I asked a question to our Twitter followers and Facebook fans a couple weeks ago; As a filmmaker, would you sooner create a web series or short film? 13 people said they would sooner create a web series, whereas 7 people insisted they would rather create a short film.

What I know is that I watch many more web series episodes vs short films during a typical week of online viewing. I’m obsessed with watching web series creators and producers increasingly improve the production and entertainment value of their content as we push forward in the rapidly evolving media creation space.

When I first started tracking and covering online video news and production “norms” back in 2006 it’s like night and day compared to just 5 years later, now in 2011. The quality gap between TV series and web series is certainly getting smaller and smaller, as the economics are constantly improving for the semi-pro filmmakers and video creators to show off their creativity, passion, and storytelling.

There are advantages and disadvantages of creating a web series vs a short film (see links below for more reading in this area), and I believe that filmmakers and video creators should do both over time. Create as much quality entertainment as you can, promote it like crazy, see which videos find large audiences and engagement, and create more similar content by doubling down on what actually breaks through the noise. Don’t spend too much money or time in the beginning, if your story resonates with viewers then leverage that when reaching out to producers to help take things to the next level.

The number of entertaining web shows is blowing up, and to me it’s extremely exciting because I see progress every week and believe in the potential going forward. I’m bullish on web series, and it will be interesting to see what big hits emerge out of this space next.

Perhaps now is your time to shine?! If you need to build a team and/or collaborate on your video or film projects, then be sure to join our Spidvid community, and post a project for our talented members to check out!

What do you think of web series vs short film in terms of creation and viewing? The comments are yours below! Here are some opinions from other bloggers on this subject: The Short Film Is Dead, TV vs Web Series vs Indie Film, Indie Filmmaking Death Match: Short Film vs Web Series.

Don’t miss another Spidvid blog post or article! Get our content delivered to your email inbox, or to your favorite RSS reader.

I recently connected with Mike Gentilini, Jr. who’s the founder of VidMuze. VidMuze is a video community where tutorials and stock footage content is shared for video editors and visual effects artists to learn and grow from. Empowering storytellers to take their video productions to a higher professional level is the core mission of VidMuze.

There are many great tutorials which you can watch on VidMuze, but in the mean time I have hand selected a couple below to get you started. To watch the others simply visit their tutorial page, or their Vimeo channel page.

Below is some pretty cool video stock footage provided by VidMuze

If you like what you’ve seen here, then be sure to head over to VidMuze to get even more valuable content to benefit your current and future video productions.

Have something to add? The comments are yours below!

Don’t miss another Spidvid blog post or article! Get our content delivered to your email inbox, or to your favorite RSS reader.

We are back with another exciting Spidcast episode this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on collaborative filmmaking. For July’s show we feature two filmmakers and actors who have both created original web series. These two individuals are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have Gavin Leighton and Mike Lawson (both featured below) on the show.

Enjoy July’s Spidcast show, click play below to listen in

Our Guests

Gavin Leighton is a co-creator behind the web series Hitting the Fan, he also works in the creative and business aspects of acting, writing, music, producing, and collaborating.

Mike Lawson is also a co-creator of the Hitting the Fan web series, is behind Idiotscreen, and has appeared in a few feature films including “Friends With Money, Fast Track, and American Pie Presents Band Camp.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Gavin or Mike talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Gavin Leighton and Mike Lawson, both actors living in Los Angeles and both now blazing their trail to non-traditional video production and delivery and worldwide collaboration as well. They have, in fact, worked together but also separately both with great success. I’m certain you’ll enjoy their similar but quite unique stories as well.

First up is Gavin Leighton. Gavin, welcome to Spidcast.

Gavin Leighton: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here and thank you for the opportunity to get to speak with others that are like-minded who want to do what they want to do.

Michael: Gavin, tell us a little bit about your story?

Gavin Leighton: I live in Los Angeles. I moved to Los Angeles about 7-and-a-half years ago. I moved out here specifically for acting, music and writing. During that time, I’ve worked some as an actor and booked things which have been exciting, but I’ve also have, most excitingly, been able to work on projects where I helped to create or I was just a part of the process with a group of friends and getting to wear lots of little hats on various projects over the course of time that I’ve been out here, which for me, have been really fulfilling. It’s a different experience that just booking something and moving on. You actually create something which is pretty exciting.

Michael: Well, it sounds great. Now, tell us a little bit about how you broke into the business.

Gavin Leighton: I’ve had the honor and the good fortune to work with some really great people out here in Los Angeles. I’ll name a few as I go along, but just name some, I’ve had the good fortune of working with Peter Atencio, working with Jen Ci, and Elisia Skye and these are all people that have made some really incredible video content and had gotten some attention with their work for numerous reasons specially with the quality of their work.

One of the things kind of most notably for me was I produced something called “Barackula: The Musical.” We did this several years ago, long time towards the end of ’07, long before it was cool to jump on the Barack Obama bandwagon and making videos about him. We created this 12 minutes—I call it a short political-horror-rock musical and basically Barack Obama fighting vampires at Harvard Law School. It’s totally fun and two musical numbers and dancing which I composed for, I helped produce, I also starred in.

That was kind of my first experience with collaborating with others in creating video content and it got a lot of attention. We were featured on CNN, Fox, MSNBC. We were discussed with VH1 and MTV. We’re in newspapers. It was really cool. We got a lot of great publicity and it was all kind of unintentional. We were not aiming to get that kind of publicity. It just kind of fell into our laps because we released it at the beginning of February of 2008 like around Super Tuesday, just for fun, and it just kind of took off from there for awhile which was cool.

Michael: Now, I’m going to guess on that production that you took advantage of collaboration?

Gavin Leighton: Absolutely. So, what had happened was, some friends of mine, Mike Lawson who I work with quite a bit, Brooke Shirey, Justin Sherman—they were just making a short film and they wanted to know if I wanted to produce it along with them. It was just really a story about Barack Obama being at Harvard and that’s all it kind of was. I like the idea of collaborating because you get to spend time with friends in a really special way, in a way that you get to do something that you love to do. You get to create something. But then somebody came up with the idea of making it a musical and that really got my attention. I was really on board from that point on and then they decided to make it a vampire musical.

We just had a great time. The four of us working very closely together and we created a great script and we made some really great music and the script and music and the idea that inspired and rolled others to kind of be a part of the project.

We kind of enlisted a guy named Mark Mannschreck who had a RED Camera and it was the first time that any of us got to use or even see a RED Camera in the beginning of ’08 when it was really just kind of coming out. This guy Mark allowed us to just use his camera. He was just being a part of it just because he enjoyed the idea of it and so he got himself inspired to be a part of it. That’s kind of how it happened.

And something very, very small an idea that we had that we didn’t have these big, high hopes for, it was just something we just wanted to do for fun, turned out to be something much bigger than any of us expected and I think that got me really into the idea of collaborating with others.

Michael: Well, you’ve certainly whetted my appetite. Where can we see that?

Gavin Leighton: Thank you. It’s Barackula.com. People tend to misspell it but it’s just like the President’s last name. It’s B-A-R-A-C-K-U-L-A. Like Dracula but Barackula. Just Baracula.com and you’ll be able to see how press and all that but you can also watch the full 12-minute video in HD on there. Again, everything there, just so the listeners can know, it looks really good, but we shot it I think for about 2,000 or less and a lot of it was just from favors that we got from friends. We got food donated to us. It was really just one of those things where we know the right people.

We’re in that community of making video content and by knowing others and by being a part of that group, they come in and they help you with the thinking that at some point, you’ll return the favor and it’s kind of like a family that produces these projects and we have. Barackula.com. I hope people go and check it out.

Michael: I’m sure they will as will I. Now, you mentioned limited budgets, tell us how to get the most from a limited or even sometimes a no-budget production?

Gavin Leighton: Sure. I’ll speak to it with some experience. Most recently, we’ve produced a new comedy series called “Hitting the Fan”. It’s very, very small budget. The first place to start when you want to create something like a web series or just a show or just a single thing, the first place to go is have that clear idea of what you want.

