How to beat Hollywood productions and make a name for yourself

How to beat Hollywood productions and make a name for yourself

  • Yes

    Votes: 12 41.4%

  • No

    Votes: 6 20.7%

  • Not sure yet

    Votes: 11 37.9%
  • Total voters
    29
  • Poll closed .
Well, I think that you all overreact. I write for OSNews.com and we have many advertisers. None of them went into asking us how to write our articles or what to write. I think that without trying, you won't know. A good advertiser will just want his 30 seconds of fame, no product placement or anything else.

As for web distribution, if something is good, it can be easily discovered on the net. As I said in my post, use the net. Use the boards, and yes, make some deals with the video services. It's not about "selling out" the indie philosophy at all. Indie people need to eat too.

Regarding "keeping it up" week after week, what another fellow said in this list is true: you could shoot it all at once if you have the right kind of money from a sponsor. Besides, if you do shoot week after week, and your show becomes popular, then more money can come in, helping the situation.
 
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Batutta said:
Of course the advertisers have a significant role in the creation of the show, because if they don't think the show will help sell their projects, it won't get funded. Their judgement isn't based on artistic criteria, it's based on numbers and focus groups and all sorts of crap. So networks play it safe and genrally only approve middle of the road material. Every now and then something good slips though the cracks, but it's usually by accident.
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When networks make crappy shows, it's because of their own decision-making to play it safe in order to please the audience and (hopefully) to attract high-profile companies to buy commercial spots. The advertisers are not sitting there in story meetings dictating how the show should be written, etc. They realize that the network is as much dependent on the show being successful as they are. In the world of internet TV, you are the network; you decide how safe you want to play it and you make the story decisions. Whether those decisions are any good will dictate the sponsors you will be able to find.

You also must take into account that there are larger parent companies at work in the network TV world. GE owns a majority of Universal and NBC, so it's a no-brainer that they will want input on major projects. Sometimes this is good, and sometimes it leads to lackluster shows.

All in all, this is a solid idea if the major hurdle of finding advertisers can be overcome. It's definitely not a new idea, and as Mark said there are reasons why this is not being done all the time; it's pretty hard to pull this all together. But I would love to see something like this come to life and succeed.
 
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I just checked them out. Nothing about a live action series though. Just a bunch of reality/news cr*p. That's boring IMO, I would never have the patience to spend more than 1 minute on that stuff -- even if some of the stuff they report on are actually important (e.g. there was some FOX News critic in there).
 
I definitely think this is a good idea. The question is: why would you be doing it? Are you looking to get your project seen or are you doing it for the money?

It would be very easy, technically, to produce ANYTHING and upload it to YouTube et. al. Heck, you could even put up your own website and stream it/offer for download!

There are a lot of people who started a career for themselves doing YouTube-esque stuff. Are they looking to get famous? Maybe. BUT, they're just uplpoading their stuff. If people like it, it's going to get watched. And I GUARANTEE, that if somebody in the biz sees your little flick has 10 million views on YouTube, you're going to get a phone call.

Right now, the same thing is going on over at MySpace within the indie music scene. If I had a band right now, never mind sending out demo tapes. I'd have a MySpace page for my band and put my music up.

I think in the indie spirit, your idea is a good one. I just don't think it need to be so "complicated" or "big". Just create a series, shoot it, and launch it wherever you can. If it's good, people will watch it! Let the "evil corporate bad guys" come to you.

Cheers!
 
>I just don't think it need to be so "complicated" or "big".

I guess that's where we disagree then. :D
I don't necessarily say that a production must be expensive, but in order to stand out, it must be good. Think of the top-3 winners of each of DVXUser competitions. I am talking about that kind of quality. And for that kind of quality, you need between $500 and $1000 per webisode.

I mean, "just shooting random stuff" can also be uploaded on YouTube, but this won't guarantee any success. It's gotta be reasonably good to get passed LonelyGirl15's popularity. :D
 
Eugenia Loli-Queru said:
>I just don't think it need to be so "complicated" or "big".

I guess that's where we disagree then. :D
I don't necessarily say that a production must be expensive, but in order to stand out, it must be good. Think of the top-3 winners of each of DVXUser competitions. I am talking about that kind of quality. And for that kind of quality, you need between $500 and $1000 per webisode.

