, but that's only the beginning. Illeana, Justine and their fellow IKEAns are on a plane bound for Sweden, where new co-workers, new relationships and 'bitter' rivalries combine to re-define 'in-flight entertainment.'
The special Flying Solo miniseries concludes with what else? A groovy disco dance number. Shake your groove plane and boogie down to Sparhusen's new single: 'Mile High Club' (available for download at http://www.cdfreedom.com/sparhusen)
*****STORYGAS INTERACTIVE RATING***** EASY TO ASSEMBLE Can you embed? YES Can you comment? YES Also on youtube? YES Forums? not found Blog? YES ************************************
What do you think? In 3 words? Or score out of 10? See COMMENTS below
...web drama, online comedy, online narrative, interactive drama, internet television series, multi-platform storytelling, webseries, web series, web tv, webisodes, transmedia, multiplatform or interactive narrative... whatever you call it, we're watching.
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HAVE A LOOK THROUGH THE COMPLETE LISTS OF WEB SERIES BELOW!
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