Before you start calling friends over, before you maybe even start writing, you really want to think what is it that I want to create? How can I do this cheaply? Who do I know that can help me on this? People sometimes think that when you hear the word resources, you think in financial terms, but in this kind of world, in this kind of arena, with making video content, your resources are the people around you. If you associate with people that make video content or know people that do, they have a great wealth of resources for you that you may not even be able to imagine. At least start sending out emails or making phone calls and starting from there to see what people can do.

We had asked a friend of ours that the sound—our friend, Josh Bissett, he joined us on “Hitting the Fan”. It was all just a favor to us. We didn’t pay him pretty much at all. He should’ve take more, but he did it simply because he’s a part of that group and at some point, I assumed that will help him with something as well. That’s one way to begin.

Michael: Okay so you got the project done and now you’ve posted it. How do you get people to find it?

Gavin Leighton: Okay, once you’re past the production aspects and you’re now on post-production, maybe editing or even past that, what do you do now? Once again, I would say, look around at the world around you. Follow the right people on things like Twitter. That’s certainly an amazing resource because if you follow the right people on Twitter, you can learn information that you really wouldn’t get unless you spend hours digging up online. These people are doing it for you already and you can do it and kind of live streaming in action.

Other ways to figure out how do you benefit others? Where does your content belong? For instance, you made a series, would a company like Netflix or Xbox, would they have any interest in having some original content? Is the quality of the audio and the video quality up to par with what they want if you’ve done some good planning on your end in pre-production and production? Maybe you have some really phenomenal quality of writing, of performances, video/audio. If you have all the four magic things all in place together, there’s a lot of places where you can go. Right now what we’re doing is we’ve shot two episodes of our show and we’re kind of on that same place, we’re reaching out to places where it might belong.

Another example, maybe check in with a website or a product or something—I’m just going to Target, I don’t know, for some reason, it comes to me. You contact Target and maybe for some reason, (pay) their own show on their website. Who knows the reason why, but they just might. Maybe your show has that original content that they’re looking for which they can also advertise on as well. All of the sudden, out of nowhere, you have some great financing that you never would’ve expected. It’s simply, once again, a matter of collaboration, but this time with a company.

Michael: Well, you’ve given us some wonderful insights into the whole process from idea to completion. What do you foresee now in the next say, five to ten years?

Gavin Leighton: It’s funny when that has had a hand in making video content. Now, people know that it’s an exciting time to be doing this because look at where things were five years ago? You never would’ve imagined the kind of advantage that we see with video equipment and all your equipment that we have access to now. Not only do we have access too, but also really cheaply. There was never anything like HD cameras. It would’ve cost a fortune five years ago, but right now, and there’s no excuse for anybody to not be able to make something that is worthy for a big screen, with lots of people watching it or worthy of having 10, 20,000, 30,000 people following it.

It’s just a really phenomenal, exciting time to be doing this because cameras are going to be getting better. Sound equipments are going to be getting better. They’re also going to get more affordable. Even this month, I think, final cutbacks with Apple (has got) software coming out, I believe, this month if I got that right. Even advances in just software can really take people’s production to a new level that they would not have imagined five years ago.

The exciting thing is in five years from now, it’s just going to be the same thing, but it’s going to be exponential. I see in five years now, everyone having cameras like the RED camera or better. Being able to make something that looks beautiful for under a thousand dollars or whatever it might be.

Once you have these resources available to you, the first place to begin is a good, proper planning. What do you want to write? What kind of script do you want? Get out there and speak. I suggest people to give their scripts to others and let them do a table read because technology can get better and you can have access to really phenomenal equipment that’ll make you look good. But you want to make sure that the content is good too. It’s all equal in form.

Michael: Well, there you make an excellent point. The accessibility, the ease of use, the quality of the equipment, but it still comes down to the writing.

Gavin Leighton: Absolutely. Every single time. Again, another example with our show right now, “Hitting the Fan”, we did a table read with a group of friends that we were not asking to help us. We just wanted to hear how it sounded out loud with me and Mike Lawson and Ron Fallica, kind of production he might have out here. And we liked having this table read but once people read the script, there are actors with great credit, people with great talent, people that their time is valuable. They said to us, how do we be a part of this? We just want to be a part of it. We’ll help any way that we can. This is a great script. It’s very funny. It starts with that. From that point forward, because we had a good product before the cameras are turned on, more resources became available to us and also for free. We got free location and things like that in nature.

Michael: Gavin, tell us a bit about how Spidvid has impacted collaboration and production for you?

Gavin Leighton: Absolutely, when I first learned about Spidvid, not too long ago, is impressed with the idea. It’s essentially just a place where people like myself and others, the same who’ll be listening to this, can really connect with others and it’s another great resource out there. That’s what it’s all about. You go online and you put out a video idea and before you know it, the world brings you something that you would not have expected yesterday. And now, all of the sudden, your project is jumping to new great heights which built the excitement and built the, I think, the production value as well.

I think it’s a great form for people to connect and learn things about themselves as video creators and also learn things about others and to produce even better content in the future. Jeremy’s is also just a pretty nice guy.

Michael: He is that indeed. If you could just wrap this up with a few easily digestible nuggets, what would they be?

Gavin Leighton: The four things that I think that are most valuable is that they’re your four pillars for a great project and that is great writing, great performances, great video, and great audio. If one of those pillars is missing, I feel like the foundation of what you’re trying to accomplish will fall apart if you’re trying to go for something grand. If you’re just wanting to make something just to make it and show friends on Facebook or YouTube or whatever, then you have a lot more freedom but if you’re trying to take it to a next level, you are getting financing or want to place it on a network, you really need to take under consideration, I think, these four very essential aspects to video creating.

Michael: Excellent. Now, Gavin, one more time, where do we see your stuff?

Gavin Leighton: You can see my new show, which I’m the star, the writer and composer of this as well, Hittingthefanshow.com. You can watch Barackula at Barackula.com and I can be emailed from any of these sites. The best one out is Gavin@hittingthefanshow.com.

Michael: Thank you so much, Gavin Leighton for joining us today.

Gavin Leighton: Michael, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

BREAK

Michael: Next up is an actor, writer and editor of Idiotscreen.com. He’s Mike Lawson. So tell us a bit about yourself and what’s your story?

Mike Lawson: Well, I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in a small town right outside of Dayton. I always knew that I wanted to be a part of films. I started making films when I was around four or five and my parents played different roles and I would direct them and write them and make remakes of movies that I really like, like “Red Dawn” and a movie called “Daryl”, which is a cheesy movie about a boy robot.

I write and I just continue to do that through my childhood and I moved out to L.A. like so many other people primarily to be an actor and a writer, but I really focused on writing first and (I was) in the acting first. I started working at casting offices just to intern and learn the other side and worked in script development in a couple of production companies also to learn that side. Slowly, I booked like kind of bit parts on TV shows and then the parts started to go a little bit bigger and did some independent films and started to write more and I started to produce my own stuff because I got tired of waiting around like so many people do.

I produced a couple of short films and web series and then I thought of the idea to kind of create my own site like a blog featuring interviews and panel discussions in our own content that my friends and I would do and have a hub for it. I created Idiotscreen.com and now it brings me to greater than right about now. That’s basically my story in a nutshell there.

Michael: So take us to the process from your idea to script to the finish product?

Mike Lawson: Well, my friends and I, we thought of an idea originally for like a half-hour comedy show and we wrote a pilot and we were like where do we take this? We didn’t have many connections with inside the big network studio system so we said let’s do this on our own. At that time, the people were, of course, creating their own content for the web, and we thought we can do this. We have the script and then we have to add the outline for the rest of the series. The show is called “Hitting the Fan” and we basically kind of pooled our friends together. We had a sound guy friend of ours that we said can we get work (cheaper too.)

We started creating the website just this WordPress site, found this WordPress theme and started learning that so you’d have the color scheme and then we just called all our friends and Facebooked them. Between the three of us, my friends Gavin and Ron, and we basically put in money we had into it, which was very little and created a test pilot shot on a HV20 camera this little mini DV camera.

We used China lanterns because they were super cheap. We used other kinds of light fixtures from Home Depot and when our sound guy couldn’t be there, we had the other actors kind of boom that first episode. We shot it and it took several months to edit it. We had a guy editing it, a friend of ours in New York. We were editing out here between our computers. Had a lot of bad luck as far as like computers crashing and there’s probably like five different computers that was on. Then we had a friend do the sound mix.

