We are back with one of our best Spidcast episodes to date this month (listen in below and subscribe to “Spidcast” on iTunes) with a focus on filmmaking, web series, collaboration, acting, and other interesting sound bites! April’s Spidcast features the incredible individuals Victor Solis and Allie Olson. They are our amazingly sexy and talented guests for Spidcast 16, April 2012.

Our Guests

Victor Solis is a seemingly rare specimen, a Southern California filmmaker who was born and raised in Southern California. He first began collaborating with his long-time creative partner Steven Itano Wasserman in the late 1980s, a dark age of VHS cassettes and voodoo economics. The duo soon discovered they shared an appetite for the craft of storytelling, satire, photography, science fiction, and films of all genres.

Victor and Steven have formally studied film and literature at the university level. In the late 1990s, they began training themselves on various film industry projects for little to no wages. Victor eschewed selling his soul, adopted a journeyman approach instead, and has worked in virtually every film department including development, camera, and lighting.

Victor’s first foray into the webseries space is the superhero adventure “Generic Girl” starring Alexandra Olson in the title role. He co-created, co-wrote, and co-produced the 10-episode series with Steven in 2011-2012. The show premiered Feb. 14, 2012 exclusively on JTS.tv and will launch widely online beginning in May 2012.

Victor is currently producing “Trouble Is My Business,” an original feature film written by and starring Tom Konkle and Brittney Powell. He is also developing a slate of feature films with Steven Itano Wasserman.

Allie Olson is an actress from Pasadena, California. She has appeared in many films and shows.

We thank Victor and Allie for being such fun and inspirational guests!

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Victor or Allie talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from it!

Full Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael London: Hi, I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the Future of Collaborative Video Production brought to you by Indie Source Magazine where they believe free is better and I like the way they think. On this episode, we’re talking with Allie Olson, an up and coming actress that you’re going to see a lot of very soon, you mark my words on that. In fact, she stars in the web series and we’ll visit with her producer, Victor Solis of the web series as well. He’s not only a producer but he’s done just about every job on the set and got some great insight. So let’s just right in to today’s Spidcast.

First up is producer, Victor Solis. Victor, welcome to Spidcast.

Victor Solis: Thank you very much, Michael. It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you.

Michael London: So tell us a little bit about yourself; the Reader’s Digest version.

Victor Solis: Alright. The digest in a nutshell. I was born and raised in southern California so there are a few of us filmmakers out here in LA who are natively from LA and I started off really fascinated in all aspects of story-telling, and we’re talking old school as in when I was in elementary school, telling stories to my younger sister, reading mythology, Moby Dick, the classic literature that a lot of us have usually forgotten about. My first fascination was in photography.

I started working in the beach cities down here south of Los Angeles with primarily as a wedding and portrait photographer. You wouldn’t think that that would’ve been the utmost training for cinematography but the fact of shooting events and shooting weddings is that you’re always working for a client. Your primary service is not that of a photographer. It is not that of just you capturing images. Your first service to any client is really providing piece of mind.

I certainly learned how to walk the walk; how to treat people with respect; how to always serve the client’s needs; but technically speaking, you learn to work very fast and very efficiently and you’re literally very light on your feet. The sun could be going down in 15 minutes. The power could go out. You need to be able to go to your redundant batteries to your other backup lens. I learned on both medium formats which is a 2.25 inch negative. It’s much larger than even the size of a super 35mm. So learning on those cameras – it’s a much larger camera as opposed to a handheld SLR or now they say is DSLRs.

We came up also during the time that film was transitioning over the digital and I started learning about the DSLRs and how much you could do; without being limited by the cost of every time you press the trigger, every time you take a picture, that’s about a dollar worth of developing film cost, print cost. You learn to work fast but you also learn to be very economical and very judicious about how you shoot and what you shoot.

Michael London: Now you see, that’s a great story because it encourages us to find experience and develop it wherever we can. It developed your eye, your craft, so whatever, whenever and however, take that opportunity to get the experience where you can, right?

Victor Solis: Absolutely. It’s all about whatever and sometimes whenever. Anybody, if you’re in Anchorage, Alaska; if you’re in Peoria, you can find other people out there who do work in a creative field and ideally, something like photography is creative yet technical at the same time. You don’t have to be out here in Los Angeles. You don’t have to be in New York City but the first thing that I always was trained to do and they definitely owe it to my parents for that and to the photographer that I learned with was find other people, reach out to others who know more than you and definitely, it’s easy to find people who know more than you. I’ve found a lot of people who know more than me reach out, volunteer, maybe you’re sort of the intern but by demonstrating that you have the passion and that you have that work ethic, that to me is worth far more than anybody who has the natural talent. Natural talent is surely a great asset but if it’s with a wedding photographer, fantastic. Do whatever works for you but learn the basics. Learn the fundamentals of how to work with equipment, how to tell a story, train your eye as you said, and you can do that in any city.

Michael London: Exactly. Victor, you mentioned a moment ago about reading to your sister and enjoying the classics, I bet you enjoyed classic movies as well.

Victor Solis: Anybody who goes into film has to be literate is what I would recommend. If you’re going into an art form – you have to love story at its core. I’m not talking about specifically cinema or video or the technology itself, but as you said, it’s the basics of what makes a fantastic character when you open up the beginning of Moby Dick and the narrator says, “Call me Ishmael”. I’m in with him. I’m going to be rooting for him. He’s going to transport me into this world I’ve never been before. You could do that with shadow puppets. You could do that with sock puppets or you could do it with a red epic camera and put together a crew of people and shoot it on digital. Really, the format and your style, your medium of choice is less than becoming very literate in story at its core what his character, what our character beats, what our emotions, how can you harness all of those, and maybe it’s true that there was no there was reading a book to my sister or putting on a puppet show in my backyard for the neighborhood kids that I was slowly learning more and more about what are the things that actually make people laugh? What are the principles of comedy? What are the principles of drama? It certainly takes time but I’d rather be doing this than doing dentistry.

Michael London: You got that right. You also talked about puppet shows a little bit ago in the backyard and such. Tell us about making that jump from your backyard in the Hollywood?

Victor Solis: The first production – I remember pretty vividly, it was out above the hills right as you would look up from Pacific Coast highway in Malibu and you see these rolling hills that are perfect for fog banks that always come in. Anybody who thinks that LA is sunny year-round, just come on down in May or June. I was still doing undergrad, studying English and film studies at UCLA and got a position on an AFI – American Film Institute – thesis film. They were shooting up in Malibu and I came one as the lower lead but very important to any production PA or production assistant. There was about three of us and everyday was totally different. It wasn’t just get the director a cup of coffee. It could’ve been on one particular evening where we had this pond – man-made ponds on the premises of this mansion that was up in the Malibu Hills. We’re shooting at night which is always interesting because you must light everything and the sound department calls one of us over and I had no experience with sound. I don’t know why the sound recorder wants one of us. So he calls us over and he says, look, guys, we need you to go out to that pond in the backyard and get a stick or get something, figure it out and we need you to keep those frogs quiet. Apparently, there is this nice community of frogs that were all ribbiting in sync much to the chagrin of the sound recorder and the director who was pulling out his hair.

One of my main jobs on that set was to run around the man-made ponds with another PA, shaking our hands and banging sticks together as long as it wasn’t too loud in order to get the frogs to shut up so we could get our takes in the can.

Michael London: So now you’ve gone from frog wrangler to wrangling the “Generic Girl”. Tell us about “Generic Girl”.

Victor Solis: Yes, fast forward several years, in fact, probably at least a decade, it was in late 2010 that I have been collaborating with my creative partner Steven Wasserman and his production company for a long, long time. We met actually in elementary school. When I was working on shoots like that AFI shoot, he was also working on shoots in northern California. That’s where he went to school. We’ve been in touch forever and we were painting his house. The doldrums of rolling pain on the wall will definitely get two men in a room to either drive each other nuts or come up with a concept for a 10 episodes super hero series.

We came up with the latter. We said if our next project is going to be something fun, why don’t we do something that amuses us? Hopefully, it amuses a few other people as well. as we’re painting his house, we conceived the story of a girl caught up in a world governed by comic book physics and inhabited by super heroes and villains and henchmen, but in our world, they have to follow union guidelines. You can’t become a hero until you have your three vouchers. A lot of it was winks to the labor unions in LA and to super hero and comic culture. That’s how we conceived the project and we shot it in 2011. Finally, we are still working on post-production and getting about to audiences. We have about five episodes remaining before all 10 episodes are online.

Michael London: Excellent. Where can we get a peak? Where can we see “Generic Girl”?

Victor Solis: Right now, you can watch it exclusively without ads on http://JTS.tv – Just The Story. Later in May, we’ll be going more widely online – YouTube and other platforms. Our website is www.gogenericgirl.com.

Michael London: Very good. Where can we learn more about you, Victor?

Victor Solis: My page is certainly up on IMDB and my info and more tidbits and behind the scenes about the making of “Generic Girl”, my bio is up on www.gogenericgirl.com.

Michael London: Shameless plug time. Talk if you will for a moment, Victor, about the value of www.spidvid.com.

Victor Solis: As a producer, you are all about collaboration. As a producer, you have to be always reaching out to others and it’s so much easier now that we have widespread internet access and people are online looking for like-minded people, looking for other collaborators, filmmaking, unlike something like photography, it’s fundamentally collaborative. You are always dependent upon everybody around you. For us, using technology, using the internet and using websites to reach other filmmakers, we work with a VFX artist who’s in northern California. I have stories of friend who have produced web content or other content and their different team members are in different parts of the US. You can do it. You don’t need to only have your same crew of five people always meeting at your house. You can do it online. It really teaches you how to juggle tasks, how to manage people, but it’s absolutely critical and that would be my recommendation. Reach out to other people and see who agrees with your mindset and who agrees with your vision and hang out with those people. Nurture those relationships.

Michael London: Right. Relationships and networking and that’s what it’s all about. How about a parting shot, Victor? A nugget of advice?

