Youtube views to massive fundraising

It's a pretty great story. I'm a big fan of Freddie and Brandon's work. They have clearly put a great deal of time and energy into their craft. Their style of storytelling suits short format Youtube content so well that it will be very interesting to see what they can do with a longer format and a decent budget. This is exciting.
 
Yeah and what's cool is that they're using the 275K just to do a web series. They seem really intent on the web series format being the destination format for everything they do. Gotta love it.
 
Based on the description in their video they seemed to imply that each episode of the web series would be considerably longer than a typical Freddiew video and that while each would function on its own as an individual story the whole project would come together as a feature-length story as well. That's a neat concept. Here's hoping they hit it out of the park. :)
 
Yeah, I've seen people take on that format before (the folks over at webserials have been doing it since forever). I still think web series are such an interesting animal. I did some web stuff a few years back, and the biggest thing I fought against was the idea of "shorter is better". In the end, online, shorter is better.

I've seen some exceptions to this rule. Especially in animation and high-octane action stuff. But I think when people attempt to put a film in web series format with little to no adjustment for the medium, it ends up being a pretty stale piece overall. There's so much inbetween time in a film, all that stuff that gets you from beginning to middle to end, ya know? A web series is much more like a comic book. A comic book lasts ten minutes at max, and it really has to end on a cliff hanger during the course of a given storyline.

But god, even the Mortal Kombat series -- after a while I just completely forgot to keep watching it. It's so much more challenging to hold an audience's attention online. It's like each episode really has to be a major, overwhelming escape or you need to get known for having huge payoffs at the end of each episode.

I'm interested to see what these guys do. Really, IMO, The Guild and maybe some of Machinima and Reckless Tortuga's stuff are the only "series" I've been compelled to keep coming back to watch what happens next.

Like everything else, you really have to have a plan going in and you have to execute pretty near flawlessly to get the kind of following these successful youtubers have garnered.
 
About a year ago I saw the web page that Freddie put together about how to make a successful viral video and it was incredibly interesting. It was, as I recall, his final project in film school. An academic study of what makes viral videos a success with lots of relevant examples. Pretty fascinating stuff.

You're bang on about the "shorter is better" thing when it comes to web videos too. It's not a universal truth, but usually when you make web content longer it becomes less compelling. With that said, I think that Cardboard Warfare 2 is among the best videos I have ever seen on the internet and it is well over twenty minutes long.
 
I've also been following Freddie/Brandon for some time. There's some neat stuff there, but a little too game-related for my taste.

With the funds they have, they bought a RED Epic and Sony F3......it's a major step up from their Canon 5D. Hopefully, they'll put it all to good use.
 
Well and getting people like Eliza Dushku to do walk-on rolls for free (she just did one on The Guild as well -- because she's awesome) bodes well for them. Hopefully the money will give them some opprotunities to work with better on-screen talent.
 
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