Our series has a lot of bad points and good points but I think that if I had planned a lot better at the beginning and got everyone's input, then they would have gone a lot better. Two out of three of our episodes were not aired on the set deadlines and in the real media industry this would have not be acceptable and we would have lost the job. I think that a lot of us needed to take the project a lot more seriously so that we would try get everything done, in any way we thought possible. Instead of this, things were just done when we thought it would be able to, I think that we could have tried a lot harder to make deadlines.
Deadlines were mainly unmet because of not getting the shoot finished in enough time and I think this was all down to planning. Our female actress was only able to shoot on Thursdays and as we knew this from the beginning, we then should have found a different actress who could shoot on more days or just not have a female character. As for the rest of the cast, they were all members of our class and they could pretty much shoot when ever we were free. If we had researched our actors/actress to start of with, we would have been able to get a lot more shooting time and therefore met all deadlines efficiently.
I think that the idea of showing our work online was a really good idea and it lets the whole world see what we have created. I decided which social networking sites that we wanted to use and we needed to display all of our videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Our chosen social networking site was Facebook, as it is very popular and it would be really easy for us to get a lot of fans and a lot of views. This was another step for us, as normally we would just upload our videos to the diploma's YouTube site and not a lot of people outside of Long Road would get to see it. However, this way we could get a lot of feedback, get a lot of people interested and it was amazing that so many people agreed to be fans of it.
I think that this has also had a down side, as there a lot of others doing the same thing all over the internet, we weren't really being original and there wasn't really a way of us standing out from the crowd. I think that if we had a bigger budget so we could make out own website, that may have helped to widen our audience and popularity but it still isn't enough. The world we now live in today, allows anyone, anywhere to show any pieces of their work pretty much anywhere. This means that you have to create something out of the ordinary, something of great quality or you have to know the right people. It isn't as easy anymore to get into the industry with a simple piece of work that you have created.
At the beginning of the project we researched a few other webseries and analyzed them. I think that in terms of webseries, our storyline is quite original and I haven't yet found something similar. A lot of the webseries, such as 'The Guild' focus their audience to teens and young adults and use them within in their series. This where we are similar because we thought that this would be the easier audience to target because we know what they would be interested in. This is also made the comedy a lot easier, as we know what kinda of comedy is humorous to our age range. 'The Guild' seems to focus on a certain stereotype in our age group, which we would call 'computer nerds', as their series is about an online game.
I have decided to random select one of their episodes and try to compare it with one of our episodes. I think that this could help us to see some faults and see how we would have improved, if were to have made another episode.
I have decided to watch Season 3 - Episode 1:Expansion Time. Below is the episode. . .
This episode is slightly different to all of the others that I have seen of theirs. Most of their other episodes are mainly of each of the character on their computers, in their virtual world. However, in this episode, they are shown lining up outside a store waiting for it to open so that they can buy the latest version of their game. This was a good twist from the normal episodes and it made it a lot more interesting to them just being sat in front of the camera the whole time. We decide to use this idea for our first episode, in a smaller scale, as we used a flash back to one of the characters getting injured. Most people thought this was the best part of the first episode as it was the most entertaining part. I think that we could have got away with putting a flash back in each episode to make it more interesting.
Their website is the image similar to the one I had in my head for our series. I think that we would have benefited from making something similar to that. Produce t-shirts that others can buy, our videos down the side in a toolbar and the most recent video being displayed as the first thing you see and also links to all the sites that we use. Their website is a brilliant way to promote their series and I think that has really contributed to getting them popular.
The internet has helped a lot of people get heard by others and allowed them to be creative in the way they want to. It is has opened a lot of windows to everyone and a world of possibilities. There aren't many people in the world now who do not have access to a computer or the internet and this helped a lot of people.
When looking at creative practitioners, you hardly see any that have become popular by producing their work on the internet. Most of the practitioners that we inspire to be, have been in the industry a long time and worked their way in from the bottom and got to the top. Not many can say that they have done that by just getting big number of hits on YouTube. Yes, they may be popular to some parts of the world but there isn't much prophet that comes from it. Popularity on the internet is more for creative work that is made for a hobby or in spare time. The prophet on the internet is low now, as people can do pretty much anything and it isn't a bad thing if that is what you are looking for.
In our case, it was really useful, we have learnt a lot from the experience and it has shown us a lot we can improve in the future. We should use the internet to stream our work cause there is always someone out there who is interested and it will help us to improve our next piece of work. We can get feedback almost instantly, a large number of views in minutes and we can change our episodes according to this. We are able to change our next episode, in response to how our audience reacts to the previous episode. This method of showing our work, in some ways, is much great in getting popular responses than say a tv show that they would have made over a long period of time and then aired after.
As for our team work, we have learnt a lot there too and it will help us when we are in the industry, how we should work with people to get a job done efficiently. Knowing how to work in a group so that deadlines are met is very important and we know what is needed to make a production work. I think that it is a lot easier to get an online series working and we have only had a smaller taster of what it would actually be like.
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