Victor Solis: Whether you are wrangling frogs on a film set or whether you are wrangling actors in a super hero series, whatever you may be doing, be humble, learn, learn, and learn. There is no shortage of literature out there to learn whether its stories, whether its photography technique, lighting, sound, learn from others. Offer your services. Be on the shoot. Work with people and you may not necessarily be receiving the paycheck but you were going to receive the hands-on knowledge of filmmaking, creating video, this is all hands on. You will always learn from others. There are always going to teach you a little tidbit, a little tip that you may not have ever thought of. Be humble and get yourself out there that’s probably the best advice that I can provide.

Michael London: And wonderful advice it is. Victor Solis, thank you so much for joining us today on Spidcast.

Victor Solis: It’s been a real pleasure, Michael. Thank you.

Michael London: Spidcast is brought to you by Indie Source Magazine, the fastest growing independent filmmaker resource and the only free publication of its kind. Their mission is to bring you not only stories of the industry’s highly celebrated but also stories and insights from players in all areas of the media creation process. At Indie Source, they believe free is better. Visit them at www.indiesourcemag.com.

We’ll continue now with the Spidcast and joining us is the Generic Girl herself, Alexandra Olson. Allie, welcome to Spidcast.

Allie Olson: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.

Michael London: Tell us a bit about your story. Well, I’m Alexandra Olson, I’m an actress. I’m from Pasadena, California and I actually wasn’t always into acting. I started off pursuing music. I was all set to go to Cal Poly Pomona for college when I was kind of scouted by a Disney Record Label and I did the whole manager-producer thing for a while and it just ended up setting me on a completely different course than I had planned and made me want to pursue a career in the arts. I didn’t end up signing with that label but I did do music for a while. I did pretty well. I got some independent film placements, some really small artist cuts, but I just didn’t have the love or the passion to really do what it takes to make it in music and since I was more of a songwriter rather than a performer, I spend most of my time kind of alone in a studio or a marketing my stuff on the phone talking to like 50-year-old publishers and meanwhile, all my friends who are out of college and partying and having fun and I felt like I was missing out kind of on my youth so I decided to go to Pasadena City College where the goal was to do get credits and most important to have fun.

I was like okay, I’m here to have fun. Let’s go out for a play. I auditioned for the play and I got in and I ended up absolutely loving it and the teachers and the people in the theater department were just so funny and cool and all of a sudden like I had this great bunch of friends. I remember my dad actually called me one as I was heading home from rehearsal and he asked like hey, are you coming home for dinner? And I was like no, I can’t because I’m going out with my friends. I have friends again, Dad. I ended up just becoming really involved in the theater department there and going kind of from show to show. I discovered that I just really loved acting and loved the community of it and just working with really talented people to create great art together and to tone off the story. That’s what I want to do with my career.

Michael London: A moment ago, you mentioned music being your first love. Tell us a little bit about that.

Allie Olson: I tend to go more of the songwriting route. That’s actually my true passion and I think that’s my strength. I sing and I play guitar and keyboards but those are kind of tools for me to use to write my songs. I love to write and I love to listen to music and I think my style is really kind of sweet, pop, acoustic, organic feeling. But I love a good song in any genre.

Michael London: What was your very first production?

Allie Olson: The first production I did? I think the first real production, real part that I got – I was so excited about getting it. I played Eve in “The Apple Tree” directed by Whitney Rydbeck at Pasadena City College and I was just elated. I had never really had a lead role and I was terrified out of my mind but I worked really hard and the experience of just going out with the people after rehearsals and then forming a community as a cast was so much fun. Definitely one of my favorite plays that I’ve done.

Michael London: So from being on stage and live productions, you get a call about doing a web series. First thoughts?

Allie Olson: To be honest, when I auditioned for “Generic Girl”, I didn’t really think much about the fact that it was in that digital video format. I was just kind of like reading the breakdowns and saw what looked like a really cool project that I want to be a part of so I went out for it, but I just gotten more into promoting it. I really learned a lot about the merits of the web series format and how digital video has really sort of democratized filmmaking. I just think it’s so cool that independent filmmakers and actors like myself can realize the vision without needing this huge budget for like distribution and you can make your seven-minute episodes or your short film and upload them to all these platforms like Blip.tv, Dailymotion, or JTS.tv, which is “Generic Girl’s” network, et cetera.

Basically this worldwide distribution without the monstrous budget and it gets lead to lots of consumers really being able to discover a whole bunch of great content that may never have even gotten made but for this new digital way. I’m really glad to be a part of something like a cool web series in a format that’s sort of the apex of the whole wave. It’s really cool. I love doing independent stuff. I think a lot of great talent really exists in that medium.

Michael London: Before you’re on Spidcast today was Victor, who you mentioned a moment ago. Tell us about him.

Allie Olson: Oh, Victor is so cool. He is a person that has so many ideas and he’s one of those people that actually really works to put them into action. The work that he’s done promoting “Generic Girl” has been outstanding. He’s constantly out there doing everything from networking, getting us on this new JTS network to even going to Comic Con and handing out business cards. He’s like a really even a foot soldier and a general. He’s great.

Michael London: Traditionally, through the years, Hollywood has been the stage and then to the small screen and hopefully to the big screen at a theatre near you, but you seem to have fallen into that new, hip, cool place called the web.

Allie Olson: Definitely true. I think the web series – I think it would be cool if web series became the new episodic television. I think there’s always a place for sitting down in front of your television and waiting for that 10 o’clock slot to come on and waiting for it all week and being really excited and watching it with a big group of people, but that can also be done online. I think it kind of actually mirrors what’s going on in the music industry too which is what musicians and actors were able to act like our own production companies almost and promote ourselves and reach our audience without needing to go through like a network per se. I mean, it is a network, but it’s like a different kind of network. It would be awesome if web series just became accepted as a regular episodic TV format.

Michael London: And of course, there’s no man in the ivory tower telling you what you can and can’t do and what will be produced and won’t be produced. You make your own content and find your own audience.

Allie Olson: Exactly. That’s a beautiful thing because if it were the case that we’d have those network producers sitting in the ivory tower shutting down some potentially great project. Thos projects can be made anyway. They can find their own audience without needing to go through all these screening processes.

Michael London: Allie, what would be your advice to someone just getting to Hollywood today?

Allie Olson: I myself I’m definitely just starting out and still really trying to make it in the industry and I mean, I would say two things probably come to mind that are really important. One is really find that teacher or that director that you feel you can really learn from and then absorb everything you can to really get the confidence in yourself as an actor. For newcomers like myself, it’s really important that we know our brand and know our strength and really play them. I think working with a great mentor can really help with that.

Michael London: I’m going to bet that you’ve come from a performing family.

Allie Olson: Oh yes, my family is – we get called the von Trapp’s sometimes. When we call people to say happy birthday, we actually sing “Happy Birthday” in three-part harmony. My mom and dad actually met in a band so we’ve always had jam sessions with our friends every month and it’s so cool. Just the other night, we’re actually sitting around our living room playing with a couple of family friends. We’re playing Iz’s version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” and we had a fiddle, a saxophone, my mom was singing, my dad was playing guitar, and I was doing harmony. It was just ethereal, wonderful experience. I love it so much.

Michael London: That is so nice, so fun. Tell us a little bit about “Generic Girl”.

Allie Olson: Oh my gosh, working on “Generic Girl”, it was incredibly fun. Definitely the coolest thing I’ve yet gotten to be a part of. Everyone on set just has this awesome mixture of professionalism and pure silliness. There were a lot of times when we would actually have to improve and we have a lot of really experienced improv actors in our cast like Matthew Bohrer and Johnny Skourtis. I could barely keep a straight face. Oh, also Matthew Farhat. I could not keep a straight face of all the craziness that was going on and the great staff that the cast have come up with.

To be honest, I knew this was going to be a really cool project to do from the very first audition because of the way they auditioned us. Sometimes you go to auditions and they hand you like a sheet of paper that’s like okay, fill in your sizes, tell us about your relevant experience but this audition, Victor and Steven, the director and producer actually handed us a piece of paper that asks questions like what comic book do you like to read or if you could have any super power, what would it be and what would your super hero name be. Immediately, I was like, okay, this is going to be awesome.

Michael London: Allie, what super power would you have and who would you be?

Allie Olson: I think I put that my super power was to be able to shoot purple sparkles from my hands but they weren’t just any purple sparkles, they were purple sparkles of death. I had named myself – I think I named myself Sparkle Super Nova, which sounds like a different kind of name, but it was favorite hero name.

Michael London: Hey, where can folks see “Generic Girl”?

Allie Olson: You can see it on a networked called – it’s an online network called http://JTS.tv. It stand for Just The Story. It’s an ad-free subscription network. New episodes go up every Wednesday. There’s actually a lot of really cool shows on there like “Continuum”, and I think it’s called the “Jeff Lewis Comedy Hour”. Those are the cool ones. There’s a lot of good content.

Michael London: And where can we read all about Alexandra Olson?

Allie Olson: You can go to my website which is http://allieolson.com.

Michael London: Perfect and for those listening, Allie, how about a great nugget of advice, the great take home message from you.

Allie Olson: The great nugget of advice from Allie Olson – I would say just make sure to always care about telling the story. That’s what I’ve learned as my biggest piece of wisdom of training that I’ve gotten from my mentor, Duke Stroud. I will just say tell the story, always be honest when you’re acting and love what you do.

Michael London: Love what you do. Excellent advice. Allie, thank you so much for being with us today on Spidcast.

Allie Olson: Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I had to say, you have the coolest voice that I have ever heard. You sound like on those movie trailer guys that could voice overs.

Michael London: That’s very kind. Thank you very much. I will tell my agent to start booking some of those jobs.

Thanks for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidvid.com or on our Spidvid blog and you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with one of our best Spidcast episodes to date this month (listen in below and subscribe to “Spidcast” on iTunes) with a focus on web series, acting, creative freedoms, Playboy, and other interesting sound bites! February’s Spidcast features the incredible individuals Brittney Powell and David Beeler. They are our amazingly sexy and talented guests for Spidcast 15, February 2012.

