What if all of this #webseries brouhaha was about creative freedom?
I know, but still, just for a minute, plug in your suspension of disbelief card and think: What if making a webseries was only about the freedom to create something within the constraints of a budget?
That doesn’t sound as much fun or as exciting as brainstorming how to integrate a brand, or designing a story for a demographic, chasing sponsors, agents, brand managers, ad agencies, trends, awards, cobbling the perfect pitch, attending seminars, reading trades and web sites - YES, I’m being sarcastic.
No one congratulates the unpublished novelist, the unproduced screenwriter, or the director with a feature that won at the film festivals and never got distribution. I mean other than friends and family, of course.
“Best-selling,” and “number one at the box office,” are terms that bring value to a creative product.
I’m not against commerce, I’m a huge fan of it. I buy stuff all the time!
I’m against waiting for a yes.
I’m against commerce taking the wheel before anything in storytelling and being thought of as the most important, core value.
I’m against having all the great things about a project hammered down to fit the mold of a sponsor or shelving an idea because it’s sponsor- or brand-integration proof.
I didn’t wake up this morning thinking of how I could make a commercial. I woke up this morning thinking about the three new characters I’m introducing in season two.
There’s been articles written about web series recently in The New York Times and Fast Company magazine and guess what they’re about: brands, branding, money, ad revenue, corporations and a lot of old model emulation. Apparently, it’s a very exciting time.
Writing about something that doesn’t make money or won’t in the future is writing about failure. The “number one movie at the box office” mentality infiltrates all of entertainment.
I was recently asked if the idea of making Vampire Mob was to do a season and then sell it as a television show.
No, that wasn’t the plan, isn’t the plan and will never be the plan.
The plan was to bask in the freedom and fun of making this show and have an audience enjoy it. That’s a plan I think I can make happen. I can’t make a corporation buy my show. I can try, sure, but I’d rather spend that time making the show.
Yes, I spent my own money making a tiny production on a microbudget using non-HD cameras and donated or stolen locations and donated talent. I also didn’t write anything I couldn’t afford to shoot.
I don’t have the money to shoot the second season right now and I will need to find it, work for it, raise it and sell shit to get it.
When you look at television shows, from the perspective of budget and audience size, including network, paid cable, basic cable and syndicated shows, each has a different sized audience and budget.
Maybe the web series space could also be seen as part of that hierarchy, but more as the black box theatre among networks, like the ones they have all over the country, that somehow stay afloat. But instead of a 99-seat theatre, there’s all the seating and showtimes you could possibly desire and the small production that audiences get to see shines a little more because the intention wasn’t corporate sponsorship, it was creative freedom.
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