We created it. We had a screening and then we decided let’s do a second episode before we air anything. We went out and we put a little bit more money but not much but we have learned a lot from that from that first one way shot on the T2i Rebel and the Canon 70 DSLR HD cameras and we got our other friends involved and we used again, mostly China lanterns, not really any traditional film lights but we went out and we shot it and same thing, it was a lot quicker because we didn’t shoot as much footage. We improved a lot more that first one. We were a lot more efficient with our time and our schedule and the second episode and we kind of put it out there.

That’s kind of how that happened for that show, “Hitting the Fan”. And then another series that I did was a lot different. That panel show for Idiotscreen. Basically, I just contacted various people that I’d want to interview and schedule a day at a friend’s house and had the basic China lanterns and borrowed a couple of lights from friends and set up three cameras, two T2i Rebels and the one 70, had some friends come. We just shot interviews all day and then had another friend edit and put it out on the web and try to send it out to the influencers out there, the people that who’s opinion seem to matter, which I believe is everyone, but we send out to everyone and also those who have even more influence as far as views on their site whatever.

Michael: Now, through what you just said, there was a continuing thread—friends, friends, friends. Tell us about how friends and Spidcast and others have helped you?

Mike Lawson: Well, Spidvid and Facebook and them together are basically—for us, I can speak at least for how we do it. They need resources to find talent because like a lot of the people that I work with, I come mostly again from the acting background and at the time, I didn’t have a lot of friends that were—I have one sound guy friend, which was a blessing, but the other people, I didn’t have many DP friends or editor friends or grips.

In certain cases for acting’s sake, one of my friends are kind of playing the similar age to me, kind mid to late 20’s, but there’s not always, maybe like someone in their 40’s or a teenager. It was very helpful to find people who I didn’t have in my inner circle then and who wanted to do the same thing. Of course, by them helping us out, in turn, we owe them our help on their passion projects. It’s just a way to find people because very often, in our case, we didn’t have the funds and even so, even if we did, we would want to have a place to find them that we could trust, that we would have like obviously, if we have people who’ll vouch for other people in person and online, we can trust them more than if we just got a resume through Craigslist.

Seeing someone’s profile page and their example work all in one page, I think, is very helpful and on Spidvid and Facebook and Twitter in a completely different way, but for as far as connecting, Facebook, Spidvid and some of the other places out there are huge resource to filmmakers and they definitely were for us.

Michael: Well, you feel your collaborators have certainly helped to bring the future to reality. What do you now see in the near and distant future?

Mike Lawson: Well, I see it going on the direction that it is. It’s becoming, of course, more digital and that gatekeepers once were at these networks and studios. They, of course, fight on to it to keep their place but it’s slowly slipping away. If you think that when it comes to collaboration, there’s going to be more and more content and more and more avenues to watch it and it’s already happening the way everyone is watching on different devices, mobile and of course, on internet, on television and vice versa. We’re just going to see more of that.

What I don’t think is going to change too much or I hope not is the medium itself. I’m a huge fan of collaboration. I think that that’s an incredibly important thing, but I also think that having a specific vision, it was the one creator or a couple creators and of course listening to input is very important but what I hope that it doesn’t change is that personally, I’m not a big fan of interactive content. When I’m watching a story or reading a book, I want the writer or director to take me into certain place. I don’t think that’s going to change except for a couple of gimmicks here and there, but where will change and get better, I think. There’s more and more sites and keeps growing. We can find more people and we can monetize the content online.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has that hitRECord site which I believe just sold a first book from someone coming up with an idea of that site and they have a book deal, I believe, I just saw. I could be wrong. We’ll see more and more of that where the gatekeepers are going away and the gatekeepers are just you and me and everyone else who are have an internet account. That’s just going to continue to grow and get better. Unlike where the actual storytelling itself despite a couple of gimmicks and niches here and there, I hope that doesn’t change too much because I think there’s something to be said for classic storytelling. Pushing boundaries is one thing but that’s basically kind of what I feel about.

Michael: Mike, you’ve mentioned the phrase “gatekeepers” several times and is it that a wonderful thing that the process of those “gatekeepers” that their influence has changed.

Mike Lawson: Yes, it’s a great thing. It doesn’t cost as much to create something now that you used to. The gatekeepers are not as important they once were. We now have the ability to go out there and create what we want to create at a cheaper rate. That’s inspiring. You can also use that with the cost going down and more content out there, it’s harder to monetize, but I believe that the ones that really stand out—the films, short films, the web series, whatever it may be—the ones that are truly great will find a home and will make money and we’re going to make some money on their next one. I think that the good ones will eventually be found.

Michael: Now that we’ve had a chance to visit with you Mike and folks have gotten to know you, I’m sure they’re going to want to see your stuff. Where do we go find some of your work?

Mike Lawson: You can go to Idiotscreen.com or Hittingthefanshow.com and you can watch the panel shows and interviews that we’ve done and also the original series “Hitting the Fan” and then we’ve got a feature film called “The Deadbeat”. We’ll be shooting later this fall and there’ll be more information about that as well. Idiotscreen.com and Hittingthefanshow.com as well.

Michael: Excellent. And do you have a parting shot for all listeners?

Mike Lawson: No, I mean, other than I guess the typical, just set a due date and go out and do something, I think you’ll find it be the best thing. As Seth Goden says, “Ship it.” Just go out there and ship something out into the world and then keep and go out and ship something else and constantly we’ll better each time, but the important thing is to “ship it”.

Michael: Mike Lawson, thank you so much for taking the time to visit today.

Mike Lawson: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it.

Michael: Thanks for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidvid blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with another exciting Spidcast episode this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on collaborative filmmaking. For May’s show we feature two filmmakers and actors who are both actively producing original web series. These two individuals are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have Cooper and Brendan on the show.

Enjoy May’s Spidcast show below!

Cooper Harris is a talented actor and web series creator of the pilot RELAPSE (embedded below) which won the Top Audience Award at the recent Celebrate the Web competition. The RELAPSE web show has been rumored to be fully produced in the near future, which is exciting news to its already established fan base. Cooper discusses her show and Squatters, and how collaboration means everything when it comes to getting things accomplished.

Brendan Bradley is the creator and lead actor of break out hit, and award winning web series Squatters (episode 1 embedded below). Season 2 is in full development now, leaving viewers anxious for its release in the upcoming future. Brendan talks about appreciating team members, how he leveraged collaboration to create his entertaining show, and gives a sneak peak into Season 2 of Squatters.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Cooper or Brendan talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Brendan Bradley from New York City. He’s a writer, director, and creator. I bet you’ve seen some of his work and probably not known it. He has some interesting insights to share. And we’ll also visit with Cooper Harris. She’s an actress and producer of web content as well, including not one, not two, but three web series, plus some feature film work she tells us about as well.

First up is Brendan Bradley. Brendan, welcome to Spidcast.

Brendan: Hey, Michael. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be on the show. It really means a lot and it’s been great having “Squatters” actually on Spidvid. So for all the fans out there that has been watching the show, thank you so much for tuning in.

Michael: Tell us a bit about you and your story.

Brendan: I’m the creator of an online series called “Squatters”, which you can find on Spidvid and at Squatterstheseries.com. You can also see me in the recent “Video Game Reunion” on Comedy Central’s Atom.com, “Jeff and Robbie Fail History”, which is a “Subway” web series, and a new series called “The Game Room”.

Michael: And how did the collaboration benefit “Squatters”?

Brendan: Michael, film’s an incredibly collaborative medium because they’re just so many moving parts. There’s this great expression, “it takes a whole village to raise a child”, which I know is kind of cheesy but “Squatters” is my baby. But I couldn’t have begun the project without my incredible team that supported me every single step of the way.

I made “Squatters” because I wanted to have a calling card as an actor and a writer, but the further in the process I got, I realized there are editors like Scott Turner and costume designers like Jenny Green, and cinematographers like James Rhodimer, and composers like Morgan Pearse; all these people who also want to make a name for themselves in their own departments, in their own creativity, and so let them. Bringing a larger team and collaborating with them and letting everybody bring their vision to the project just helped everything rise up and raise the bar.