Our Guests

Brittney Powell is a talented and beautiful actress who was born in Würzburg, Germany. She has appeared in many TV shows and films including: Airborne, That Thing You Do!, Fled, Stacy’s Mom, Safety Geeks: SVI, and countless others. She was also a Playboy playmate, which brought her into Hollywood.

David Beeler was born and raised in Kerrville, Texas. He went to school in London and trained at The Central School of Speech & Drama while Laurence Olivier was the President of the school. David was “over there” for 10 years and highlights include: playing Hamlet in London and at Kennilworth Castle, Ritchie Valens in Buddy, Puck, Edmund, and being directed in “The Scottish Play” by Dame Judi Dench.

Along with comedy writing/performing/producing partner, Tom Konkle, Dave & Tom have a rapidly growing presence online with over 12 million aggregate views. Please visit Dave & Tom for latest news, videos and general silliness.

David stars as Brian Forbes in Invention with Brian Forbes. (Selection ITV Fest 2011), co-wrote and produced with Tom the 3D Film Festival Award Winning, Safety Geeks: 3D and played the suave, yet totally inept Reginald Syngen-Smythe. He has appeared in over 55 national commercials, several of which aired in various Super Bowls.

We thank Brittney and David for being such fun and inspirational guests!

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Brittney or David talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from it!

Full Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael London: Hi, I’m Michael London. Welcome to Spidcast, the Future of Collaborative Video Production brought to you by Spidvid.com and sponsored this week by Indie Source Magazine where they believe free is better and you know what? I think they got a point. On this episode, we are talking with Brittney Powell, an actress you’ve seen plenty on episodic TV and movies too and lots of other things. Also, David Beeler will be here. He’s an actor, writer and web creator. David is certainly one of the pioneers of the new media and he has a great story to tell us and will take us to at least two continents.

First up is, well, ladies first. She’s an actress, producer and I’m told an all-around awesome chick. Brittney, thanks for being with us today.

Brittney Powell: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Michael London: So, tell us a little bit about Brittney.

Brittney Powell: Well, I’m an army brat. I’ve traveled the world just in being an army brat because that’s what we do and I would say that translates into why, one of the reasons why I moved to Los Angeles, the career path of an actor is very much a person who has to fit into new environments quickly and make themselves at home and make new friends randomly and get sent across the world to go on location and so forth. So, I find that being an army brat was good training for being an actor.

Michael London: Well, I can see that. So, where was the very last place you were right before Hollywood?

Brittney Powell: The very last place I was before I came to Hollywood was a little town in Texas, right outside of Dallas, Fort Worth which has grown exponentially since I’ve moved away and that was, well, I won’t say how many years ago that was because I’m still only 29 years old.

Michael London: And what is the name of that little town?

Brittney Powell: It’s Mansfield, Texas. In fact, I just found out from my parents that Kelly Clarkson now lives in Mansfield, Texas. I knew that she had been from Burleson but I had no idea that she went ahead and made the big move to Mansfield.

Michael London: Well, you have to fight her now for hometown girl billboard space.

Brittney Powell: I know. When I come to town, she better scoot aside because I want to be on the front page of the newspaper.

Michael London: I don’t blame you. So, tell us about that path, army brat lived in 10 or so places, new school every year?

Brittney Powell: Well, actually, when I was about six, I would say, I started—my father was an officer, so he would always get options of where we were going to be stationed next and I swear to God, that’s when I would pull out a map and a ruler and whatever was closest to LA, that’s the one that got my vote. So, when we had the opportunity, I was born in Germany, but then we moved back to the States and traveled a bit. When we had opportunity to go back to Germany, of course, that’s the one my parents chose but I’m thinking, no, no, I think Phoenix is a better option. Phoenix because it’s closer to LA.

Michael London: Good thinking and what about early performing opportunities?

Brittney Powell: Mostly, I started just doing family stuff whenever we would have family functions. I would write little plays and I would enlist the help of the friends and families that were there, and make them perform and then I would get, I didn’t understand when they would get nervous in front of their parents. I’m like, we’re just acting and they’re your parents, they love you. Just do it. Then I would get all frustrated if they got all nervous.

And then I started doing community theater. I would UIL competitions and they were One-Act Play competitions in high school and what I realized was that I would win and I loved getting the ribbons and the trophies and stuff but I realized very quickly that if I moved to Los Angeles and did this as a living that I could get as little green bio survival tickets that we called dollar bills and those were my trophies that I preferred. So, I just went ahead and I was like, I’m moving to LA. I’m going to make my living doing this.

Michael London: All right, all about the Benjamins. What is UIL competition?

Brittney Powell: UIL competitions, they’re One-Act Play, so you’ll take an entire play and you’ll go through it and just start editing down lines or even scenes and turn the entire play into one act and then you perform them starting at just the little district level and then you would move to Regionals and if your entire cast continues to win, then you go on to state and so forth.

Our cast never actually made it to State. We were always beaten by Martin High School so I’m going to go back and punch them.

Michael London: Darn those Martin High Goons. So, we fast forward a bit and you finally land in Hollywood. What do you think?

Brittney Powell: I loved it. I originally came out to Hollywood because I accidentally was in Playboy, the girls kind of things, just one those little side picture once they do and the editor saw that, asked me to be a playmate so they started flying me out to Los Angeles a lot and when I was out here, I was meeting agents and they told me point blank that I’m marketable, that I’m talented and that if I would just move out here that I could actually start booking work. So, that’s what I did. I just packed up my little car and tripped it on out here and I started booking work right away. They were right.

So, that’s what brought me to Los Angeles and then once I got out here, really, I started booking work right away, lots of commercials and a lot of episodic television, anything that Aaron Spelling had done.

Michael London: Wait, wait, wait, tell us where we’ve seen you.

Brittney Powell: Oh, my goodness, anything Aaron Spelling has ever done, I’ve been either a recurring role for half a season or I’ve been the series regular for like “Pacific Palisades”. I was a series regular on that. Then Stu Segall Productions, he would do all of the “Silk Stalkings” and “Renegade” all those kind of shows and so they would bring me down and just keep constantly casting me in those shows and then night time episodic was the majority of my career and then films. I had a little, not a little film, it was one of Icon Pictures, first venture into feature films. That’s Mel Gibson’s production company and that was a movie called “Airborne” which is a coming of age movie and I was the lead female in that. Just the (cutest little) movie and I still meet people today, kids who are still addicted to it.

In fact, I rented a car the other way and the guy behind the counter, I walked in and he looked me and he goes, “Airborne, right?” How do you know this? I’m like ancient compared to those days, how do you even still recognize me?

Michael London: So, he says, “Airborne” and your first word should have been, “Upgrade” right?

Brittney Powell: Oh, yes, and don’t think I didn’t. I got the upgrade.

Michael London: Good for you. So, you’re really living the working actor’s dream. You’re working a lot. You’re being seen. You’re making your contacts all in traditional media. Then you take a sharp right into the web world. Tell us about that.

Brittney Powell: Ah, this I owe to my business partner, writing partner, acting partner, best friend, Tom Konkle. I was at an audition for a commercial and I was just kind of being a little smartass kind of in my own little world but funny, I don’t know, it’s kind of quirky and I realized there was a human being very close to me who was laughing at all of the twisted things that I would say out loud to myself and so he and I started saying weird things out loud to each other and after the audition, I followed him to the parking lot and I told him that I have to know him and we became friends and he had been working on a script called “Safety Geeks: SVI” and very Monty Python-esque but in getting to me, he realized that I was the lead female that he had written.

And that started our ventures into the web world. It got a wonderful reception. Immediately, we were one of the first web series that was actually funded by an outside source. So, it was a platform called (Cold Cast). They went ahead and paid for it and it went crazy. We started winning awards, nominated for Streamy Awards and LA Web Fest Awards. It got an amazing reception and that’s when we realized we’re really on to something and then Tom had also in the past had worked with John Cleese who saw it and decided that he wants to be in our—we’re not going to call it a second season. We’re going to call it a sequel because we’re turning that actually into a feature film instead of a web series but it will be on the web as well so John Cleese, we have him on board. Virginia Hey wants to be in it. It’s so silly and it’s ridiculous, it’s so our humor.

So, that got us going. Then we decided based on that, other people were asking us to be in theirs doing cameos and so we were doing that. That’s when we realized that we’re going to start our own YouTube channel which we’ve recently launched. It’s RomComtTheSeries, so you can find that at YouTube/romcomtheseries and it is going to be Tom and I playing different characters, romantic comedy, just silly stuff, our humor, the one thing that we did notice with that is that we posted some of what we find to be romantic comedy and in researching the demographics, we’re realizing that we’re serving an underserved market which is people our age watching the internet, looking for more mature romantic comedy.

So, we started posting a few things up and when we first put, we just put up a silly sex scene, really fun, romantic but a bit off the wall and we were getting about a thousand hits an hour when we first put it up and it’s continuing to grow.

Michael London: Goodness gracious, it sounds like it. Now, John Cleese decidedly silly and then romantic comedy, who exactly is your audience?

Brittney Powell: Females love what we’re doing. The main genre, we’re serving it right now, our demographic on there is 60% female within the ages of 18 through 54. So, what we want, actually is for people to email us at tomandbrit384@gmail.com and start emailing us some of their ideas of what they would like to see like if they actually did have the weirdest little romantic scenario in their life, we want to recreate that. We want to write it and put our own spin on it but we want their ideas, what they find to be funny and romantic and then we’re going to put those up as well and we fortunately found that people are finding it funny as well which is nice because sometimes, you put something up that you think is funny and they just run the other direction but they seem to like our weirdness which is cool.

Michael London: And you’ll know, you’ll know right away like you’ve seen before with the hits.

Brittney Powell: Yes, and I’m very, very fortunate to have Tom as my business partner because he loves computers so he has all the different spreadsheets and everything that are telling us what countries are from, for instance, “Safety Geeks”, when it first launched, we were very big in the United States, but now, we’re finding Saudi Arabia. We’re spiking in Saudi Arabia right now and we can’t exactly explain it. We aren’t going to complain about it.

