by Marc Hustvedt on December 1st, 2009
omedy is still the king genre of web video. And fittingly there are dozens of sites vying to be the web’s go-to hubs for comedy—Funny or Die, Atom.com, My Damn Channel, Comedy.com—but that doesn’t mean the broader web series hubs aren’t up for some jocularity of their own. Sony’s Crackle.com has had its share of original comedies over the past year, most recently bowing Jon Heder led Woke Up Dead, not to mention earlier jabs like David Faustino’s Star-ving.
But in an effort to bolster their comedy wares, Crackle rolled out its latest push today with the launch of a video slate dubbed “Last Call for Comedy.” The package contains just two new original web series—Decisions, Decisions and So On and So Forth—alongside the online debut of the first two seasons of TBS comedy 10 Items or Less and some cult comedy films like the Wilson brothers debut flick, Bottle Rocket. Both of the new series are out of house pick-ups for Crackle, nabbing them from now-defunct web studios Stage 9 Digital and 60Frames.
Decisions, Decisions: A 15-episode ‘buddy comedy’ series centered around two friends (who in real life are brothers), Roger Ponders (Brendan Countee) and Patrick Shruggs (Adam Countee), throwing ridiculous hypothetical questions at one another. You know, exactly the kind of ‘would you rather’ lobs that make those long road trips bearable. Like: “Would you rather have to take all of your dates to Civil War reenactments OR have to give a live press conference immediately after getting laid?” (see above)
The two stars created the series through their Handsome Donkey production outfit, having last made Squeegees for ABC’s shuttered web content arm Stage 9 Digital. All 15 episodes are released on site today. We scored some exclusive outtakes from one of the eps below:
So On and So Forth: Love triangles are for wimps. This series is a mess of five tangled lovers. There’s Sam (Armen Weitzman) who’s hopelessly in love with Chloe (Diana Gitelman) who “may or may not have just broken up” with Dennis (CSI Miami’s Jon Togo) whose friend Leland (Jake Johnson) just bought a gun and thinks he’s in love with Chloe’s friend Joy (Camille Chen)…and so on and so forth. You need to see this to fully wrap your head around it:
by Tubefilter News on November 25th, 2009
This month we are bringing you Going Pro: Seducing the Studios, featuring panelists from Big Fantastic, Sony Pictures Television, and Crackle’s upcoming action series, The Bannen Way.
Many producers dream of scoring a studio deal. With financing, marketing, and distribution all taken care of, can’t you finally just focus on creating something great? But what’s it really like when a studio gets involved? At December’s Hollywood Web Television Meetup we’re exploring these questions and more.
by Marc Hustvedt on October 29th, 2009
Somehow without much fanfare, all 18 episodes of Jessica Rose-starring Blood Cell snuck out this week on TheWB.com. What was once one of most anticipated (if YouTube trailer views mean anything) series cooked up at the now-defunct 60Frames, is now tucked away on TheWB.
Right off the bat, this on is, well, gripping. A girl has been kidnapped and her friends Julia (Rose) Alex (Sara Sanderson) are lopped into the hunt when a late night call from their kidnapped friend Susan jolts Julia. Being a web series, the media-rich phone shows a video friend Susan—crying and scared. The kidnapper is a disturbingly grotesque thing (think Saw’s tricycle riding clown and you wouldn’t be far off), but there’s a catch: Julia can’t turn off her phone – if she does, her friend dies. A text message hits the phone moments later: “Dead Cell = Dead Friend.”
Over a year ago we looked into what happened to Blood Cell, which seemed to have squandered its healthy web buzz. The trailer, which featured a sultry close-up pan shot of Rose, racked up almost 7 million views since its release in April, 2008. Now the thriller web series, created by genre director Eduardo Rodriguez and produced by Jeremy Bell, is finally online—though unfortunately the roll out made no use of the show’s popular YouTube channel.
by Marc Hustvedt on June 15th, 2009
Global web video site Joost announced last week that it was adding 12 new content partners to its roster, stepping up its offering of original web series content. While a number of the new additions are traditional TV series, a new handful of primarily web series makers are on the list.