Especially in the web area, it is so tempting to just do everything to just do everything yourself and act like a one-man band, but I always try to surround myself with these many talented and intelligent people as I can and allow them to put their stamp on the project and then take credit for it. But seriously, I think that’s ultimately what helps “Squatters” stand out, is so many phenomenally talented people all bringing their vision and putting their stamp and having their own ownership over the project.

Michael: Great managers hire the right people and let them do their job. So tell us, Brendan, how did you attract the big names that you had in the first season?

Brendan: Over the years, I have actually been very blessed to work with some extremely talented actors who I have been lucky enough to stay friends with. There’s just nothing more satisfying than creating an opportunity to play with your friends or people that you respect. So most of the roles in “Squatters” were actually offered to people that I’d worked with before or I wanted to work with.

I met Erik Scott Smith who plays Alex Selkirk on a short film and we’ve become real life best friends, which really helped with that banter between Hank and Alex. Sandeep Parikh from “The Guild”, he actually hired me for my first commercial in Los Angeles and my first web series, the “Legend of Neil”. I really just returned the favor to him. But then there’s people like Christiann Castellanos, who plays Ramira or Matt Moy, who plays Hung, the delivery guy, who we actually held auditions in Los Angeles and New York and they had practically no credits on their resumes at the time and immediately after they shot “Squatters”, they really just started exploding, which makes me feel really good that I’m not the only one who noticed how talented they are.

To tall the actors out there, the advice I can take away with becoming involved especially in the web world, but even in the independent film world that I’ve experienced is, be reliable and fun to work with and just stay in touch and you will get hired again. But it’s all about cultivating those relationships.

Michael: An absolutely great lesson on networking as well. What did you learn from the first season that you’re applying to season two?

Brendan: God, we learned so much during the first season of “Squatters” that really just helped the show kind of evolve as we went. We shot off and on for over a year basically whenever I could save up enough money to continue shooting. And in that time, everything changed, with the web space changed, new media contract’s changed, the cameras that everybody was using changed. It’s such an exciting and fast-paced medium and I’ve really learned something new every single week.

The first thing I’m bringing to season two from the experience of season one is just to shoot everything all in one chunk with a set budget just to make it less stressful for my entire team—the cast, the crew and everybody. Just get everybody there for a month and do it right.

The other thing is people don’t necessarily find your show on the first day or the first episode. It’s something I’ve really learned that I’m trying to apply to future episodes is that the second season of “Squatters” will be a lot more self-contained and really push the boundaries of Alex squatting in that office and Hank really exploring New York City and really driving those two-story lines as far apart as we can.

Michael: What did you find was the best way to promote and get attention for the web series?

Brendan: I have to credit Felicia Day here who I worked on “Legend of Neil” and she said to tell a story that is true to you and make a show that you want to see and instead of trying to cater to what you think an audience wants. I personally love shows like “Psyche” and “Scrubs” and “Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, and “Squatters” is a hundred percent my sense of humor the way I like shows to look, the characters I invest in—all of it. I think that allows me to be totally honest with the audience. If you like what I like, you’re going to love “Squatters”. And if you don’t, no hard feelings. There’s a lot of other great shows out there.

We’ve had some support from sites that we uploaded to like Dailymotion and Blip and Stay Tuned TV. My entire PR strategy was allowing a hundred people in the cast and crew to just promote their work and feel proud of the final episodes because I really think that personal touch is what matters.

I get dozens of emails, Facebook invites, tweets, you name it, every single day and they’re all so vague. When a friend really reaches out to me and says, hey, I’m really proud of this, will you check it out? I will always take the time to watch and even comment or vote or whatever it is that can help that video and that creation. That’s been kind our key in promotion, as just being completely sincere about “we love the show”, “we’re proud of the show”, and we think the people who are like us and our friends and family will love it. It’s really helped us kind of find even a wider audience beyond our immediate circle.

Michael: Alright, Bradley, here’s the million-dollar question and of course, all pun intended, what are some tips to get the most out of a limited video project budget?

Brendan: I have to say be good to your people. I cannot stress it enough. I don’t think there’s a project in the world that couldn’t use more money or more time. The budget is always going to be limiting. If you treat your team well, they will work with you and they’ll bring their A-game every single time.

“Squatters” was burden. No one asked me to make that show. Everyday the people even showed up, paid or not paid, that was a favor to me and I really tried to honor that as much as possible by respecting what each department needed on the set and trying to give them a feeling of ownership over a piece of the project. I think that is ultimately the key to collaboration. You choose the people who bring out your best and want to bring their best to the work.

Michael: And can you give us a bit of a sneak peek into season two of “Squatters”?

Brendan: I would love to give you more than a sneak peek. The fun part about the internet is, like I said, it’s always evolving and we’re always kind of seeing what’s next. I’ve been involved with a lot of other projects over the past six months, but “Squatters” is still happening and still being worked on and I think at this point, all I can safe-fully say is we’re going to really try to keep going bigger, faster, and funnier. Really getting both Alex and Hank to fully explore those environments more like I was saying earlier. Let the love interest develop, get Alex really exploring the office and that environment, get Hank really exploring New York and a lot of other temporary housing solutions not just the comfortable pillow tops of a lot of ladies all over the city. And hey, drum roll please, maybe even resolve the bet. We’ll see how far we want to go with that.

The recent exposure like the Indie Intertube Awards and the Clicker Awards, we hoped that those will help us find financing or a sponsor that will really help us bring that next level of production to the show and to our fans. Fingers crossed everybody, for the Streamy Awards to hopefully get some love to my amazing team that just made the first season happen and really had supported me every step of the way.

In the meantime, I hope everyone will go check out episodes on Spidvid and Squatterstheseries.com. Make sure you let us know what you think and we’re also at @squattersseries on Twitter. Follow us and harass us and we just are so appreciative that people are out there watching. Thanks for having us on today.

Michael: You are so welcome and thank you, Brendan Bradley.

BREAK

Michael: You know how challenging it is to produce quality videos without the help from others who have the skills and talent you need. Well, Spidvid let’s you find the individuals you need for your video production project so you can create the internet’s next big viral hit. Visit Spidvid.com. Click the signup link and reserve you spot within our collaborative video production community today.

Next up is actress and web producer, Cooper Harris. Cooper, welcome to Spidcast.

Cooper Harris: Absolutely my pleasure. I’m excited to be here.

Michael: Tell us about how you broke into the web series world?

Cooper Harris: I broke into web series world kind of on a fluke. I and my producing partner had done numerous online commercials basically and we sold in to companies like Post-it Notes, Kimberly-Clark, Krazy Glue, and from there, since we’re both actresses, it kind of made sense then to transition into scripted content. That was right as the whole web series thing was really breaking two years ago. That’s kind of how it happened.

Michael: Cooper, how has collaboration help with the web series pilot?

Cooper Harris: I think collaboration is key in any project or any thing, but especially for web series, especially if you have a lower budget because to try to do everything yourself, it never turns out as good as what we’d hope. So I think bringing out other people whose creative vision fit yours is a really good idea. That way, you can all just fill in the chinks that inevitably will come from not having as much money as you’d want. “Squatters” was created by Brendan Bradley and I jumped on board and we produced the whole thing together from start to finish. I remember the very first reading, it was a really exciting thing to be kind of just put together and then from there, a year and a half later, we have the show.

Michael: Do you have some tips that you can share to get the most of out of a limited budget project?

Cooper Harris: Favors. That favor thing. I really do think also time management and planning, they say you can’t have the whole (league) trifecta production. You can have a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of quality, but if you’re missing one, you have to make up for in the other department. We do not have a lot of money for “Relapse” the kind that we just did (which won) “Celebrate the Web”. We also do not have a lot of money for “Squatters” either. So it was really crucial that we really planned it all out kind of even to the minute and also collaborated with people who had exceptional vision and equipment.

Michael: Now, you’ve mentioned “Squatters”. Tell us a bit about that.

Cooper Harris: Yes, “Squatters” is a web series created by Brendan Bradley and produced by myself and executive produced by Frank Kramer, who came on at the end and was generous enough to give us some finishing funds. Another example of, at least, monetary collaboration. It was really great to have him.