Michael London: Yes, no need to explain it, just enjoy it. So, honest question time, all right? You’re doing well. Your career seems to be on the (uptake), features, episodic TV, you meet Tom. Tom approaches you and says, “Hey, want to do some stuff for the web?” Really, now, what do you think?

Brittney Powell: I’ll tell you what, what first caught my attention to say yes was the interaction that I had with Tom and I knew that we could create something that was unique and I knew that we could create something that made me happy. It was our product. We had control over what we were putting out and we had control over how it was put out. That got my attention because a lot of times, you’ll go into a sitcom and you have to do exactly what those writers said and they might not have quite your same personality but you do it because it’s your job and I love my job.

However, I love being able to tell Tom, “Can we twist it in this direction as well and have it still be as funny?” And then we can mull it over. We can twist it and tweak it and do that sort until we make it what we want and then we put it up and if people like it, they like it. If they don’t, that’s okay because somebody likes it. There’s not one guy sitting in an office somewhere that it’s his opinion of what’s funny. It’s actually out there for the public to determine and if they like it, they can go to it and watch it.

Michael London: Now, you know what? For my money, that is the single most exciting thing about this venue, no gatekeeper. So, literally now, being a pioneer, how about some words of advice for those coming up behind you.

Brittney Powell: I think my main bit of advice that I would give to people coming up in the web world would be really pay attention to what you’re writing because you can’t just write something and throw it up and expect it to hit. You’ve got to pay attention to the actual quality of the writing and then pay attention to the quality of production. A lot of people on the web, they’ll have an idea on the weekend and then they’ll shoot it over the weekend and get their friends together and they’re not real actors. They should hire real actors to portray the characters they’ve written instead of saying, “I want to be on TV so I’m going to write something and just put it up there.”

Don’t just put it up there. Make sure it’s good enough to represent you as a writer, as an actor and as a producer because that is what, I mean, it’s going to live on the web forever and if you’re just putting up crap, then that’s what people when they do go back 10 years from now and they’re like, “Who’s this person?” And they go back and see it, they’ll be like, “No, they suck. I don’t to watch it.” So, truly pay attention to the quality of what you’re doing and play to your strengths.

Michael London: Wonderful words of experience there. So, Playboy, did it hurt or help?

Brittney Powell: You know what? Playboy helped, I have to say. It was right around the time when Pamela Anderson was making it okay to be a Playmate and an actress. At that time, I actually turned down Playmate. I’ve shot my centerfold and it was right before Pam made it okay. So, I was noticing that a lot of the other Playmates who were trying to be actresses, they were losing jobs even after having booked the job, they were getting fired off sets once the producers realized that they were Playmates. So, I backed out of the centerfold but what I got out of that was connections. I actually met my first commercial agent through Playboy and we didn’t promote that I was a Playmate or that I had worked for Playboy or anything but I did continue to do the lingerie issues as a way to pay my bills in one day so that the rest of the month, I could be going out on auditions.

He was married to Kimberley Heffner at that time and she was very strict at the mansion so when they would bring me out, they would put me up at the mansion and I didn’t have to worry about lecherous old men trying to say, “Well, I can help you, baby, but this is what I like,” and I didn’t have to worry about that because she was like, “Anybody in the swimming pool, you got clothes on. I got a baby running around this house,” or when we would have the Sunday night movie night, it was just his closer friends that they trusted. It wasn’t really just kind of anybody who thought it would be fun to go see a bunch of hot chicks. It was people who actually had integrity and had something to say in the entertainment industry.

So, I met some really wonderful people that way and some of whom, I’ve remained in contact with since. So, Playboy I loved and I would do it again.

Michael London: Interesting, so what can you tell us about your experience with collaboration?

Brittney Powell: I think that what you guys have going with Spidvid is incredibly helpful to the independent producer because we can come to you and say, “Hey, look what we’ve got,” and then you have a whole targeted audience that comes to you guys to say, “I have this to offer but I’m lacking in this area,” and they have that to offer but they’re lacking in that area so it does become very much a collaborative effort and with people of like-mind. So, that to me is invaluable. So, thank you, Spidvid, for existing. It is invaluable what you guys do.

Michael London: Very kind words, Brittney. Thank you so much but the only way we exist is because of people like you.

Brittney Powell: Oh, well, thank you very much for saying that.

Michael London: So, what would be the takeaway message from Brittney Powell today?

Brittney Powell: Taking talent and utilizing it along with what would otherwise be considered maybe a more surfaced quality. People do pay attention to my looks and I know that but that doesn’t mean that I have to only use my looks to get ahead. My looks get attention and then from that, people can really go, “Whoa, wait a second, she can walk. Whoa, she’s intelligent.” That is what I appreciate about being on this planet.

Michael London: All right, and speaking of looks and talent, where can see everything Brittney.

Brittney Powell: Everything Brittney, well, IMDB as my entire resume and that’s of course, Brittney Powell on IMDB. You can find, a lot of the new stuff is going to be on the RomComTheSeries on YouTube. There’s a lot of stuff too on the www.safetygeekssvi.com. In fact, I even have a little bit on “Invention” with Brian Forbes. I have kind of a cameo in that. I’m a guest star on that one, a recurring player. The internet, I mean, anything Brittney, just Google it. Everything will come up. What won’t come up are my photos from Playboy. I don’t know why. I think it was because that was back in the ancient days when they didn’t have digital.

Michael London: I just sense a disturbance in the force.

Brittney Powell: That’s funny. Well, I’ll go find some of those old pictures and scan them and put them up and then I’ll put them under fake names so that nobody will come after me for copyright infringement.

Michael London: You can say, here’s Kelly Clarkson.

Brittney Powell: I will say, “Kelly, can you just come here and say a few words standing next to me and then I can pop up under your Google searches too?”

Michael London: Always thinking, Brittney Powell. Thank you so much for joining us today on Spidcast.

Brittney Powell: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time talking to you.

Michael London: Spidcast brought to you by Indie Source Magazine, the fastest growing independent filmmaker resource and the only free publication of its kind and their mission is to bring you not only stories of the industry’s highly celebrated but also stories and insights from players in all areas of the media creation process. At Indie Source, they believe free is better. Visit them at www.indiesourcemag.com.

Let’s continue now with the Spidcast. Joining us is actor, writer and web creator, David Beeler. David, welcome to Spidcast.

David Beeler: Well, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael London: So, David, tell us a little bit about your story.

David Beeler: Goodness, I was born of poor black child. No, I’m sorry, that’s already been done.

Michael London: Yes, already taken.

David Beeler: No, actually, I’m an actor, professional actor. I live out in Los Angeles. Before that, I lived in London, England for a decade. I went to drama school over there, a conservatory for three years and then wound up staying and working there for that decade before coming back to the States. But I was born and raised in Texas in a small town and I was kind of a class clown, enjoyed making my friends laugh because I quickly got that that made them like me more and there’s something very powerful about laughter and that it opens up people. It’s that saying that “laugher is the best medicine” and there is actually physiological evidence that that’s actually very true.

I did all the stuff as a kid. I got local theatre to local television show and by the age of 15, I decided, this is what I wanted to do. But when I was about fifth grade, my mom used my full name and I knew I was in trouble so I’m thinking, what did I get caught doing? And she goes, “I got a call from your teachers.” And I’m like, oh, what did I get caught doing at school? She said, “Well, they’re very concerned about you.” And I thought, all my grades are good? And then she said, “They think something might be wrong with your brain.” And I was like, “What?”

So, it turns out they thought I had an equilibrium problem because I had gotten so good at walking into desks, bumping at doors, and just falling over doing these pratfalls to make my friends laugh but they thought something was actually wrong with me. So, I kind of blame my teachers that I don’t have Jim Carrey’s career because my mom told me to put the brakes on that which I did.

But by the time I was 15, I knew I was going to be a professional actor and that’s what I was going to do with my life as a vocation. So, it’s been a couple of years at UT Austin, in Texas on a scholarship and then I applied for the school in England and got accepted which was a real coup and I didn’t realize it at that time, it was as big a deal for me as it was going to be.

And then I was paying for school so I had to pay for a lot more of school by going to this conservatory in England which was the Central School Of Speech & Drama and so I wrote and produced plays in Texas to pay for my training in England and that actually worked. So, it was ironic that I paid for school by doing what I was going to school to learn to do.

Michael London: Well, how cool is that? I’m sure this has helped throughout your career so far?

David Beeler: It was pretty cool. It was a big learning experience to get to school for me as it was being at school and that was really fascinating and some of that entrepreneurial spirit and production just sort of, “All right, we’re going to figure out how to make this work,” has carried into the stuff that I do now with my creating partner or creative partner, Tom Konkle because he and I do comedy and almost all of our stuff is a comedy based online.

Michael London: Now, we’re going to get more into your current stuff in just a bit but I want to hear about more of the stuff from England. This is good stuff.

David Beeler: I had some really cool opportunities there, things like I got to play Hamlet in a castle; did a one-man show called Booth about the actor Edwin Booth, took that to Denver Festival and won an award. A director who saw this wanted to work with me. She said, we need to retool the script and before you do the show again, which was about Edwin Booth preparing to play Hamlet after his brother assassinated Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth. She said, “You need to play Hamlet.” I said, well, it’s on my list and she said, “No, no. You’re going to do it.” And so I wound up getting to play Hamlet.

A company I was working with touring around England doing Shakespeare, we actually got to play Hamlet at Kenilworth Castle. So, that was an amazing experience for me.

Michael London: I’ll bet so you work your way to England. Played Hamlet in a castle no less so in your mind, had you arrived? Where you successful?

David Beeler: I do my goals between Christmas and New Year’s every year and realized, am I doing what I want to do? And I’m like, yes. I’m an actor, I’m earning my living. This is great. I thought is this really what I want to do and I went, what if I could do anything, I’d work in movies. And I thought, oh, well, I’m in the wrong place because they don’t do that many films in the UK sadly because when they do, do them, they do them very well.