The curated site favors a global audience, and all but a few of the new partners (RDF, Marvel, ReelzChannel, TOEI) are opening up their content globally without geo-blocking.
New web series content partners:
* MWG Entertainment (My Two Fans, Road to the Altar)
* Marvel Entertainment (Marvel Super Heroes: What The –?!)
* RDF Digital USA (RDF USA’s digital arm which has web series in the works)
* Vogue.TV (Model.Live, Trend Watch)
by Marc Hustvedt on March 11th, 2009
Almost a year after its sizzling teaser trailer went up on YouTube starring the original lonelygirl15 Jessica Rose, Blood Cell from web studio 60Frames has finally found a mass distribution deal. The horror-thriller web series has found a home on Warner Bros.’ online network TheWB.com for release later this year.
Back in October, we wondered what happened to Blood Cell, which seemed to have squandered its healthy web buzz. The trailer (above), which was released on April 1, 2008, netted some 5.2 million views. The eighteen episode series was produced by Jeremy Bell and written-directed by genre director Eduardo Rodriguez.
by Marc Hustvedt on March 11th, 2009
MTV has ordered up a half hour pilot of raunchy comedy web series Private High Musical which debuted last fall, marking the latest of the network’s web to TV pickups. Creator and star Taryn Southern will produce the new pilot, which is still in pre-production.
As part of the deal, MTV acquires the rights to the series, though Southern will remain a producer and actor in the show. Southern originally cast a talented group of actors she’d worked with before, including Lauren Mayhew and fellow Sorority Forever star Angie Cole, even her new producing partner and web star Jessica Rose made a cameo. Some of the original cast are expected to return, though no word yet on whether Mr. Belding himself, Dennis Haskins, who played Mr. Johnson in the series, will be making his the trip back to primetime.
by Pat Miller on February 12th, 2009
Trey Stokes of Pink Five fame has released a teaser trailer of his most recent project, a science fiction thriller web series called Ark: The Series, produced by Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah of 90210 notoriety.
Ark: The Series began life as part of a collaboration between digital media company 60Frames and independent graphic novel publisher Oni Press. If you have already fallen in love with the Alien-esque aesthetics, you’re in luck – Ark is supposed to release simultaneously as a comic book and a web series, each dealing with different stories in the Ark universe.
All we know about Ark: The Series is that it stars Renee O’Connor (Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess), Adam Cardon and Marjo-Riikka Makela, and that it starts with a woman named Connie being waking up in a pod on a spaceship instead of her bed like she expected. Other than that, details are fairly sparse – which is why we were lucky enough to get some answers from Trey himself.
by Mary Feuer on January 30th, 2009
John August’s screenwriting credits go on and on: Big Fish, Corpse Bride, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are just a few. His first feature as a director, The Nines, was made in 2007. Now he’s joined the ranks of web series creators.
August’s The Remnants, shot during the writer’s strike, caused a stir when it was posted to Vimeo a few weeks ago. Clips of the show had been previously uploaded, whetting our appetites for more of this mysterious apocalyptic comedy. But we’ll have to keep on pining, at least for the foreseeable future, since The Remnants hasn’t acquired the sponsorship necessary to bring it to the web as a full series.
August recently wrote about The Remnants on his blog, sharing details and specifics you don’t often get to see. I asked him to elaborate on his analysis of the experience for Tubefilter.
Tubefilter: You said that a lot of agencies refused to send their actors out because “The Remnants” was a web series. Can you talk about that?
John August: When you’re casting a traditional TV pilot, you audition 50 or more actors for any given role. So for agencies not to send out their actors to meet an established writer-producer in the middle of a strike which had shut down the industry was absurd. I had no idea who Michael Cassidy and Amanda Walsh were. If their agents hadn’t sent them out to audition, they wouldn’t be in the show, and I wouldn’t be a huge cheerleader for both of them.
I didn’t need any name-brand actors. Ernie Hudson, for example, was just awesome for being awesome. And Justine Bateman has an energy that was fun to write for.