It’s a story about two roommates in New York who made a bet to live without paying rent for a year. It’s really fun. It’s a comedy. Dailymotion picked us up. We are to date, I believe, their number one original comedy, which is really exciting. We have everybody in there from Ryan Sypek from “Wild Fire” to Sandeep Parikh of “The Guild” and “Legend of Neil”, Tony Janning, and of course, I’m in it as Julie, the female lead, and I play an up and coming—actually, she’s a lawyer and she is kind of the girl who’s always getting away from Hank.

Michael: What did you find was the best way to promote and get viewer attention to a web series?

Cooper Harris: First of all, you want to have a really kick-ass show. That’s just kind of the basics so that when people do watch, they feel excited and not like you’re wasting their time. At least for “Relapse”, “The Celebrate the Web” pilot we did later, we were able to get a lot of kind of big YouTube personalities and people with large Twitter followings, definitely influencers, to watch the show like it and then tweet about it, which got up a huge number of votes which was how “The Celebrate Web” competition worked.

I think that was really successful for us. But again, it all hinders on having a really good and intriguing product that you’re showing people. Definitely Twitter. Facebook’s great. I actually send around good, old-fashioned email chain to my mother and all my tradition fans and North Carolina. Definitely drawing on the families, the old friends from back home who get excited to seeing what you’re up to out in California.

Then we had amazing success with “Squatters” in terms of—Tubefilter was very generous on their coverage and took a keen interest. They actually kind of broke the original sneak peek of “Squatters”. They were the first publication to do anything on it. We had a lot of feedbacks from that. Definitely targeting the online web media places. It’s really good .New Teevee, of course, Tubefilter, all of those, they’re really good.

Michael: You just mentioned something exceptionally important, that is that it all falls back in the writing and a good product.

Cooper Harris: Yes, definitely. It’s really important that when you’re pushing something, it’d be good. That sounds so basic but if you’re going to (inaudible 00:15:15) you want to give them something back. You want to reward them for the six minutes they’re spending by great writing or release fun, maybe unexpected casting choices, stuff like that. People they’ve seen in other places. Humor is always good or that tension. You got to give back.

Cooper Harris: Cooper, it’s been a bit of a challenge to pin you down for this interview. I mean that in a good way because you’ve been so very busy. Tell us where do we see you next?

Cooper Harris: I have so many different things going on. It’s a hard thing to juggle in my mind. I have a really exciting show coming up called “Mighty Woman” and that will touchdown, if you’d like to say, because she’s a superhero, in a couple of months. Of course, I also have “Relapse” coming up which is “The Celebrate the Web” pilot, which is very exciting. It sounds like it’s going to be a show. We can’t announce anything officially just yet, but that’s definitely in the works.

And a really fun, not on the web series field, but in traditional film, I have a romantic-comedy coming out called “Amy Alyson Fans”. It’s really fun because I think it’s one of the first films that really pays homage to the online phenomenon. It uses real YouTube video bloggers, like real YouTube stars in a film talking about this actress who is quickly rising to fame on the internet. It’s kind of a fun, blending, cross-platform project. I play the actress, Amy Alyson, so that should be really great. We’re screening at the (DCA) in two weeks.

Michael: Art imitating life there.

Cooper Harris: Exactly. It is kind of art imitating life.

Michael: And how about your web address? Where do we see you online?

Cooper Harris: Cooperharris.net.

Michael: Cooper Harris, thank you so much for being with us today.

Cooper Harris: Thank you so much and I really appreciate all that you guys are doing for the online video space.

Michael: Thank you for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidvid blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

Before we launched our public beta of Spidvid we had a podcast show called Spidcast, which many of you likely never knew about until just now. The show was mainly conversations with online video executives, and only aired for a short time. We have been wanting to bring it back for awhile now, but the time never quite seemed right until the last few months as we’ve been getting on many new media filmmaker’s radars through our community building efforts.

So we are back with Spidcast this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) this time with a collaborative filmmaking focus. For April’s show we feature two filmmakers who are both actively producing original web series. These two guys are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have Ralph and Richard on the show.

Ralph Fontaine is a Spidvid member who is producing the web series Causality which is set to be released later this year. Ralph discusses his series, how collaboration has benefited its production, and he shares how his team is building an audience BEFORE the series is released.

Richard Boehmcke has just released the pilot episode for his web series Twentease and is quickly figuring out this rapidly evolving digital media landscape. Richard talks about tapping into social media, collaborative production, and how tapping into your connection networks can be extremely beneficial to filmmaking projects.

Enjoy April’s Spidcast show below!

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Ralph or Richard talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, it feels super great to be back!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Richard Boehmcke from New York City. He’s a writer, director and creator and I bet you’ve seen some of his work and not known it. He has some interesting insights to share. We’ll also visit with Ralph Fontaine, creator and director, and he has a new web series called “Causality”.

I say we jump right in. Richard, welcome to Spidcast. Tell us a little bit about your story.

Richard: I’m a writer/director/creator of things. I live in New York City. I’ve been blogging for about three years and that’s kind of shoot me up into other things, short video, contests, playwriting and some stuff like that and kind of got into the social media world where I started into Facebook and got on Twitter and eventually, for me this is really the first super valuable things that come out of Twitter was coming across Spidvid. I saw the posting looking for anybody who wanted to talk a little bit about video collaboration and it’s something I’m passionate about and looking forward to sharing some thoughts on it today.

Michael: Well, since you brought up Spidvid, tell us a bit about your experiences with collaboration.

Richard: Sure. I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of great people around me that I work with. Some of the cool stuff that I’ve done recently are some short video contest that I did late last year which led into working on this short web series actually that I’m putting together right now. We finished the pilot in fall and submitted it to a contest. We submitted to the “Bing Decisions” contest. It’s a contest about decisions, so they wanted to see a short pilot about that. I needed help doing it.

I wanted to write/direct it but I needed people to get in it and help me put it together and I basically reached out to some of my trusted friends and said hey, do you know anybody who’s interested and basically was fortunate enough to get hooked up with some really great people and we put together this pilot and shot it and brewed it in a couple of weeks and shot in a day and edited it in about four weeks, which is unfortunately the worst part of the process. But put it together and it was a really excited process, now we’re actually probably going to be working with some of those people on some projects later in the fall that we’re putting together right now.

Michael: Excellent. We’d love to hear that. Share with us more specifically about some of those with whom you have collaborated?

Richard: When I got into this pilot, we knew that we needed a staff. We needed that in the past, there’d be a cameraman and actors, but this time, we needed a director of photography. We needed producers. We needed people to support the whole process and I didn’t have that in my immediate network, kind of my first connections.

I have some people who would help out with marketing of plays that I’ve written and directed in the past. I said hey do you anybody who likes doing this sort of thing and they knew what kind of I was all about and the things that I love to do. That was really a huge help in reaching out and I had a friend whose friends went to NYU Film School. They loved doing projects like this and so put me in touch with the director of photography and him and his buddy shot the actual pilot and through another friend, I was like I need some help putting this together. I can write and direct it, I was confident in that but reaching out to a venue, I didn’t necessarily know that I have that connection. Another friend who had seen some of my work said, I have a friend who’s looking to do some producing. And really what it came down to was being fortunate enough to have people who knew the kind of work that I was looking to do and knew people that were passionate about kind of breaking into this.

We kind of all helped each other out in this project and it was great because like I said, I didn’t have those connections and it’s so important to have people who know what they’re doing. I mean, you can kind of fake it in the beginning but it comes across real quick if you don’t know what you’re doing. It was super helpful to have that.

Michael: You are right there. You have found the creative collaborators but how about creating projects with limited or even no budgets?

Richard: It’s pretty easy. You just basically stop sleeping and just obsess compulsively over the project until it’s done. We had no budget for this project as we have limited budget for anything else. Basically, the budget is whatever spare cash I have in my bank account at that time.

For this project, it really came down to the conversation beforehand which kind of guided the project because like I said, we didn’t have any money, we didn’t have a bank roll or budget or anything to fund it. I knew I needed people who are willing to volunteer their services and who are going to be as passionate about it as I am.