So, from there, I thought, okay, I’m going to pick up and head back to the States. So I took a reconnaissance holiday, came out to Los Angeles and stayed here for eight weeks with some friends of mine from drama school and found much to my delight that it was actually a very nice place and in being here, one of the things that happened along the way was when I first got out here, I thought, gosh, I haven’t done comedy in years and that’s something I really loved. It’s partly what got me to acting. So, I signed up with LA Connection, which is a place out here that does improv and had found that some of the other places that are very famous for improv, you have to go through years of their training programs before you get to perform but LA Connection had a fast track where you could do that within a couple of months.

And so, I thought, well, that’s what I want. So, I did that. A group of us kind of got bored there, splintered off with some people from the groundlings and created a new sketch troupe and one of the guys from that group which fell apart fairly quickly because different people wanted to do different things. So, the group fell apart but one of the guys later was producing a show called “Beyond the Fringe” which is the seminal British review that launched the careers of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, you may have heard of and Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller are very big in the UK and one is the director and one is the writer. This guy, Joe Dunne who was producing the show, he said, “I need you to play the Dudley parts because one of the improv characters I created having lived in London was an out of work mortician and I thought, oh, it would be fun. I lived in South London for the most number of years of my time in England and I can do a very good South London accent and I thought, if this guy is an out of work mortician but he’s on the dole but he’s so broke he has to nip at the formaldehyde if he can no longer afford to go to the pub and I thought, oh, that’s a fun idea for an improv character so I brought that in and what happened was he wound up sounding very much like Dudley Moore, completely by accident and “I’m going to go in and I’m going to do this thing and his name was (Glenn Long) and he was a less successful brother of (Forest Long). And of course, I didn’t hold that over Forest, God bless him, but he was very frustrated. He couldn’t get things to work right.”

So, everybody was like, “Oh, that’s a great Dudley,” and I’m like, oh, no, I don’t want to do Dudley. Dudley did Dudley so I was like, ah, back to the drawing board but they insisted that I keep doing this character because they all thought it was very funny. So, Joe knew I had done this character and he said, “I want you to play Dudley Moore in this review show,” and I was like, okay, “And you’re going to meet this guy who will play the Peter Cook parts. Tom Konkle is very funny, I think you’ll get on.”

And at the read through, sure enough, Tom and I got on like a house on fire and in doing that show which won Take of the Week in the LA Weekly out here, Tom said, “We need to do the two-hander that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did called ‘Good Evening.’ They did this on Broadway,” and I was like, okay. And Tom said, “No, no, we’re going to do it.” I said, okay and then two weeks later he called me and said, “Okay, I’ve booked a theatre, we’re doing a show.” And I said, oh, all right. When? “In two weeks.” I was like, whoa, goodness, we probably should rehearse. We got the show up on its feet real fast. I had a great time and then in the process of doing that show, we kept kind of improvising and playing with those characters and we decided that hey, we could actually continue playing and develop that into some of our own original material which we did and that show was called, “Goodnight” and that was basically a tribute to “Good Evening: The Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Show” and in that process, Tom and I found that we worked really well together as a writing team that we were very (simpatico).

And about that same time, I’d written the stuff that paid for my training but I don’t write a whole lot because it feels like work and I’ve had a number of people go, “You’re good at writing. You should write more.” And so I was looking for a way to enjoy writing more and then Tom showed up and we had a great time writing. It was just a laugh and we would catch stuff and try to get it in the computer while it was fresh and still making it laugh and so we began to collaborate and write and around about the same time, I joined their sketch troupe called Lester McFwap and we were doing live sketch shows. We did them in different places around the country at different festivals and around LA and about that time, a guy came to one of our shows and said, “I think we should do a television pilot,” and we said, okay. So we wound up producing this TV pilot called McFwap with an exclamation point and not the musical but just McFwap!

So, we produced this pilot and it was green lit for along weekend before it fell through the cracks in the Vivendi sale, when Universal was bought by Vivendi and lot of these other TV network, cable networks that they owned, all kinds of people losing their jobs and so we fell through the cracks of that sale which was very frustrating. But at that time, we’d already began doing some sort of interactive media stuff in our live shows and filming things and putting them in our live shows.

So, when the internet began to come out with an opportunity where the bandwidth was large enough that you could actually post something and have people watched it without being it completely stilted, the very early days of YouTube, then we were like, oh, well, we should put something up. So, Tom and I did a sketch and we put it out and I think it was a month or two, we got like 500,000 hits.

So, here’s half a million people watching our comedy which was more than we had seen all of our live shows combined over the entire time we’d been working together before that. We’re like, wow, this is powerful. So, we formed Pith-e Productions and the idea of that was to keep it short and pithy because at that time, that was what it had to be as dictated by the bandwidth and a guy approached us about doing stuff for mobile and that was still way too early for mobile to have satisfactory mobile video. Nowadays, you have that quite readily but at that time, that was sort of more of an idea than a reality but we got this idea of, oh, we could do this and we kind of build a footprint here and then expand it out and hopefully go into new media, create our brand really strong and then take that brand and move it into old media or the more established media, however you want to look at that. So that’s kind of partly how we came to be and how we came to be doing what we’ve been doing.

Michael London: So, is “Invention” an outgrowth of that relationship with Tom?

David Beeler: “Invention” with Brian Forbes grew out of a sketch show. Tom and I were doing a two hand sketch show and Tom had this idea for this crazy inventor and being interviewed in a show that’s the guy who’s running the show was trying to do a very serious show but his guest is just a whackadoo and we did it as a sketch and I thought it was a great sketch and it always got a great reaction and at one point, Tom said, “Let’s film that.” And I’m like, okay, we’re doing these little short pithy one offs and so fine.

And then Tom later said, I think we should do that as a series because we’ve done another live sketch show and we’ve done another invention and Tom said, “Let’s do this as a series,” and I said, I don’t think it will sustain as a series, Tom because it’s a little just, they’re little snippets. They are really just little sketches and there’s no kind of continuation in that. I don’t see that being a series and I said, I think people will stale of the same thing again and again. And Tom said, “No, no, no, I’ve got so many ideas. They won’t.” And I’m like, all right, okay.

The great thing about Tom and I is if either one of us feels passionately about something, the other one usually goes, “All right, I trust you.” And that’s come from years of working together. And I was like, okay, if you really feel like that, let’s do it. So, we did. We began doing more and more and more of these and I have grown to love, love, love the show. It’s one of my favorite things we do because I love the relationship between Brian Forbes who’s desperately trying to do something legitimate and I think for a lot of artists, that craving of legitimacy, of I want to be accepted and do something that’s good and be lauded by my peers. Most artists have that in some capacity once they get involved in their disciplines, their craft that they want their peers to recognize them. Hence, the proliferation of award shows.

So Brian Forbes is deadly serious and then you have this force of nature which is the only guy that I know who’s just out of his mind or eccentric as they say in England I think the combination of that is really wonderful and it’s just a very simple idea that relies purely on the writing and the performing and the relationship between these characters.

Michael London: And David, how did you find your audience or better yet, how did they find you?

David Beeler: We call it our web series that good. It’s like the little engine that gets over the hill because for years, we would just do them because we wanted to and we never had any sort of game plan or sort of we must (do a mark at) this and put it out there and figure it out how we’re doing this. It was really just, we were doing it and we’ve never ever gotten a bad review. We’ve gotten tons of great press. Everybody seems to love the show and we’ve only gotten positive feedback on it and a few years then, on doing the show, we were like, oh, we probably should look at this. Another positive review would pop up and that’s a neat thing about the internet in a lot of traditional media. Once you have an opening, you air the show and it’s over and maybe it comes out again in rerun but it’s looked as a sort of second tier because it’s already been out.

Whereas with the internet, one of the things we have discovered is there are ways of discovering. We had this very recently where we don’t quite know why but on YouTube our views peaked into the hundreds of thousands out of nowhere. Just suddenly we were getting like hundreds of thousands of views in a week and it just sort of had this little peak and I was like, well, that’s interesting. We don’t quite know why but somebody somewhere might have discovered it, put it on Facebook and it just spread virally or something. We don’t quite know what that is although we’re trying to figure it out.

Michael London: But isn’t that one of the coolest things about being involved in new media that your show has literally forever to find an audience and there’s not one guy in the ivory tower saying, “No, this will not be made.”

David Beeler: That is phenomenal. Never in history has it been a more democratic platform where you can put what you want to say out there and people vote on it with their eyeballs. So, that’s incredibly powerful. As you said, there’s no men in the ivory tower, there are no suits going, “No, no, we’re not going to do this.” There aren’t gatekeepers other than people wanting to watch it or not wanting to watch it. And that’s amazing. That’s crazy cool, the fact that like I said, Tom and I were blown away and this is many years ago. Many years ago, and I think 2003 or 2004 when we put up a video and it got half a million views in a month or so and we went, “Wow, that’s amazing. The fact that that many people could see your work.”

Here’s a funny story, one of the things is called the “Prostate PSA” and it’s basically a public service announcement for men’s health and we did this thing. It’s pretty funny, it’s out there Prostate PSA, Dave and Tom, go check it out but we did it, put it out. Several months later, an old girlfriend of mine from Texas emailed me that her husband had just gotten that video sent to him from his friend in South Africa because he was having a prostate issue and it was sort of one of those things where I was like, wow, that circumnavigated the globe to come back to someone I know who says, “Oh, my god, I saw that (video.)” And that’s happened two or three times where people I know have said, “Oh, my dad just got this thing and it’s you and somebody that I didn’t know had sent it to him. And then it came back to me and they had discovered it.

So, that’s crazy (call). The downside of this very open democratic platform is that there are no gatekeepers by which I mean, for an audience, you sometimes have to sift through a lot of dirt to find a lump of coal much less a diamond because there is no barrier at all for submission. Anybody can do anything they want and put it up there and so sometimes, you have to kind of wade through some not so good stuff to find the good stuff. However, I would much rather have it this way than the other way where there’s, who’s deciding whether you get to watch that or not.

