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When 60Frames
Entertainment first announced its
entry into the Internet video medium, it was met with a fair share of
skepticism. “The problem is monetizing it,” Mark Litvack,
an intellectual-property attorney who has worked with various media
conglomerates, told CNET
in January. “(That’s the) difficulty with any project such
as this.” Part of the criticism had to do with the fact that,
despite $3.5 million in start-up capital from United Talent Agency and
Spot Runner, the little information released about the company’s
business model was limited to contracting with independent producers
and making the finished products available on the likes of YouTube and
Bebo, with revenue then generated from advertising sales. The concept
was hardly original, and has likewise been proven unsuccessful. Still,
initial 60Frames content included a new webseries from the producers
of Prom Queen and another from Brent Forrester, a consulting
producer on NBC’s The Office. Although the company might
end up failing financially, it did have the potential to offer some
solid entertainment options in the meantime.
While that
initial launch was far from groundbreaking, the announcement last week
that 60Frames had entered a partnership with comic book publisher Oni
Press has far more potential. On the
one hand, the news was pretty straightforward: the agreement called
for the two companies to create original online video based on Oni Press
properties. The twist, however, is that the finished product will not
only consist of various webseries made available on the Internet by
60Frames, but Oni will publish corresponding traditional comics for
the shows as well. “We are excited to co-develop a new hybrid
of storytelling,” 60Frames CEO Brent Weinstein said,
“one that reaches fans of Oni’s unique style as well as
a new generation of consumers across the internet and traditional media
platforms.” Initial projects include a sci-fi series from the
executive producers of the new CW 90210 spin-off, as well as
Men With Guns: Assassin, created by OZ/Homicide
producer Tom Fontana. For what initially began as a “ho-hum”
venture, 60Frames has certainly demonstrated an ability to adapt and
evolve.
—Anthony
Letizia (July 1, 2008)
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Although
there is still isn’t an official “release date” for
Dr.
Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the three
episode webseries that Joss Whedon co-wrote with his brothers, a trailer
for the project is now available on various Internet sites, including
fansite doctorhorrible.net.
The one minute, three second teaser begins with an eerie-sounding narration
by Whedon—“For every day, there is a night. For every world,
there is an underworld. And for every hero, there’s… this
guy”—before launching into a sequence of clips featuring
Neil Patrick Harris (Dr. Horrible), Nathan Fillion (Captain Hammer)
and Felicia Day (Penny). Word on when the approximately 30-minute musical
about “a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him
up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk
to” will be online should be coming shortly, as the actors and
writers are already scheduled to appear at this year’s San Diego
Comic-Con on July 25th.
While other
Hollywood writers will be releasing their own web projects on July 4th
via StrikeTV.com,
it is Whedon’s webseries that may have the biggest impact on the
budding medium. First, the television creator already has a significant
online fanbase because of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel
and Firefly, and second, he seems intent on fully exploring
the web as a medium that offers both creative freedom and monetary gain.
“At first I was just really working the problem because the strike
was a very serious issue and one that I don’t feel we resolved
adequately,” Whedon told the Los
Angeles Times last month. “I
reached out to the people in Silicon Valley, like everyone else, and
said, if you will finance something, I will put it together. I will
shoot it tomorrow. I will make something so low-budget that will look
so good. That deal still isn’t made. It took so long. But I wanted
to get out there and create jobs and tell stories, and really explaining
to people that there really is another way.” He then decided to
shorten his expectations and went with Dr. Horrible as a test-project
instead. After its initial online release, plans for the webseries include
availability on iTunes and a DVD (with lots of extras).
Although
exactly what impact Whedon and Dr. Horrible will have on the
webseries genre is yet to be known, it has already changed one person’s
opinion on the medium. “I saw a rough cut of this thing and it’s
frickin’ great,” Fillion told TruckerMovie.net.
“It’s changed my opinion as to how things are going to work
in the future as far as taking the producers out of the equation and
the Internet is now your distribution. I think everything’s going
to change and I think this is certainly my first experience in the direction
things are going.” Hopefully millions of viewers will soon feel
the same way.
—Anthony
Letizia (June 26, 2008)
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FX’s
Rescue Me was a major casualty in the recent strike by the
Writer Guild of America: a summer regular for four years now, the work-stoppage
prevented the series from filming this year and pushed season five into
Spring 2009. To hold fans over until then, producers Denis Leary and
Peter Tolan have created a series of ten minisodes, five minutes each
and airing Tuesdays at 10 pm on FX beginning June 24th. While having
no connection to next year’s episodes, the minisodes are more
comedic in tone in order to appease fans who were unhappy with a sub-par
season four. “One involves a flashback that explains something
that goes all the way back to the beginning of the series, and another
is a dream sequence tied into Tommy’s psyche,” Leary told
USA
Today. “It starts out as a really
sexy dream and ends up as a nightmare.” For viewers unwilling
to tune in to FX simply to watch five minutes worth of footage, the
minisodes will also be made available on YouTube, Hulu and Crackle.
While it
may seem odd to air what basically amounts to a series of webisodes
on an actual television, FX is not alone in the experiment. TNT has
contracted Dean Devlin, the man behind Independence Day and
the Godzilla remake, to produce what they are referring to
as a “microseries” about an FBI project to solve murders
by implanting the memories of victims into the living. “What we’re
doing is drastically segmenting a TV movie so that instead of a three-act
structure, we’ve created a 20-act structure,” Devlin told
Variety
about the plans to edit the eighty-minute Blank Slate, as the
series is called, into twenty four-minutes mini(micro)sodes. TNT will
air episodes of the “microseries” on two consecutive Tuesdays
and Wednesdays beginning September 8th during blocks of five back-to-back
episodes of Law & Order. (Just like the Rescue Me
minisodes, Blank Slate will also be available online at TNT.tv.)
