PROJECT: RANT - semi finalists in the YouTube Nextup Contest (check it out)

Luis Caffesse

Luis Caffesse

Admin
Well, after a lot of talk, and a little work, we've finally launched our newest online brainchild -

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Project: Rant takes real anonymous online posts and recreates them in a variety of styles. We've been working on it for the past couple of months (after a lot of discussion) and finally feel we have enough episodes both in the can and lined up to shoot to feel comfortable putting it up for the world at large.

The first three episodes are up, and we'll be publishing another one later this week.
After that there will be at least one new episode published weekly. We're still working out the details of our schedule and workflow. Ideally we'll be able to keep up with a twice a week release schedule.

Where to watch Project Rant:
This is an evolving list - I'll update it as we extend our distribution

Facebook
Myspace
Youtube
Blip.tv

And you can keep up with the details via Twitter

And of course there is always the official show site: www.projectrant.com
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So check it out - and if you like it, feel free to subscribe to our feed, mailing list, become a fan on Facebook, or join one of the other social network pages listed below so you'll know when new episodes come out. Links will be updated as things move forward.

If you have any questions about the creation of the series itself, production, post, or about the distribution and marketing strategies - just ask away in this thread and we'll do the best to answer all of them.

I'll be updating this thread as the series continues.
So if there is anything anyone would like to know - just ask away.
Thanks for the support.

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Newest episode is up now -

"An Open Letter to my non-Vegan friendshttp://www.projectrant.com"


Meanwhile we have a shoot today for 3 more episodes... and we shot 2 earlier this week.
The most difficult thing about trying to produce a web series is making certain you can have enough content to meet demand, and resisting the urge to release everything at once.

We started shooting this series at the start of February, and had 12 episodes shot and edited before we put anything online. The idea at that point was to release one a week - though we've since decided we're aiming for a twice a week release schedule (new episodes posted every Tuesday and Thursday). Obviously that just cut our runway in half.

With that kind of frequency I'll probably only feel comfortable when we have around 16 episodes in reserve at any given time. That would give us a lead time of 2 months to keep up our production needs.

Just to give you an idea - we released only 3 episodes initially when the site went live.
In the first 24 hours we had people telling us we should post more content.
Granted - our episodes are about 2 minutes long on the average.

It's really tempting to want to just post all the episodes we have sitting here that are done -
on the other hand, I think the worst thing you can do with an online series is make your release schedule either too spaced out or erratic. Slow and steady definitely seems to win the race in these situations.

So on that note.....
new episode coming Tuesday.
:)
 
Awesome! This is really great!

PS~~> If you ever need topics, just let me know! There are plenty of things I rant about all the time.
 
Thanks guys -

And Hawk, If you really want to get a rant off your chest - we have a "what's your rant" section on the site for the show (www.projectrant.com) where people can submit rants anonymously. We've gotten quite a few already that will be rolling out in the next few weeks.

I'm not going to update this thread everytime we put up a new episode... seeing as we're releasing two a week right now (Tuesdays and Thursdays). But I'll have some BTS stuff to post soon - plus some episodes being done on different cameras (D90 hopefully soon). I've also been learning quite a bit about budget greenscreen work... and I've also learned that my living room can easily be converted into a 'studio' by moving the couch out of the way.
:)

Thanks for watching -
 
Looking forward to giving this a watch, Luis. I should get a chance by Sunday if I can get through all the scripts in the current ScriptFest IV Western. I'll be back then and let you know what I think...:beer:
 
The latest episode of Project: Rant seems to be getting a good response:

"My Life"

Fair warning to those of you at work - all the profanity has been bleeped out, but there are a lot of 'bleeps.'


I'd love to get some feedback from some of the people here on our encoding bitrates.
Are the videos on the site playing smoothly for you? We've played around with the encoding - so not all epsiodes are encoded at the same rate - if any of you could check out the playback quality/speed of a few episodes and let me know what you think - any feedback would be helpful.


On the tech side of things - I'm finding that the H264 encoding cleans up a lot of hte mess left from sloppy greenscreen work :) Not ideal, but it's good to note as I work my way through this tech hurdle. I've added a magenta gel to the backlight being used when we're shooting greenscreen (as a lot of people suggested) and it seems to be working wonders.

I've been using a 1/2 minus green, but I"m thinking of going with something stronger next time, as the green spill is still pretty evident most of the time. Of course my living room wasn't really meant to be a studio - so that is the main culprit.

You can see in this BTS still from a different episode that our space is kind of limited (especially when the actor is over 6 feet tall :) )- but it seems to be working:
3385340057_b418f9dcef.jpg


As soon as I have the time - and figure out a better and more permanent green screen setup,
I'll try to put together a lighting diagram is anyone is interested.

In the meantime - thanks for checking out the show.

:thumbsup:
 
Some quick updates on the show -
We're keeping up with our production schedule without too much trouble.
The experiences we gained from doing online series for other companies in the past few years has helped out quite a bit on that end.

I think the most important step in that regard was waiting until we had over 12 episodes finished before we even went live - that gave us a 6 week runway or so to produce further episodes. So far so good and we've been able to keep our reserve at about that level (I'm not 100% certain where we're at right now, but it's somewhere around 10 to 12 episodes in the can that have yet to go online).