And then the good stuff tends to get the cream will rise to the top. The good stuff tends to get referred. It gets noticed. People write about it, blog about it. Other people share it. So, in that way, the good stuff tends to rise anyway.

Michael London: Right, not only does the good stuff rise but the good stuff gets very strong word of mouth, the best advertising for any business at any time in history.

David Beeler: Exactly, exactly and that’s where I would say if anybody is going to attempt to create video or do web series, there are a few things I would consider moving into it at this time. First of all is just to look around and see what’s being done and try to find a way to either do something that’s not being done and part of it just because this is an open platform so no one is going to say no. So, this is the chance to do something different as opposed to trying to recreate a television show with the resources to do it which a lot of people do and then it looks like a very sad sick cousin of something that you could see on television. Do something else. Find a way to use your voice to express your creativity, follow your passion but do something that’s been different.

If you’re going to do something that’s been done, for example, like another zombie story or vampire story which are just ripe at the moment, then do that really, really well. And one of the interesting things right now is because there are so many good shows out there, production values have gotten very good very quickly. It’s sometimes very amazing what people can do with very little resources and still have it looked very close to being a TV show. So, that is something you have to bear in mind that to be competitive if you want to, I mean, because you can also just put stuff out there and allow this to be a type of film school where this is where you’re expressing yourself, trying things out, learning and put it up there and if somebody likes it other than your friends and family, cool. And this is like film school. A lot of school films get made not to be watched necessarily but for the learning process that they give.

So, you can either do this to try build an audience and have people follow your shows or just for your learning curve and actually both of them will happen if you’re going for an audience. You’re going to learn stuff. You cannot help but learn stuff.

Michael London: Now, talking about that very topic, where can we follow your stuff? Now, talking about that very topic, where can we follow your stuff?

David Beeler: Well, if you would like to watch some of our shows, the easiest place to go to is daveandtom.com because everything is parked right there. You can also go to our YouTube channel. We’re on Vimeo (Cold Cast). We’re on over 200 portals so just do a search for David and Tom and you’ll find our videos. You cannot help but find them. We are out there and that’s amazing. We actually have had, we did this one thing about a genie and we did a search one time because we were talking to a new media agent and we were like, “Okay, how much are we out there? Let’s find so we can report back and say, this is where we are,” and we did the search and on page, I don’t know, 40 something or 50 something deep in the Google, we were on a French genie fetishes site. We’re like, (What?) That our video was part on a fetishes site for people who were into genies because we’d had a sketch about a genie popping out of a bottle and we’re like, “What the hey!”

So, that is the other wonderful thing is you’ll turn up in these wonderfully obscure and bizarre places.

Michael London: So, let me rub that lantern and wish for a parting shot, some words of wisdom, a golden nugget perhaps of advice?

David Beeler: Well, I think my biggest kernel of advice is one of the signatures on my Dave and Tom email which is a quote from Joseph Campbell, “Follow your bliss,” and it’s one of the easiest and hardest things to do. The beauty of the web space is that you can create whatever you want and that’s both like Spiderman, an awesome responsibility. It’s a power and with that power comes responsibility but if you follow your bliss, you set out doing what you really want to do. It makes your heart sing and there is this easy and difficult because yes, that’s easy to tap into. It’s difficult because there will be many hurdles like what they said, “Well, this seems like it’s been a pretty easy process.”

No, no a lot of it is really hard work but like playing a game like if you play soccer or tennis or any game, when you’re playing it, you’re putting a ton of energy into that but it doesn’t feel like work because you want to play that game. You’re having fun. So, follow your bliss, have that fun. Follow the thing that makes your heart sing and have the courage of your conviction to start. There is no path. Everybody’s path will be different so if you look at somebody else and they’re something and you go, “Well, that works. I need to do what they do.”

No, you need to follow your bliss, follow your path, follow your knowing because your path will be your own and you can’t look at somebody else’s and try and emulate that. Learn from them absolutely but have the courage of your convictions to know that you’ve got to do what you need to do and knowing that is sometimes very hard because there are so many different influence is they can push you in this way or that.

And I think that is it. Like I say, it’s a very simple but difficult thing to follow your bliss and that would be my primary advice to somebody wanting to do anything creative whether it’s making web videos, painting, doing music, an acting career, have that courage to start and then continue and as you continue, really tune into what makes your heart sing and constantly pay attention to that.

Michael London: Best advice I’ve heard in a while and David, thank you so much for joining us today on Spidcast.

David Beeler: You are very welcome and also, I think you need to check out the website like Spidvid that allows you to join up with other people or try to collaborate and do the same things you are because if you’re making anything with a camera, a video or film, it’s a collaborative process. You can’t do this by yourself and you’re going to need to find those people that are your peeps that share your vision and want to do similar things to you. So, I would say, use those resources.

Michael London: Absolutely, make use of those resources. Use us often and as you wish and thanks for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidvid.com or on our Spidvid blog and you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with one of our best Spidcast episodes to date this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on web series, acting, getting lucky, and other interesting stuff. January’s Spidcast features the incredible individuals Tom Konkle and America Young. They are our amazing guests for Spidcast 14, January 2012 which you can listen to below.

Our Guests

Tom Konkle is a professional actor and writer who has also done sketch comedy for over ten years. Tom is the founding member of the sketch troupe Lester McFwap, and has performed hundreds of original shows around the country as well as having completed the television pilot, McFwap!

Tom has starred in the short films “Who Makes Movies,” and “Sanctuary” to name only two. He has appeared in comedy films with David Beeler including “Seat Fillers!,” “The Animal In Us All,” “The Secret To Happiness,” “A Paid Advertisement” “Destiny’s Stop” and “The Argument Clinic.”

Tom has written three screenplays including Village of the Darned and Last Breath. He has also written for television, short films, and industrials.

You may have also seen Tom in commercials, guest star roles on television and independent films. His stage career is extensive with shows including The Real Inspector Hound, Beyond The Fringe, Clare and Tom: A One Woman Show, Loot, Nevermore: The Black Cat, Good Night, Britcom, Double Act and many others.

The remaining Monty Python members asked him to direct, perform and ruin their never before seen sketches live in a show called Owl-Stretching Time. Tom was a series regular on NBC’s Spy TV, Sci-Fi Channel’s Scare Tactics and Fox’s The Orlando Jones Show, Arrested Development, NBC’s The Office, Back to You, Secret Life of the American Teenager and CW’s The Game. Tom stars in four episodes of Comedy Gumbo for Sony Pictures Television and is the voice of the cup in the film Behind the Cup.

Tom recently wrote for and starred in a two man sketch show with John Cleese called The Art of Football. Tom is starring in, co-writing and co-producing the comedy horror film, Quarter Cool Cthulu.

America Young helped start the Feel Good Film Festival in 2008 where it ran until May 2011, while it was at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Her titles were Executive Director and co-Programmer. America is behind the web series Geek Therapy which is where non-geeks go to find their inner geek, and geeks go to cope with geek-related problems. She has collaborated on many online video projects, and she has been involved with many traditional films as well including Abandoned.

We thank Tom and America for being such amazing guests!

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Tom and America talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael London: Hi, I’m Michael London. Welcome to Spidcast, the Future of Collaborative Video Production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Tom Konkle. He’s an actor, director and co-owner of Pith-e Productions. And Thomas moved into the new media space and will tell us all about that. Then we’ll visit with a lady who has a kind of unusually hyphenated title you don’t often hear. A director-stuntwoman, America Young will be here. She has a wonderful outlook on this business and some great insights as well.

But first up is Tom Konkle. Tom, we’ve seen your face, I know we have. It’s all over TV. Tell us a little bit about your story.

Tom Konkle: I started as a professional actor and director in Los Angeles in the early ‘90s and obviously in traditional media. But I also had a background in sketch comedy. I love performing live. I had a sketch troupe for a long time. We toured many places in the world and around the US, ended up partnering up with Dave Beeler and doing a two-man sketch show as British guys. Our hook was that we would British comedy American made and we started a comedy called Pith-e Productions. Pith-e meaning when the internet, at least when it was first starting, everything had to be very short because of bandwidths and storage so we were short and pithy. So, we’re Pith-e so like email Pith-e Productions, myself and Dave and we started filming our sketches.

And I would take stuff that I would make in traditional media and I’d roll through that money very much like something like Orson Welles would do. He’d work on a studio film and then he’d do his passion project as independent project. He’d roll some of that money into it and we did a very similar thing where we took a leap and made shows like “Invention” with Brian Forbes and “Safety Geeks.”

So, my background really is as a filmmaker and actor who finally found the internet as a way of combining those disciplines.

Michael London: So, take us through that process of you venturing into internet production.

Tom Konkle: Well, the story behind me, I was very fortunate. I came out and I really had a passion for acting and directing. I came out from—I actually moved here from Virginia because I went to college at American University in DC and got a degree in Cinema and Theatre from there and I kind of moved here knowing nothing or anyone and lived in a truck and I found a place on the last day before I had to turn the truck in and have my stuff on the street. I found an apartment somewhere in Glendale, California; lovely Glendale and from there, began working getting an agent doing commercials.

I’ve probably 50, 60 commercials. It’s been a really nice way to free me up to do other creative pursuits and then I’ve always had a passion for writing and directing. I’ve done a lot of short films and short form things; beginning to develop now some features because I’ve made the connections I need to make but really I’m a unique animal and that I’m an actor who understands the technical side, the post production and production side intimately because I’ve been doing it for 17 years.

Michael London: Well, you know what, nothing speaks like experience, that’s for sure and you’ve had a lot of experience in commercials. I know you might not want about them. We want to hear about them. Where have we seen your face?

Tom Konkle: Okay, well, commercially, at the moment I have a Coca-Cola running which runs a lot during American Idol. I have a pretty famous internet meme once where I play Brahms in a thing called Raisin Brahms and I think there’s about 100 little mini-fan films where people have corrupted and changed my spot into something else. So, it’s a very bizarre spot and it’s kind of wonderful. I’ve done spots for Quiznos, most major car companies. ING right now is running where I’m up in a hedge, so there’s a bunch, I usually have four or five at any given year. So, that’s been a real boon to keeping the acting career going.

