Seth Weintraub wrote a great piece today on 9 to 5 Mac about the newly redesigned AppleTV’s AirPlay functionality that will allow users to stream video, music, and photos from their iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch directly to their TVs. As Apple describes it:
Monday, October 4th at 11PM EST, the long awaited web series The Resistance will make its debut in a most unlikely place, cable television.
Syfy will air the series as a one hour special in place of its Ani-Monday animation block. This might be the first time a series created originally for the web will first premiere on TV.
The cable network will package episodes of The Resistance web series and air them back to back, along with approximately 9 minutes of behind the scenes footage in order to reach the 44 minute television runtime. Following the TV broadcast, the series will revert to online video form. Viewers will be able to watch The Resistance in two parts on Xbox Live, Hulu and other distribution channels before it eventually lands on YouTube in four- to five-minute installments. If the series performs well, Starz will greenlight the program as a TV show or web series, and possibly even develop the property into a feature film.
The Resistance director, Adrian Picardi explained the genesis of the project and the partnership with Starz over e-mail:
The Resistance first got started after I had met up with Scott Bayless and Eric Ro back in late 2007. We decided to partner up and form a company called Northern Five Entertainment. Scott Bayless really helped giving us the tools and resources we needed to create The Resistance trailers and from those trailers we were approached by Ghost House Pictures and Starz Media.
When the first Resistance trailer debuted on YouTube in December, 2007, it promised to be a stylistic, action-packed show. Subsequent trailers only heightened the anticipation; however, as the months rolled on, the likelihood that the series would ever air seemed less certain. In 2008, Starz picked up the series and had it re-shot with better equipment and a budget rumored to be in the low six figures. But that had been the last word we heard from the producers about the series’ fate, until now.
The show’s storyline follows Syrus Primoris (Adrian Zaw), a chemist, who in exchange for absolute power provides the only known suppressant for a deadly plague. Opposing the tyrannical rule of the would-be world savior is Lana (Katrina Law), leader of the Aurordecan Resistance Movement.
While The Resistance is hardly the first web series to make the leap to television, it might be the first to do so by skipping its online debut entirely. Starz Media’s newfangled distribution and marketing strategy for the show further blurs the lines between online and traditional content. It also begs the question, “If it first debuts on television, can it still be called a web series?”
ITV Studios announced that on November 1st, they will be launching Corrie Nation, a social networking game based on ITV1’s incredibly long-running soap opera Coronation Street. Initially, it will only be available on ITV.com and Facebook, but other platforms are expected to follow.
Created to be a “parallel world” to the TV show, players will build and manage the famous neighborhood of Weatherfield and its populace with gameplay that sounds like a cross between The Sims and Sim City… with a dash of Days of Our Lives thrown in. Your “understanding of what builds drama” will help you get the highest score.
Bands embracing online video is nothing new. Since OK Go’s treadmill ballet went into seven-figure view counts, any group of individuals trying to make it in music have understood the importance, power, and prevalence of the medium. But what is new are the different ways bands embrace online video. Take, for instance, Guster.
It’s been almost a decade since I’ve listened to Barrel of a Gun, but the band from Boston that built its name on hand percussion recently showed up on my radar. To help promote the upcoming October 5 release of their sixth studio album, Easy to Wonderful, Guster is premiering a dozen music videos, one for each track. The catch? All were created by friends, fans, or artists the band loves, and “everyone was given absolute free reign to create whatever they felt.”
Currently, music videos for two of the 12 songs are live. Chad Carlberg’s stop-motion rendition of Guster as a high-school band in a performance art piece singing Do You Love Me, and One Degree Off’s cardboard cutout and shadow puppet theatre interpretation of Stay With Me Jesus. Both are great. Sure, they’re no Telephone, but if Guster every got airtime on MTV2 and you caught one of these music videos, you wouldn’t question why they were there. They’re professional and look pretty from a production standpoint, engaging from a community point of view, and with a $0 price tag, incredibly cost effective according to Guster’s balance sheet.