It was interesting because one of the first people I was put in touch with about kind of doing this filming and being a director of photography for the project, we had the initial conversation and he was going to help us out. I was like, okay cool and I got off the phone with and I was just like you know what, he’s going to work for free and he’s got great equipment but I just didn’t get that good vibe of this is somebody that I really felt got what we were looking to do. I actually followed up and said, you know, I’m going to go to another direction and take my chances to see if I could find somebody else. Lucky enough, I was able to find somebody else willing to volunteer their services.

It really comes down to those initial conversations of how much are you willing to give and in the nicest way possible, not like in the sense of hey, you got to give me everything you have to give me. Everything, give me your soul, but more in the regards of hey, what can you offer and what do you have to contribute and can we make this together? It was volunteering of time and finding some venues that were looking to donate services as well.

I think that’s when you kind of have those best projects are when people come together who are all really interested in accomplishing a goal and their more passionate about seeing a completed project, seeing something thru the completion as opposed to just how we can make it the biggest possible. We left the project and one of the girls, who produced the show, actually said to us, “I’ve never had that much fun on a project before. I thought it was supposed to be stressful”. That was the nicest thing I heard at the end, which kind of validated our whole approach.

Michael: And without the fun, what’s the point, right? Now, talking about fun, collaboration has seem to somewhat lessened the backstabbing competition that is sometimes prevalent in this business.

Richard: Yes. We’ve realized kind of early on—and I say “we” and I speak in the royal “we” all the time—the most work I do is with my friend Andrea, who’s a childhood friend, we’ve been friends for 15 years and just kind of stumbled into working on this stuff together and she’s my editor, my producer, my everything in these projects. She’s like my primary collaboration in all of this. She is there for every step of the way.

One of the things we’ve seen kind of early on is that we just want to do something kind of unique and something cool and something that speaks to us and for us, it has come to the forefront of this project. We wanted to kind of create stuff that either we don’t hear or things that reflect our lives in the discussion that we’re having. You see other people doing stuff and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that sense of oh man, they’re two years younger than me and they’ve got this contract or they sold a movie or something like that.

I think it comes down to really as making something that speaks to what you’re looking to do and just being honest with creating the kind of work that’s honest about your voice and what you’re looking to create because there’s a great competition in it and having other people kind of in the same space doing stuff and innovating and that’s a really cool kind of competition but I’m not looking to blow anybody else out of the water. I want to do something that makes me happiest and I feel really helps the people that I’m working with all kind of reach our potentials and do the things that we really love to do.

It’s cool to work with somebody else. You want to believe that you can do it all yourself but all it takes it a couple of sleepless nights and some heart palpitations to make you realize that you can’t necessarily do that. If you could find those good people to work with, man, it changes the whole process. It makes it bigger that any one person.

Michael: Let’s do a one AV on this. Taking if from collaboration to direct competition, which you recently won a competition, right?

Richard: There were actually two contests that I won last year. Two video contests—one was the Fiji Water-Air Pacific “Two Tickets to Paradise Contest” and the other one was the Cold-Eeze “Worst Cold Ever Contest”. I won a vacation out of both of them, which the first thing I learned was winning video contest is a great way to finance your vacations. That’s a goal for this year.

The thing that I really learned was both of those projects, as soon as I read the summary or the bio of what the contest was about, I had the idea. It came to me right in that moment. I entered, I think, probably about a dozen video contests last year and some of them I kind of forced an idea into creation and try to make something happen when I didn’t necessarily have a whole bunch there. I realized from these contests that when I did have success in them that it really pays to go with what your gut says and attack those things that you know you can make a difference at. Because I can enter 25 video contests throughout the year but if I’m just kind of bringing to light some kind of 30% ideas, it’s not going to be a great success and it’s not going to validate me in the way that I want to create great art or work or whatever you want to call it.

What I learned from that really was that man, if I have a great idea about something and I feel that kind excitement in my chest, that’s something that I want to go for, yeah, I’m going to pursue it. Whereas, I don’t have to force myself to do something just to make something just to have it. I want to create a whole bunch of content. I want to create great content but I would rather have it stuffed that’s coming from inside me and things that are actually organic to my hopes and dreams. It’s a little over the top there but I think to the things that I want to do and really speaks to my goals and focusing on the things that I believe I can do something good in, I think that’s really what I’ve learned from that impulse (from that tremendously).

Michael: Well, let’s do go over the top a bit. What are your thoughts as you get that feeling in your chest, that feeling of anticipation about future projects and collaborations?

Richard: When you bring up that idea of anticipation, I’m anticipating about everything, about the next 10 years. That’s what keeps me up at night, just the exciting feeling of all those great stuff coming.

We’re working on two really big projects right now. One, we’re finishing writing the script for this web pilot which they’ll announce the winner in May so whether or not we win the contest or not, we’re going to go ahead and shoot the entire series and get it online and get it out there. It’s a series we call “Twentease”, kind of a play on words about the tease of being in your twenties. We’re writing that now.

We’ve got a play lined up for the fall. It’s a full length play. It’s called the “Lion’s Wager”. We’re shooting for October and we’re going to do some really cool stuff. We’re doing a two-month web series leading up to it.

We’re doing a whole bunch of multimedia stuff through Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook and a really unique approach trying to change the way people see live theatre and really kind of doing a grassroots, a term that’s thrown around a lot, but kind of a grassroots approach in that connecting people to the project very early on so that we’ve got this built-in audience so that there’s this kind of great lead up to this show that will go on for a week in the fall. We’re going to film it and put the whole thing online kind of like a high quality film. We’re working on those and putting all our resources towards both of those things.

Michael: Lots and lots of things in the pipeline. That’s what we love to hear. How do folks get in touch with you and see your work and perhaps collaborate with you, Richard?

Richard: We’re always looking for cool people to collaborate with and people who have ideas. I say “we” again, but Andrea and I, my friend who I kind of coerced into most of this are always looking for a new project. Everything is kind of found to the homepage. It’s Boehmcke.com and everything’s there. You can hit me up on Facebook, our Vimeo page, our YouTube channel and see all of the kind of work we’re doing and reach out to us that way. Of course, our blog as well which you can find out through Boehmcke.com.

One of the cool things is that we’ve been lucky enough to kind of find this podcast and this opportunity through Spidvid. I follow Spidvid on Twitter, so anybody else who wants to reach out on Twitter to Spidvid or to me, specifically, I think it’s a great kind of new tool for video collaborators because I think it kind of instantly puts it into your stream and instantly puts it into your kind of access point where it might not have been a couple of years ago or even a couple of months ago. It’s a great way to keep in touch.

Michael: Richard, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Richard: Thank you.

BREAK

Michael: Next up a visit with Ralph Fontaine. Ralph, jump right in here. Get the Spidcast family up to date on you.

Ralph: Sure. My name is Ralph Fontaine and I’m the director/producer of an upcoming web series called “Causality”. I started out awhile back as an actor and I’ve learned early on that although I really enjoy acting, there were some things that I missed about just having a little more control, a little more creative control of the process.

I started learning web directing and producing and learned that it’s one of the most exciting things in the world to see your vision come to life on a screen. I got more into that and kept up with the acting. I worked in Los Angeles for awhile as a reality TV producer and director and decided that reality TV was not for me. As everyone knows, there’s really no reality to it at all and there’s really not a lot of vision to it either.

I left that and I came up to Seattle and I connected with a lot of really good people and became sort of (inaudible 0:14:54) in the filmmaking world appear as much as I could. I’ve been learning more and just getting more involved and more involved in the world of directing and producing and as web series and web entertainment have developed, I really decided that I think that’s the future of entertainment since more people are more both creating shows for online distribution and watching them that way.

I think that there’s not reason to have to be in New York or Los Angeles anymore if you’re a creative and talented person. There are tons of them here in Seattle. I know there are others all over the country and I think that’s really the future. It doesn’t have to be segments in one of those two major hubs that have been before.

Michael: That’s great. There is a wealth of talent in those so-called flyover states that now have accessibility to producers such as yourself. Tell us about your latest production.

Ralph: Sure. “Causality” is a story of several time travelers who come from various times in the future for various reasons. One of our tag lines is “Every one has their own reasons for traveling to the past.” When they come to the past, they end up meeting together, much like settlers in the Old West that people who came from different places. In our story, they’re coming from different times but they meet one another, they support one another, they help each other survive in the sort of a foreign land. As they do that, they end up running into some people from the current time, which takes place in our current time around 2011, and someone else gets drawn into their story and into their environment and they have to work together to prevent some things from happening that really shouldn’t happen.