I mean, "just shooting random stuff" can also be uploaded on YouTube, but this won't guarantee any success. It's gotta be reasonably good to get passed LonelyGirl15's popularity. :D
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I'm not talking about random stuff, mind you. Two things are: I don't agree that you can put a hard number, like $500-$1000/episode, on quality. Does money make it easier? Sure. I totally agree with that. But only on the technical side of things, mostly.

And then it just comes down to financing. In your detailed "how-to" post, which I thought was well-thought out and insightful :thumbsup:, you have certainly provided a way to finance a such a project. I'm just saying that there are other ways to go about it. If you've got a sure-fire winner, than sure, corporate sponsorship a la "real" television would be the way to go. But strictly from an indie standpoint, I feel that it doesn't have to be that involved.

If I needed five grand to produce a dozen 10 minute episodes for a web-based series, personally I would look for other ways to raise the money, as well as a low-cost, or even FREE, way to distribute it.
 
I have actually done this.

www.tvface.tv

Last year I wrote up a business plan and raised the money to do a web-series and partnered with a company that matchs advertisers up to content inventory.

And its funny you should mention prom queen -- I know the guy who made that show and what you need to realize at this point in time, is that while the interest and demand is there for quality content, the economics have not been carved in stone so the upfront money and the scale of pay and the system of corporate under-writing is not in place.

So they may have gotten ink and exposure based on the taste of eisner... but nobody made a dime on that show and in comparison to a network development deal --- pffff!!!

This is bad for business because the cashflow is questionable, however its great if your an enterprising person because you get to lay claim early in a hot market and possibly grandfather your way in.


I would say go for it, but try and produce your content all at once rather than stagger it -- and I am all for using this new media / new model to provide what other outlets can't! I mean -- feature films and tv have their rules and expectations but the internet can get crazy, and be more experimental.

Anyway, my 2 cents coming from being in the middle of this right now. Check out the website.

Again www.tvface.tv
 
Me and a few other guys put together Big Brain Pictures a few years back (I'm no longer with them), but before I left I started development on a web series titled, Purgatory, Arizona. www.purgatoryaz.com

They ended up shooting it as 13 5-8 minute webisodes (shot like a feature as Dean mentioned above), but even though they are web savy, the cost of bandwidth for decent quality playback was ridiculously high and it cost too much to host even the preview episode. They still had to fund the entire thing upfront and sponsor were only most interested after the traffic comes, so the cash outlay can get expensive.

Last I heard (the sites not working for me) they were going to cut the episodes into a feature and go that route.

The big problem with public distribution like YouTube and such is that they have the right to do with your stuff whatever they want. Not a good thing.

This idea will surely come around, but it really still needs to be treated like a business first and art second.
 
Scott Kirsner's CinemaTech blog is basically all about web based business models and is a must read, IMO. His book "The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers" is worth picking up too. Lots of good info on the promises and pitfalls of this new frontier.


-A
 
> The big problem with public distribution like YouTube and such is that they have the right to do with your stuff whatever they want

Not true. YouTube (the site itself that is) won't steal your property. Users will, but not the site. The only way to go around it would be to add DRM, but this will work against you because not only it wo't be compatible with the video sharing sites that we need to use in order to gain popularity, but the kind of people who watch Web TV despise DRM.

Obviously, when you take the web route, you must find a balance and offer a product that will create the smallest outcry, and subsequently the smallest amount of piracy while retaining retail viability.
 
Great thread. I think people will pay only for "persistent" worlds from here on out. So if you come up with some type of serial or soap opera, and use Youtube etc for bandwidth... you might have something that builds a user base and eventually attracts sponsors.

It would have to be somewhat bland/mainstream and it would have to continue forever -- like a soap opera. Recurring characters, etc. Just some thoughts.


http://www.aswarmofangels.com/

http://workbookproject.com/
 
Very interesting thread. I'm definitely going to have to ponder on this for a while.
Thanks for starting it!
 
>but would never watch any more of those

Agreed, I personally don't like sex as a reason to watch something either, but truth is, 15 year old guys would love more of that.

>Heres a web series that I thought looks cool

You somehow missed the FIRST sentence of the first post of this thread?

BTW, according to Revver's paying cut, you earn about $7 for 1000 views of your video, which is not bad. Usually, the videos deemed "successful" on sites like YouTube don't have more than 150,000 views. Which means that in order to make a GOOD buck with ad-sharing-revenue, you will need to be successful on a lot of different video sharing sites and have overall over 5 million views. This is not easy to achieve, this is why the sale of higher-res videos in addition to ad-revenued QVGA version should also be available.
 
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