Our latest episode seems to have been very well received - and we've started to get some much welcome and unsolicited support from a few people and sites. I just noticed a little while ago that Blip.tv is now featuring one of our episodes on their home page (featured in their "hot episodes" section). The content director at Blip also sent out a msg via Twitter promoting the show.

It's always nice to see people promote your work completely of their own volition.

We started making a bit more of a promotional push recently - now that we have 12 episodes online, so there is actually some meat to the site. This week we contacted several sites/blogs/etc about the show, and hopefully we'll have a few independent reviews going up in the near future (and hopefully they're positive).

I think we're going to expand our distirbution a bit in the coming weeks as well (the show is now available on iTunes, and a few other places will be added at some point).

All in all - it's going well.
And most importantly - we're having a great time working on it.


As always - if any of you have any ideas for the show, or rants of your own you'd like to submit - feel free to PM me here, or drop us a line via the form on the site at www.projectrant.com


Thanks!
 
Luis Caffesse said:
The latest episode of Project: Rant seems to be getting a good response:

"My Life"

Fair warning to those of you at work - all the profanity has been bleeped out, but there are a lot of 'bleeps.'


I'd love to get some feedback from some of the people here on our encoding bitrates.
Are the videos on the site playing smoothly for you? We've played around with the encoding - so not all epsiodes are encoded at the same rate - if any of you could check out the playback quality/speed of a few episodes and let me know what you think - any feedback would be helpful.


On the tech side of things - I'm finding that the H264 encoding cleans up a lot of hte mess left from sloppy greenscreen work :) Not ideal, but it's good to note as I work my way through this tech hurdle. I've added a magenta gel to the backlight being used when we're shooting greenscreen (as a lot of people suggested) and it seems to be working wonders.

I've been using a 1/2 minus green, but I"m thinking of going with something stronger next time, as the green spill is still pretty evident most of the time. Of course my living room wasn't really meant to be a studio - so that is the main culprit.

You can see in this BTS still from a different episode that our space is kind of limited (especially when the actor is over 6 feet tall :) )- but it seems to be working:
3385340057_b418f9dcef.jpg


As soon as I have the time - and figure out a better and more permanent green screen setup,
I'll try to put together a lighting diagram is anyone is interested.

In the meantime - thanks for checking out the show.

:thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Awesome news re Blip, etc.

And useful info about creating the cushion for a web series with stockpiled episodes before you go live.

:thumbsup:
 
I would like to be on a show. Make your peanut butter, shark meat and pinapple fruit cake and I'll trash your kitchen! :)

Please PM me if you need volanteers. :Drogar-Smoke(DBG)::beer:
 
Jack Daniel Stanley said:
And useful info about creating the cushion for a web series with stockpiled episodes before you go live.
Click to expand...

Funny that I mentioned that yesterday - today I can give you a perfect example of why that's so important...

My partner on the show was rushed to the emergency room late last night and wound up in surgery to have his appendix removed. Luckily he's fine - the surgery went well, and he should be back home tomorrow sometime. Whew....

But - this may put a hold on our shooting plans for the upcoming week.

Luckily - since we've left ourselves such a cushion of episodes, it shouldn't be a huge problem if we have to reschedule our shoots. I double checked this afternoon and we have 17 episodes in the can right now waiting to be finished in post. So that's just a bit over 2 months worth of content (releasing two episodes a week). So thankfully we should be able to put shooting off if we need to without putting ourselves under any real pressure.

Honestly, that's one of the hardest things about doing online work a lot of the time -
our temptation as creators is to make something and immediately want to put it in front of people. Of course, once you do that the audience generally says "cool - what else you got?"

And like anything that is online, an online series has to be continually updated or it will simply die. Like a blog that is never updated, people will just lose interest (for the most part).

Point is - life is always going to throw you curve balls ... and sometimes even a bum appendix... so make sure to leave yourself some decent runway if you want to try to build any momentum behind a series online.
 
Some quick updates:

We recently got a nice writeup on NewTeeVee.com

After a few snafus the show is now available for download from iTunes, and is being promoted by Apple in the iTunes store. Blip.tv has been featuring the show on their home page quite a bit over the past few weeks, listing us either under their 'hot episodes' or embeded on the home page. Both of these things have helped give a bump to our viewership.

We've also added some non-video content to the site - posting text rants multiple times a week.
We've been getting so many submissions through the site, but not all of them could possibly make decent episodes, so we decided to at least put them out there so others can read them.

Meanwhile, given the nature of the show I guess it was natural to expect a few episodes here and there to really speak to people (seeing as each episode sort of stands alone and deals with a totally different topic). We thought our 'Dear Honda Owners' episode was funny... but apparently it really struck a chord with various racing communities out there. It has since been embedded and linked to on numerous forums/blogs, etc - and the views on that episode alone shot through the roof. At this rate, that single episode is now on track to be nearly half of all our views for the entire series.

Which is both good... and slightly frustrating.
:)

More updates coming at some point.... when there is more to update on.
:thumbsup:
 
I am a firm believer in the right to rants (it is our constitutional right according to the first amendment). Great video work and I love the use of the green screen.
 
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