It’s really character-driven. It is a science-fiction and speculative fiction web series as we like to say. Because of the fact that we really believe that characters are what make good science-fiction good, although there will be some special effects and there will be some science-fiction scenes, we’re really focusing on the characters and the acting and the writing. We’re hoping that what that’s going to do is help us stand apart from some of the other shows that maybe have very high production values and very exciting special effects. In addition to having that stuff, we’re going to have as strong of acting and writing as we can possibly get.

I’m really excited about the cast that we have. We just shot a promo the other day that looked amazing. I’m really excited for it. The whole team is just really getting into the process and just developing the story as we go and we’re learning more about the characters and learning more about the situations and we’re hoping it’s going to be sustainable, something that we can continue for a couple of different seasons.

We’re talking what we call a transmedia approach to it and I don’t know how familiar people are with transmedia but what it means to us is that our primary means of telling the story will be the episodes. Each episode will be between probably five to ten minutes long and ultimately by the end of the first season, it’ll be about a feature film length, about 90-100 minutes or so. In addition to that, we will have character blogs, character video blogs that I call the Captain’s vlog, kind of like on “Star Trek” where there’ll be characters sitting in front of a webcam telling some aspect of the story that relates to the main story in the episodes but is a little bit separate and may give more back story for those that are interested.

We’re also going to have some written fiction that’s in the world of “Causality”, but again, related to but not exactly the same story that we’re telling in the episodes. For those that are interested, there’s going to be lots of different ways to go deeper, learn more about our characters, their situations, how they got there, why they do what they do in the episodes. It’s going to be up for the viewers. If they want to just watch the episodes, they’ll stand along and they’ll be hopefully exciting and keep them coming back for more. If they’re interested, there’s going to be more to watch and more to read.

Michael: That is a great added bonus. Love that. Now, if you would speak a bit about a collaboration has aided you specifically in the development of “Causality”.

Ralph: Collaboration is completely essential. I’ve worked on projects in the past as a producer and director. I’ve had some ideas that I was hoping would go somewhere and because of those times, I didn’t find the right people and the right situations, those ideas didn’t really go anywhere and part of the reason that “Causality” is actually getting some traction and going somewhere is because of the team that we’ve built. It’s a very strong team of passionate, creative, talented people who all bring their own—not just their own personal skills and talents—but also their own networks to it. Everyone who is part of the process has really brought more to it rather than just the talents. They brought new friends and new ideas and things that just bring it so much further.

I want to mention a couple of my partners in the process, Glynis Mitchell, is one of the writers and she’s also going to be one of the actresses and she’s the producer. She has really brought a lot to it with—I was mentioning earlier about the character-driven aspects of it. She’s a writer and an actress. She brings a very character-driven esthetic to it.

The other writer is Michael Montoure and he is by trade a horror and science-fiction writer. He brings the really strong sort of scientific and science fiction aspect to it. The two of them collaborating to write has really made it something more than it would have been alone.

We also have some Seattle talent coming in as director of the photography. We’ve had really good people because of some people we knew. We got a great location for our promo. Without the collaboration of people, we really wouldn’t have even gotten as far as we have and we’re still in the very early stages.

Where we really see the collaboration continuing is we have been active on Twitter, Facebook and blogging on our website to try to build some audience. We’ve really already started developing outside of our Seattle network of artists. We’ve started developing a strong collaboration with some of our fellow web series creators that we met on Twitter. I think that’s amazing because as I was saying earlier, I feel like the new world of entertainment that’s coming is coming on the web and it’s a little bit like our series. It’s the Old West and there’s no rules.

Everyone is doing their own way and there’s so much talent out there all over the country and we’re all trying for the same goal and yet the competition factor is not a negative thing. We’re all looking for more people to start watching and paying attention to entertainment online. For example, one of our friends is Michael Flores from Western X: The Series, he has built a great following for his series. Although they’re also kind of a speculative-fantasy-fiction kind of series, their competition is not negative with us because if he gets an audience and then shares that audience with and we build an audience and share it with him, now we both win because there’s more people watching online entertainment.

That online collaboration, the same thing with Spidvid, the fact that what you guys are doing and brining filmmakers together in wherever they are and whatever skills are, brining people together to create something is the only way we’re going to get this done since we’re not sticking to those hubs like New York and Los Angeles.

In those places, it’s easier to make the connections with someone else who’s in the industry because let’s face it, everyone in L.A. is in the industry so anywhere you go, you’re going to run in to someone who has a similar goal. The negative there is there’s all that competition where if I befriend someone in L.A. who’s also a director, we might be vying for the same work. In this case, we’re just vying for audience. We’re not taking each other’s jobs. We’re building audience together and we’re building awareness that is this relatively new form of entertainment. That’s really exciting to me and I don’t think that we’d be able to go very far with it if we didn’t have that collaboration. The more people that start watching this stuff online and start really enjoying the concept of sort of shorter episodic entertainment, the way web series tend to be, the more advertisers are going to take note. There’s going to actually become more money in this for the creators and to allow them to sustain their art the way that sometimes people can’t right now.

Michael: I love win-win aspect of this. Now, you mentioned about the blogging and podcasting to a not only in the marketing, but also the enjoyment of “Causality”, where do we find that?

Ralph: Our website is Watchcausality.com and what we have up there right now is still in the preliminary stages. We have a blog that we contribute to as often as possible. We tend to do at least three posts per week and the people that are mainly posting right now are myself, Glynis Mitchell and Michael Montoure, the creators and producers of the show. We do also have some of our cast members contributing blogs when they can. We’ve also began the process of talking to some of our web series creators to maybe add some more blog content about their shows as I was talking about with the cross-promotion.

Go to watchcausality.com, you’ll see our blog. We have a couple of promos up. They’re very simple, short promos to start to introduce our characters. We also have a Q&A session that we did at a local Seattle bar and restaurant here that was nice enough to host a reading of Michael Montoure’s, one of his fiction and horror stories and the crowd that was there were mostly friends and other people from the area who knew of his writing and they also knew of the series so they started asking us some questions of “Causality” and we shot that and sort of made a Q&A so the people would understand a little bit more about the series. Since we don’t have episodes up yet and it’s still kind of a ways off until you’re really going to get to see a full episode. We wanted to start getting people to understand what our world is, who are these characters that we’re going to hope you’re going to follow once the episodes are out and really building a community around the sights as the world of “Causality” that we’re creating.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about how to build an audience for a web series and one of the things I’ve learned is that what most people do is they go out, they create their show, they bring your team together, they create their show, they edit it and they put it up online and then they go why isn’t anybody watching?

Well, it’s not that they didn’t make a good product. A lot of times, they do. It’s just that it takes a very long time to build an audience and it takes a very long time to create a quality show. What I had learned from some of the stuff I’ve read is why not start early? Why not start during this process? It’s going to be about a year from when we started talking and planning “Causality” until we actually have a full season of episodes. Why not take that year and build awareness and build excitement for the episodes that are upcoming? That’s what we’re doing. We’re active one Twitter. We’re doing the blogging. We’re starting a podcast actually. We’ve already recorded a couple of episodes that’s called Podcast the Test. It’s not posted yet because we want to make sure we have several episodes in the can before we start making it available so that it can be a regular thing. Once a week or so, we’ll be able to release a new podcast and the podcast is going to be not specifically about “Causality” but it’s going to be about what we call sci-fi (inaudible 0:26:03), which is just about anything sci-fi. We’re going to talk a little bit about the world of “Causality” but we’re also going to talk about our influences, other shows that we like, other shows that maybe we don’t like. It’s kind of humorous and for anyone who’s into sci-fi, we’re hopefully they’re going to really enjoy listening to some of our opinions and maybe they’ll agree with me, maybe they won’t and they can write in and we can talk about that the next time.

We’ve got the podcast. We’ve got the blog. We’ve got the promos that are up there right now. We’re really just trying to engage people as much as we can and have them be there for us when the episodes are up.

Michael: We will all head over and check those out. Ralph, how about some take home points for those wanting to get involved in collaborative production?