If you’re a fan of Guster or just like making things the filmmaking community on Vimeo would love, you’re in luck. Turns out the band fell one director short and needs a video for Bad Bad World. Instructions on how to make Guster your muse, and a music video for their song your masterpiece, can be viewed on the Easy Wonderful website. Check out all the other music videos for the album there, too. Happy listening, filming, and viewing.
CBS weekly television news program 60 Minutes announced plans to launch a weekly web show “that begins where the television broadcast ends”—it’s called 60 Minutes Overtime, and is scheduled to launch Sunday, September 26, 2010, the same evening as the 43rd season premiere of 60 Minutes.
Barbie gets all the attention—the outfits, the special editions, the SNL parody sketches—but what about her forlorn beau Ken?
Mattel has been looking to reinvent Ken with an ever so clever product placement as a central character in Toy Story 3D this summer. Now it looks like they are turning to the world of web series to revamp their plastic bachelor.
We came across this site for a new reality web series Genuine Ken: The Search for the Great American Boyfriend that seems to have just gone up this week. It looks like a casting call for now to find the real-life eligible bachelors who will star in the 8-episode series this fall. Is it just me or would Bannen Way star Mark Gantt be a shoo-in for this?
Issue-based shows always have it tough. When revolving around one subject repeatedly, how do you expect to keep an audience interested in the interim between episodes?
World Full of Nothing as a web series pretty much did everything it could to make their lives more difficult. First, this was a film, originally, which won a few film festival awards for director Jesse Pomeroy. Now it’s been re-edited and broken up into episodes to try and have a life on the web. Then, the issue this show revolves completely around is that of teenage suicide, specifically creating a secenario in which a teenager’s suicide broadcast on the web sparked a trail of copycats.
Supposedly, the trailer seems to suggest, we will be having an FBI profiler and a web predator both racing to find another one daring people to find some reason for her to continue living, with talking heads interspersed throughout utilizing this wave of suicides as fodder for their sound bytes.
Cecil B. DeMille is an American film legend. He directed classic movies of both silent and sound, including Cleopatra, The Ten Commandments, and The Greatest Show on Earth. The Golden Globes has an award for oustanding lifetime achievement in the world of entertainment named after him. Last year, Robert DeNiro presented it to Martin Scorsese.
DeNiro lavished praise on the American director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. He concluded his commendation with, “I can’t help but think if times were a little different, how proud Cecil B. DemMille would’ve been to be honored with the Martin Scorsese Award.”
If the Golden Globes took place in North Korea, however, both acclaimed directors would be receiving the Kim Jong-il Award.
Turns out, the dictator of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a huge cinephile. In addition to owning a video library over 20,000 titles long (he’s particularly fond of slashers, Godzilla movies, and anything starring Elizabeth Taylor), Kim Jong-il wrote the definitive book On the Art of Cinema (in which he refers to himself as “Genius of the Cinema” and credits the Genius of the Cinema with conceiving the multiple-camera setup), has over 11,890 film credits, built a film studio in Pyongyang, and kidnapped South Korean stars of the silver screen to act in early North Korean films. And thanks to Generalissimo’s state-sanctioned cult of personality, he’s revered by his people as the greatest director, producer, financier, costume maker, set designer, screenwriter, cameraman, and sound engineer that ever lived.
I just learned all this in the past 30 minutes after becoming slowly gripped by and then severely engrossed in The Vice Guide to Film: North Korea. Created and distributed by VBS.TV, the three-part series highlights Vice co-founder, Shane Smith’s state-mandated tour of North Korean monuments with a focus on the facade of a film industry in Pyongyang. It’s a helluva captivating look into what life would be like if Hollywood was headquartered in Oceania.
It’s also a reminder of the great pieces of journalism coming out of VBS. Smith and company started the broadband video network after growing tired of talking about “cocaine, whores, and denim” on the pages of Vice Magazine. They went on a mission to do “the real deal…not just the usual bullshit.”
And bullshit this ain’t. Give VBS.TV a few more years of producing content like The Vice Guide to Film and viewers won’t even realize it’s an offshoot of a popular hipster rag. Interested parties will discover Dos and Don’ts through the magazine’s affiliation with the online video network, not the other way around.
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