What They Know Now

Looking back on the production of Mountain Man, I’m emboldened with a new sense of experience, accomplishment and satisfaction. “Boy, I sure did learn a ton!” I’d say to myself, after a long day of shooting in the valley, “I sure wish I knew all that stuff before…” Gee Golly! As the web video space becomes higher profile and more “Hollywood” it’s important to remind people of how wide open the space still is.

In an effort to keep this blog constructive and encouraging for the web community (and would-be contributors) I decided to ask a few online luminaries I know if they wouldn’t mind sharing some of their experience. Casey Mckinnon (of Galacticast, Kit Kast, and  A Comicbook Orange) Mary Feuer (of With the Angels and Lonely Girl 15) and Brian Lerner (of Duck ‘n Cover) took the time to talk shop and wax nostalgic on the trials of no-budget hit making.

Production:

No matter how professional, experienced or prepared you may feel, no-budget film making has a way of throwing you a curve ball.  “If you think it will take four hours give yourself six hours. EVERYTHING takes longer than you expect and I have yet to find a good solution to this” says Brian.

But unpredictability on set is what keeps things lively and inventive on the Duck ‘N Cover set, “Sometimes it can actually enhance whatever it is you are working on. Maybe a last minute idea is the best one of the day and you just have to put in the extra time to see it through.” Casey found it more straightforward to do the heavy lifting herself…

When you hire your friends, you never know what you‘re going to get. You could have a friend with a great personality, but then you tell him to say a line and he totally changes for the worse! When it comes to acting, I always give more than 100% and often play multiple roles… without going out and hiring professional actors, I know that I can always trust myself as an actor.  And since we do comedy, it adds to the comedy if I’m playing a man or an old lady.

Mary streamlined production to keep things lean and versatile…

Our set is very mellow, and our crew is almost non-existent. It’s me, the
DP, Neil, our editor, Albert, who is almost always on set when we shoot, and Jenni Powell, the Associate Producer…  We don’t use theatrical lighting – just whatever lights are available in the room… I have worked on
some very large productions, and it was important to me to keep this
small.  We shoot without permits of any kind, so small is necessary.
When we needed another apartment to shoot in, we’d knock on a
neighbor’s door and ask if we could come in. You can’t do that with a crowd.

Success:

We still don’t have an obvious metric for “success” in web video the way film does. A
million hits? A sponsor? A Streamy? Those are all strong indicators you’re doing something right, but for most of us, we have to define our own benchmarks.  Casey’s many shows all had a different path towards finding an audience…

Kitkast was an instant success since it came out right before the
release of the Video iPod.  The show became #1 on many iTunes Stores
around the world and was featured on Gawker sex blog Fleshbot, which
brought an instant audience…

Galacticast’s success was very different since we had to start from scratch.  In our second week we were featured on Rocketboom, which in 2006 was a big deal, then after 6 months of building our audience and making consistent content we won 5 Vloggies at the first online video awards show.  We were the second biggest winners that year after Alive in Bagdhad, and from then on had a steady stream of interest from mainstream press.

While Mary was up for two Streamy’s this year, her most significant acknowledgment came from the fans of episode 20…

The comments that episode generated – the dialogue about faith, the depth
of the analysis – made me really happy, and proved to me beyond a
shadow of a doubt that it’s never necessary to talk down to or baby
your audience. They are almost always smarter than you think

Advice:

As they say, hindsight is 20/20. For both Mary and Casey, a grueling production schedule almost burnt them out.

Casey:

I wish we knew to finish production on a bunch of episodes before posting
anything online. Living week-to-week really burnt us out.  I also wish
we had thought of “seasons” before we started… we ended up having to
invent seasons just to take a break!

Mary:

I wish someone had warned me to pace myself. To stop working and take a
walk around the block every few hours – not during shooting, but during
the period when the episodes were posting. To hang onto all my revenue
sources and give them enough attention to keep my bank account full
despite the fact that I was totally occupied with making this show. To
stop stressing about view numbers.  To maintain some detachment instead of becoming completely immersed and obsessed.

Of course, I doubt I would have listened to them.

Final Nuggets:

Mary:

I would caution anyone setting up a show to think carefully about the
timing of your episodes, the length of your series, the level of
interactivity you commit to. I was obsessed and thrilled to be doing the show, but there is no question it ate my life.

Brian:

If there isn’t food, no scratch that, if there isn’t good food and if its late people get mean.

Casey:

When your video is being featured on a high trafficked site like YouTube, don’t read the comments!

If you’ve got bits of your own advice, a suggestion for a creator you’d like me to speak with next, or some spam, feel free to drop a comment below.