Michael London: What does that feel like? What does it feel like to be the focus of a (parity)?

Tom Konkle: I have to admit, I love it. The Raisin Brahms one with Guten Tag, I have some of them myself that I’ve saved. There’s one guy who did a screensaver of me doing Guten Tag and it’s actually me saying, “Guten Tag” for full two minutes. I was like “Guten Taaaag” it just cracks me up. I love—everything is a remix and everything is a sort of reformulation and what’s cool about the internet is it’s cross pollinating in everything that happens. We didn’t have that in the ‘90s. We didn’t have that happening and now, I can put something up on YouTube or Blip or KoldCast or wherever and it might inspire something else or I might see it reformulated and then come back to me and I love that.

Michael London: Oh, that’s great. Now, you mentioned earlier that you are a hybrid, the talent and techie and that you really put that into play on Safety Geeks: SVI, right?

Tom Konkle: Absolutely. With Safety Geeks: SVI, that was really, I wanted to see the show. I really love Adult Swim and the Adult Swim sense of humor but I always thought with the human face, being an actor, (I was) like, there’s nothing more expressive than a human face. What if you took the sensibility of Adult Swim and (married it) with actual people and of course, I couldn’t destroy a (Costco), I couldn’t do all the same stuff they do so me and Mike Smith and Thor Melsted and Dave Beeler and Brittney Powell, we all got together. We’re all friends that are professionals and said, how can we learn? What’s our learning curve to create a universe build? How do you make it effects latent comedy because there aren’t a lot of, (in fact), heavy ones and we were really groundbreaking.

We started a company called Lumen Actus which was a subcompany and Lumen Actus really is a visual FX and even 3D company and I know the post process. I’ve worked in the studio system as well and I’ve had to deliver films and television shows and I know how to cut them and if I don’t know how to physical do the mix, I know how to supervise it. And so, Safety Geeks was all these disciplines coming together into a sort of passion project of what would make us laugh, how silly can we be and how can we build a world and the effects are part of the joke and so the acting is there and the writing hopefully is there but what’s cool about is without a filter unfettered by a middle man or anything else, right or wrong, very much like putting up a play in a 99-seat theatre, you rise or fall on your own decisions and I really like that about Safety Geeks. And I think Safety Geeks are groundbreaking because it’s the first 3D web series in the world.

Michael London: You got to love that. No brag, just fact. Now, take us a bit deeper into that somewhat uncertain world of 3D.

Tom Konkle: Well, there’s been slower adoption than was predicted and I think part of that is mistakes made on both side. I think there’s still a stigma that somehow it’s a fad or a gimmick which actually came up as an objection when sound was introduced to film like, “Ah, sound will never last,” and then when color came in, they’re like, “It’s not necessary. I like my black and white TV.” But with 3D used properly, it can immerse you further into it.

I think the problem is the studios paid lip service to the company that make it but we have all hardware and not enough software, not enough shows to watch it on so I think we’re kind of upside down. It’s ironic to me the most successful 3D film in history Avatar is not available on 3D Blu-Ray which, I think, is very odd and we’ve been working to get Safety Geeks out on 3D Blu-Ray through our distributor named Yabazam. It’s a division of DDD, Digital Dynamic Depth and I think as people adopt the television and get more comfortable and hopefully, we’re getting into glasses free 3D, I think that for Indies like us, that becomes special. It becomes almost the hook, the niche is, oh, here’s some 3D content where they won’t go, “Is Will Farrell in this comedy or we won’t take it?”

In this case, well, hey, it’s in 3D. The 3D is decent. It’s good. It doesn’t need to have star names in it, big names. We have certainly some great credits because it’s in 3D, it open doors that we wouldn’t normally have opened. We never would have gotten a deal to have a 3D Blu-Ray of our web series had it not been in 3D.

Michael London: Well, that is a perfect example of collaboration as technologies helped you and you have helped pushed technology with your creative work, right?

Tom Konkle: Absolutely, yes. We broke a lot of ground with it when we started Geeks in 2009. There was really no—there wasn’t even a standard for 3D and originally, we delivered it in 2D to KoldCast who helped with some of the negative costs of creating it and it had 7,000 composite shots which is more than the first three Star Wars, the original Star Wars movies combined. Every single shot is an effect shot in Safety Geeks.

Unless you’re physically touching something and nothing is there and as a filmmaker, I was like wow, it’s an interesting challenge plus I’m in it, plus I wrote it plus I’m worrying about bringing the sandwiches. So, for me, any studio project or if I step on to a television thing, I recently did a little guest spot on community or something, it’s like taking weights off my ankles because I’m like, “Really? I don’t have to pick up the cable?” It’s kind of nice.

Michael London: I bet. And that brings me to one of the main points here today and that’s all about collaboration. I’m certain that you found along the way how valuable collaboration is.

Tom Konkle: I think collaboration is really the most important part of the creative process. Unless you’re a novelist or a painter, it is a team effort. Certainly, you have to have your own vision and people will march in the same direction with you if they feel like you know what you’re talking about but I couldn’t do it without the, they’re frankly friends, without the very dear friends that happened to be artists. We call it friendship with a purpose. Most friends get together and go to the bar, well, we, our friends all get together and go, “Okay, let’s make a show.”

And what’s nice about that is I try and bring out the best in myself and in them by enthusiasm and them knowing if I say I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it and in this town in Los Angeles in particular, a lot of people have a lot of plans and a lot of things they’re going to do but what I pride myself in is with myself or Dave and I or me or Brittney, we’ve worked on some things. If we say we’re going to do it, by golly, we go and do it and people know that it will be fruitful and that they’ll be respected and that their contribution will be considered important and for me, that’s the most exciting thing. Collaborating with people that make your game better, it’s like tennis. You want to play with people as good or better than you.

Michael London: Tom, that is such valuable advice. If you say you’re going to do it, just do it. Great stuff. Now, you might have answered a part of this next question, but what advice can you offer to those just starting out?

Tom Konkle: If you were just starting, I would say have the courage of your conviction and what I mean by that is pick a project that’s scalable that will present you and you must know thyself, you are the expert on you and if you know yourself as an artist and where your strengths are, pick a project that is scalable that you can actually do. Don’t have the helicopters coming over the hill, that’s not your first project. That’s your 50th and pick several actually and take those projects and see them through and assume you’re going to learn a lot and fall and fail and be okay with it because a perfectionist will never start and for me, the first few steps into this world, well, you copy what you like. You learn from it. Like I said, earlier, you remix and reformulate something. Make what you want to see. If no one else agrees with you, get out of the business.

Michael London: I love the advice of picking scalable projects. Now, for the beginners, Tom, how hard do they dig their heels in for what they believe?

Tom Konkle: Well, when you’re starting out, there are places what I called the heel you want to die on. If you dig your heels in and you really feel passionate about it, it’s a double edged sword. People respect that and yes, you will have a singular vision come through but make sure that’s the who you want to die on. If you’re digging your heels in because it has to be this particular store, because it has blue in it, that’s not a battle you want to fight. Where you want to dig your heels in is the integrity of the project. Is it being fundamentally altered so this is no longer yours or worse, many people fall in the trap of doing what they think someone else might want? They’re given a brief like, “Well, someone else will find this funnier. I believe this to be commercial. Or I believe this is what other people want.”

You should be your own audience. You should really develop that compass, that internal compass of taste and your own artistic limitations and say, this is to scale, this is what I can do right now really, really well and present that. It’s great to overreach a little bit, push yourself a little bit, but you’ll never start if it seems so overwhelming or if you really fundamentally don’t believe it.

And last thought on that, this comes from experience. I’ve been doing this for very long time and I’ll say half the sets I’ve been on, with all the money flying around. You’re going to have a million dollar commercial. You’re going to have a television show, you could tell when no one on that show believes in what they’re doing. They’re collecting a paycheck or it’s a machine and it’s running through the machine and it’s reflected in the art. So, it may be a (solo) piece, it may be a commercial piece, it may be fluff. But when you’re on a project and there’s an energy and everyone believes in what’s going on, it transcends even its own limitations. If you have, for example, technique but no feeling, well, then it’s like watching a virtuoso but he’s playing with no feeling.

If you have no technique but a lot of feeling, well, then you have potential there but you’re not executing it. The perfection of art is matching technique and feeling so that what you’re doing is reaching the audience that you intended for which includes you but has a technique where you can execute the idea.

Michael London: And you have indeed reached your intended audience. Where can we see your stuff?

Tom Konkle: There’s a couple of places you can see it. One is really easy, I can’t believe we got this domain name, if you want to see the Dave and Tom stuff, some of its double act which is the British comedy that we do, the sketch show, you go to www.daveandtom.com and that’s AND spelled out so daveandtom.com. Also, it has Invention with Brian Forbes which is a show that has been critically, just chugging along. We call it the little show that could; safetygeekssvi.com, you can see Safety Geeks. If you want to see it in 3D, you go to yabazam.com and I’ll spell that, that’s yabazam.com. You can download it. You can take a look at it. Stream it if you have a 3D TV or computer and the other show that I’m doing is Ask Grim.

If you put in, Ask Grim in YouTube, you’ll see a very funny show that I do with Sandra Payne and all those are there and I have an upcoming series that I’m going to be doing with Brittney Powell called Rom Com which is kind of an edgy romantic comedy which will also be on YouTube. So, any of those places you can find me. And if you’re interested in visual effects or 3D work, lumenactus.com and I’ll spell that out, lumenactus.com and that is my production company and visual effects company.

Michael London: We will meet you there. And how about a parting shot for us to take away?

Tom Konkle: A parting shot would basically be this, take a real assessment of who you want to be as an artist and how you want to present yourself. Have a very real sense of your own audience and what you are capable of creating in this moment, not I want to or I will but where you are right now and know that that art that you create now, you’ll look back and it won’t be, that will be early stage you but it’s okay. So, have the courage of your conviction. Go for it, start, begin. There’s a great quote that I’ll leave you with. I believe it was Somerset Maugham who said, “I only do something when inspiration strikes.” Fortunately, inspiration strikes every morning at 9:00 am.