Ralph: My advice to anyone who’s trying to create a web series is to have a plan. One of the things I said earlier is that we know a lot of people and we’ve heard about a lot of people that create something and they put a lot of time, energy, sweat and tears, all that stuff to creating something and then they’re frustrated with the fact that it didn’t go anywhere. Part of those is because we’re all artists. We want to create our art. That’s the ultimate goal of what we do but if you have a strong plan and that means sort of a production plan, a marketing plan, and a budget, these are all ways that you can really make your art even more worthwhile so that not just you and your close-knit family and friends are the ones enjoying it.

The more of a plan you have, the more people will see what you’re doing and the more sustainable that art will become. By marketing plan, I really mean think about how do you want to get the word out? Think about who is your audience. An artist don’t like to think about this stuff a lot of times, they think if I do something good, everyone will like it. Ultimately, that maybe true but to get people to know about it, you have to focus on the people who are going to be passionate about it. In our case, it’s science-fiction fans.

In other cases, you may have a niche. I have another friend in Los Angeles who created a web series called “WORKSHOP: The Series” and he was very smart about it. He created a series about a bunch of actors in L.A. that are taking a workshop to learn about acting and connect and try to get famous in L.A. They’re very character-driven and hey, everyone in L.A. can relate to these characters that they’ve created. He built a strong audience because he came up with something that people relate to and he knew what that was. He knew how to market it.

Whatever you’re creating, find out who your audience is and find out where they hangout. Go online, go on Twitter, go on Facebook, create a fan page and really try to have a plan that by this time, I want to have this many followers and this many likes on Facebook. Here’s what I’m going to do to get there. I’m going to release promos once a month. I’m going to some video content at least once a month. I’m going to do a blog post three times a week. Give people reasons to keep coming back to you and to tell their friends about what it is that you’re doing. If they do that, then your audience will branch beyond the initial niche people if it’s a good story and if it’s done well. That’s what we’re hoping for. That’s my advice. Just really use the network you have keep building that network online in places like Spidvid, places like other websites where you can post and repost articles and contribute, become part of the community.

Michael: Priceless advice, Ralph. Again, let folks know how they can get in touch with you and enjoy your work.

Ralph: Sure. The website for “Causality” is Watchcausality.com and my personal Twitter account is @rfontaine71. I also recommend that you follow @watchcausality on Twitter. You get more information about what’s upcoming for the show. If you like, you can follow a couple of the creators, @glynismitchell. She’s one of the creators and actresses of the show and writers. Then there’s @montoure. If you’re interested in horror-writing, you can check out his website at Bloodletters.com.

Michael: Ralph, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Ralph: Thanks a lot and for having me.

Michael: I’m Michael London. Thanks for listening to our Spidcast show, we appreciate your time and attention! You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidvid blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast!

I’ve long been fascinated with infographics from a visual, information, and content intake perspective. I figured it was time to create an infographic for Spidvid because our community has been relatively active and has accumulated some decent statistics over the past few months. So I published a tweet (@Spidvid on Twitter) asking for a talented designer to collaborate with us in creating one, and Joshua Murphy of element3media kindly reached out and designed the Spidvid infographic art that you see below.

This is just the beginning of our community’s successes, and vision to become the world’s largest open and collaborative filmmaking ecosystem ever built in the history of mankind. If you need some sort of help/advice on your short film or web series, or some seed funding to develop your content, then please reach out to us and let’s discuss how we can partner up!

Cheers to infographics, innovation within the online video space, and especially to our community for producing remarkable video entertainment for the world’s audience to enjoy and share.

Stay updated on everything Spidvid by getting our blog delivered to your email inbox, or read it in your favorite RSS reader. And if you don’t have a Spidvid profile yet, then create one now!

Have you ever heard the term “social graph” before? Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook made the term famous on May 24, 2007 at the Facebook f8 conference. The social graph has been described as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related.” Since then “_______ graph” has been getting thrown around the web for other websites, including Quora being called the “interest graph” and Hunch being called the “taste graph.”

I thought about what kind of “_______ graph” Spidvid is becoming many months ago, and came up with “video production graph” or “video project graph.” I suppose either term could mean “the global mapping of everyone’s videos, and the connections between the individuals for the original production projects.” I actually bought VideoProductionGraph.com and VideoProjectGraph.com because Jason Calacanis has me obsessed with buying new domains.

Facebook helped us get our connections online which ultimately led to the social graph, and my vision for Spidvid is to get every video creator’s projects online to become the video project graph or video production graph.

This is just something that came to me and I merely decided to throw it out there to see if it sticks. I don’t believe every huge Web company needs to become a “_______ graph” to be the dominant player in any given space, I think the terms are for reference and association more than anything else.

If you have something to say regarding the “_______ graph” phenomena the comments below are all yours!

A few short years ago an entrepreneur couldn’t build and scale a successful tech or media company without raising millions of dollars in venture capital funding. The same can be said about a video creator or filmmaker where they couldn’t create a hit show or film without the resources that a corporate studio provided. Fast forward to 2010 where we are seeing many startup companies and films succeeding without the support of big corporate money. I don’t know what you think about all this, but to me it’s truly refreshing to see new possibilities and opportunities, and to watch as the business and media industries rapidly change like never before. Look no further than Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as I believe that he’s the poster boy for the new generation of business visionaries, innovators, and leaders.

Our vision is to grow Spidvid into the web’s open video production ecosystem where individuals share and aggregate their talent and resources together so new video entertainment can be created. Studios are still needed for the most part to develop and promote feature films, but many top web series and short videos/films of the future will be the result of collaborative teams that crowdsource their funding, and leverage new marketing tools at their disposal for free.

I thought up this connection between studios and venture capitalists the other day when I was working out, and couldn’t resist writing a post about it. I’m both an optimist and evangelist when it comes to new media and business, and it’s very exciting because we’ve never seen the world transform so drastically so fast like we are today. This post is a bit random, but I hope it provided some good food for thought.

So you’ve went through the entire process to create an entertaining web series that runs for a few episodes, great! Now comes the fun and challenging part, promoting and marketing it effectively so it finds an engaged viewing audience.

We’ve been sponsoring, and working with a few video creators over the past few months and have learned a thing or two about getting attention for web series. Below are the top 5 places online to promote your web series, according to our many experiences.

1. Twitter – We’ve worked hard to build up our Twitter following, and it’s starting to pay off as our followers enjoy hearing about web series creators, their projects, and content. Plus viewers coming from Twitter are proving to be very engaged with videos, and encouraged to share the content with their friends and followers.

2. Facebook – Lots of people are clicking through to web series content via Facebook because they’re interested in watching entertainment, and seeing a picture to go along with a video link really helps. It also doesn’t hurt if there are a few “likes” and comments on the content to entice others to see what the buzz is all about.

3. TubeFilter – There are lots of passionate viewers into web series, and the top place to learn about new shows is TubeFilter. We’ve helped to get a couple web series featured on the site, and in turn it led to other entertainment bloggers picking up the story and writing about them too.

4.  YouTube – By putting teasers and trailers up on YouTube, you can drive web series interest from loads of potential future viewers. Just be sure that this short form content is highly entertaining, and nicely cut, otherwise most people won’t even be inspired to watch episode 1.

5. Web Series Network – The four above websites are fairly big ones that you likely know about, but have you heard about Web Series Network? WSN is a social network for web series creators and fans, so by connecting directly with these people you get a targeted group who wants to hear about new web series launches.

Hope you enjoyed these website recommendations for promoting your web series. And of course we always like helping out web series creators and producers with promotion, so reach out if you want some Spidvid love.

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It’s our mandate to allow Spidvid community members to use our platform wherever they prefer. For now we have Spidvid.com but are happy to announce that Android app planning is underway. Follow us on Twitter? You should because we originally broke this news a few days ago via a tweet.

The plan is to include all of the features that are now on the site, in the Android app, with the exception of uploading a team created video which may or may not be included. The app will be free to download and use, and our hope is to release it later next month in August or early September.

After the Droid app we will develop either an iPhone app next, or a Facebook app. If you have an app preference let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or email us.

If you have a device which runs the Android platform, we hope you download the soon to be released Spidvid app, and let us know how you like it and how we could improve it for you. The Spidvid mobile revolution is just around the corner.