Devlin plans on recouping any losses for the project by editing the
20 minis back together into a Made-for-TV movie to sell overseas, echoing
Sony’s recently announced Web-to-DVD business model.
Webseries
and microseries, webisodes and minisodes, Made-for-TV and Web-to-DVD
movies: all this experimentation with new forms of media is starting
to become complicated. Hopefully it leads to something entertaining
as well.
—Anthony
Letizia (June 24, 2008)
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Emmy nominations
are scheduled to be announced on Thursday, July 17th, and various television
critics throughout the country have already posted their picks for an
“Emmy Dream Ballot.” Michael Ausiello got his choices
in before leaving TV Guide for Entertainment Weekly
last month, for example, and is picking 30 Rock, How I
Met Your Mother, The New Adventures of Old Christine,
Pushing Daisies and Ugly Betty as best in comedy with
Big Love, Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad
Men and The Wire the best in drama. His actors/actresses
list are heavily-weighted for most of those shows as well, with Big
Love receiving four “nominations,” while Friday
Night Lights, Pushing Daisies and Ugly Betty
get three each.
Robert
Bianco of USA
Today, meanwhile, pretty much echoes
Ausiello’s choices for Best Comedy, with the exception of replacing
How I Met You Mother with The Big Bang Theory. In
terms of Best Drama, there is a definite disagreement—Bianco goes
along with Lost, Mad Men and The Wire, but
his two remaining picks are Grey’s Anatomy and Rescue
Me. Big Love is a total shut-out for Bianco, while Pushing
Daisies leads among actors/actresses with five “nominees,”
followed by Grey’s Anatomy with four and Lost
with three. The
Hollywood Reporter recently pooled
a number of other critics, with Lost and Mad Men getting
the most mentions (30 Rock and The Office also received
their fair share of comedic attention).
The agreement
and disagreement between two of the biggest television journalists in
the country (Ausiello consulted another big-name—TV Guide
reviewer Matt Roush—for his list) reflects the general thoughts
on television choices these day; basically, that quality comedies are
rarer than dramas, and with no Sopranos-like front-runner,
the race is pretty much wide-open in the drama category. And as The
Hollywood Report also points out, “the WGA strike sidelined
many series and gave some lesser-watched programming a wider audience,”
all which means July 17th could make for some unexpected announcements.
Can’t wait.
—Anthony
Letizia (June 23, 2008)
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Firefly,
the Joss Whedon-created FOX television show cancelled in 2002 after
only eleven episodes, is a bit of an anomaly. Part sci-fi, part-western,
the series followed a rag-tag group of “space-scavengers”
trying to eek out an existence on the far reaches of the galaxy. With
low-ratings, a Friday night death-slot and trigger-happy FOX as its
network, it had little hope of surviving. But this was Whedon, the man
behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who has one of the strongest
fan presences on the Internet. While the ensuing “Save Firefly”
campaign failed, that online community was ignited nonetheless, eventually
paving the way for a big-screen adaptation in 2005, Serenity.
While not the box-office blockbuster many hoped, Browncoats—as
Firefly/Serenity fans are know—remain just as
strong and passionate as they were in 2002, and will gather in over
40 cities worldwide this weekend for the annual Can't
Stop the Serenity charity event.
“Late
in 2005, a group of Browncoats were leaving one of the last big screen
showings of Serenity,” Anna Snyder recently told the
Portland
Mercury of how the fundraiser began.
“And (Portland Browncoat and blogger) the One True b!X was thinking,
‘Hey, maybe there’s a way we could get the movie on the
big screen again, just for fun.’ And that morphed into, ‘Well,
if we could do it to raise some money, that would be great.’ Which
then became, ‘Hey, let’s organize a charity screening and
let’s see if we can get other cities involved.’”
“Can’t
Stop the Serenity” raised $65,000 for Equality
Now—an international woman’s
right organization that Whedon is a strong supporter of—in 2006
and an additional $106,000 in 2007. The Pennsylvania
Browncoats have been a part of the
effort from the very beginning, and this year’s outing—which
features a screening of Serenity—takes place on Saturday,
June 21st, at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall (doors
open at 7pm). alterna-tv.com is proud to be among the sponsors.
—Anthony
Letizia (June 20, 2008)
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PREVIOUS
BLOG ENTRIES:
StrikeTV
to launch on July 4th The online network of original
video content first proposed during the strike by the Writers Guild
of America is set to launch on Independence Day. (June 19, 2008).
Next
New Networks and the 'chicken-or-the-egg' conundrum
Is NNN looking for a new CEO because building a web community is the
next logical step or because the company is not viable without one?
(June 18, 2008).
Sony's
new web-to-DVD business model Sony plans on launching
new online webseries next year and then releasing them as DVD movies
(June 17, 2008).
CBS
commits to web content CBS announces a partnership
with social entertainment company EQAL to produce original online content
(May 15, 2008).
Is
Pittsburgh the next Hollywood? Carson Daly to produce
webcast hosted by Pittsburgh’s iJustine (May 13, 2008).
ALTERNA-TV.COM:
THE BLOG ARCHIVES Contains
a complete listing of all blog entries.
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