Michael London: Thank you, Tom Konkle for joining us today on Spidcast.

Tom Konkle: All right, take care. Thank you so much.

Operator: Spidcast.

Michael London: Next stop is director, stuntwoman, America Young. America, thank you so much for joining us today on Spidcast.

America Young: Well, thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

Michael London: And for the benefit of those listening who haven’t yet heard your name, they will. Fill us in. Tell us a bit about your story.

America Young: My story, I’ve been living out in LA for a few years now. I’ve moved out here to be an actress and while I was out there, I also discovered that I also like bossing people around which naturally lead to producing and directing and I’ve also been doing a lot of stunt work in the last couple of years. So, basically, my story is I’m a storyteller.

Michael London: So, how do we know if you’re telling stories right now?

America Young: I’m always telling a story. Sometimes, they’re true then sometimes they’re not.

Michael London: Well, I say, good for you then. Hey, where have we seen some of your stunts?

America Young: I was actually just in Transformers 3 doing stunt work in Washington DC and I just filmed on John Carter of Mars which is a new Pixar movie coming out and I do a lot of stunt work in a TV show called Goodnight Burbank which is on Hulu and was on HDNet.

Michael London: Oh, we recently had Hayden Black, Goodnight Burbank creator on Spidcast. So, America, how or why did you make the jump to online media?

America Young: Because I was bored and I was not creatively fulfilled by the projects I was working on. A lot of the times, you take projects that pay the bills that you aren’t necessarily proud that you’re a part of or you don’t find them particularly interesting. So, I started just doing stuff online because then you get to tell the stories that you want to tell and the way you want to tell them.

Michael London: So, you’ve kind of taken a different path than most we’ve talked to and that you already had a traditional film career, then you got involved in this new media. Has that helped or hindered you?

America Young: I think it’s only helped jumping from film to new media. I know it does seem a little bit backwards but the truth of the matter is more and more are doing it because of the creative control they get over their own projects and because of the things that they get to create. When you’re working on a film, you’re hindered and helped. I mean, granted you’re helped by the studio and their money but you’re also hindered by the fact that they’re still pulling the strings and that you’re telling the story that they want to tell.

The new media online, you are the boss and you get to do what you do, money restricted, of course, and that helps so much. It helped with my creativity, it helped with my learning of all aspects because we’re doing independent film. You’re doing every aspects of filmmaking possible and I think the more you learn about filmmaking, the better it makes you at whatever you want to be.

If you’re an actor and you learn what it is to produce something, then that makes you a better actor because you know what you’re stepping into. If you’re a director and you have to teach yourself how to edit, that absolutely makes you a better director because then you know how to shoot for the editing room. So, in every single way, it’s like an intensive course on filmmaking.

Michael London: I love everything you just said. I trust there was lots of note taking going on as well. This is terrific insight, America. We appreciate it. Tell us your experience with collaboration.

America Young: The barter system is alive and well in Los Angeles. I’ll work on yours if you work on mine and that has helped so much because there’s no better way to learn than by doing it yourself, by doing it with people who know how to do it better than you and that’s what happened is. You work on somebody’s projects for them doing what you do best. I’ll get hired on someone’s project to do stunt work because that’s something that I do well and I can coordinate and as in return of a favor, then I’ll bring them on to my project to do what they do best and then I learn from them.

So, collaboration is the best way to do this and a lot of new media is not paid or if it’s paid, it’s peanuts. What you’re learning, what you get is so much more valuable because you’re learning and you’re getting the experience.

Michael London: At times, there are things more valuable than the mighty dollar. Now, you touched on so many good points and you may have answered part of this but what are some tips for those just starting out.

America Young: I say, just do it, man. Just jump in and do it. It’s terrifying at first. it’s overwhelming at first but you learn as you go and that’s the best way to go. So, find a story whether it’s a short one-minute video that you want to go viral or if it’s a web series that you want to tell that you think hasn’t been told or hasn’t been told in this way and find somebody who’s a friend of yours who’s a writer and say, “Hey, how do this and do that?” And then once it’s written, get your favorite actor friend that you know or hold auditions and meet a brand new group of talented people and just do it.

It’s a step by step by step and reach out to people in your lives that you know that know what they’re doing or have experience and something that you have questions on. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t have too much ego to not admit that you don’t know what you’re doing and just do it. And your first project most likely will be awful. They’ll be so many things with it that you wish you had done differently but that’s the best way to learn is looking back on that and going, “Oh, my god, I really wish I had done this or wow, we really needed a sound guy on that or next time, we’re definitely having a makeup artist.” And then as you go, you learn what’s important to you for telling your story. But that’s the only way you can do it is to do it.

Michael London: Excellent, love it, just do it. So, where can we see some of the things that you have done?

America Young: Well, I’ve done a lot of work with Comediva. It’s comediva.com. It’s COMEDIVA and it’s a website that’s like a funny or die college humor specifically geared towards female comedy and I’ve done a lot of work with them creating shows and directing things and writing things. So, there’s a lot of stuff of mine on there and you could always follow me on twitter and that’s @america_young and then my website, I usually update. I’m a little behind updating because I’m so busy which is a great excuse to not update but americayoung.com. I usually eventually post links everything I’m working on.

Right before the holidays, I directed a video that was a light saber duo between Christmas elves and you can se that on YouTube. It’s called Elf Sabers and Teal Sherer was actors in it who produced it. It’s on her YouTube channel, My Gimpy Life and I also just directed a web series presentation pilot called Wrestling with Parenthood and it’s basically Mr.Mom in the professional wrestling world so we have some real professional wrestlers who are in it and that’s pretty exciting. So, I’ll be posting updates about that on my website and on Twitter.

Michael London: Lots of cool things to check out so if somebody’s listening and you want them to say, “I was listening to this pod cast and this girl named America Young said blank,” what would you like them to remember?

America Young: Bite off more than you can chew and then chew it. Jump in the deep end and learn how to swim really fast. Just do it. if you want it and this is what you want more than anything in the world, don’t let anything stop you except the law but even law can stop you but other than that.

Michael London: You know, I once had a guy tell me that there’s a wall that I never want you to go over, luckily, it’s made of rubber and I won’t respect you unless you run and hit that wall as hard as you can every now and again.

America Young: I love that. That’s a wonderful expression because it’s true, you do have to hit the wall sometimes and it sucks, man, but it’s worth it because you learn from that and it makes you stronger and if you can survive hitting the wall, you can survive almost anything.

Michael London: America Young, thank you so much for joining us today on Spidcast. It’s been a delight.

America Young: Well, thanks so much for having me. This is really fun.

Michael London: And thank you for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidvid.com on our Spidvid blog and you can join on our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with one of our best Spidcast episodes to date this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on web series, acting, getting lucky, and other interesting stuff. December’s Spidcast features the incredible creator of the vampires vs zombies web series Suck and Moan, Joel Bryant, and the producer of hit web and TV show Goodnight Burbank, Hayden Black. They are our amazing guests for Spidcast 13, December 2011 which you can listen to below.

Our Guests

Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Joel Bryant attended La Cueva High School (former students include: Neil Patrick Harris, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Terri Conn and Tony Vincent). He started acting at the age of 11, doing stand-up when he was 14, and began improv training at 16. After winning Outstanding Actor at the New Mexico Theatre Festival, he was offered a theatre scholarship from Pepperdine University. He headed west and graduated magna cum laude in three years with a B.A. in acting. Among his numerous theatre highlights, he has garnered glowing reviews all over L.A. (Knightsbridge Theatre, Hudson Theatre, and The Next Stage) and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Texas Shakespeare Festival and a variety of regional theatres throughout the Southwest, including the world premiere of “Terminal Cafe” with Neil Patrick Harris. Trained in improv at the L.A. Connection (Best Newcomer in 2001), Joel is a co-founder and member of the award-winning comedy duo Deven & Joel with Deven Green, with whom he has toured with Armed Forces Entertainment entertaining the troops overseas, performed at a series of maximum security prisons, played at colleges and clubs all over the U.S., and have headlined at many places including The Comedy Store, The Icehouse, the Venetian in Las Vegas, the Chi Chi Club on Catalina Island, all over L.A. and San Diego, a week of sold out shows at the San Francisco Fringe Festival and won the Best of the Fest at the International Hollywood Comedy Festival. They have also opened for Eddie Griffin, Paul Rodriguez, and Andrew Dice Clay. Since starting stand-up comedy at the age of 14, he has performed in such places as The Comedy Store, The Icehouse, The Comedy Union, Laff’s, The Queen Mary, and many clubs in between. An accomplished dancer (hip hop, swing, ballet), he has been seen in “The Nutcracker” (with Moira Sinise) and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at Smothers Theatre. He has been a writer and performer for a number of well-reviewed sketch comedy shows (”Sketch This!,” “Sketch In The City,” and “Unnatural Selections”), written for “Friday Night Fix” on F/X, and has developed a full-length feature for Fox.

Hailing from Manchester, England, Hayden moved to the US in ’97 because he wanted to better understand the culture that produced five different home shopping networks. Hayden once sang with early ‘90’s new wave band The The The – but they only lasted long enough to put out one single, the ill-fated “I’d Love It If You Loved Me”. Shoving all those dreams into a bottle and burying it somewhere in the garden, Hayden eventually carved out a career in radio shipping news and has used that talent to catapult him to success here in Burbank at Channel 6. He loves Burbank and all nine of its restaurants. Gordon’s divorced, enjoys golf, and quiet weekends avoiding LA traffic. Hayden is also the co-host of the hit web and TV show Goodnight Burbank.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Joel and Hayden talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Transcript Below

Michael: Hi, I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Joel Bryant, actor and producer of the web series “Suck and Moan”. He’s also an accomplished standup comic as part of the comedy duo of “Deven & Joel.” We’ll also visit with Hayden Black. He is the writer, producer and co-star of “Goodnight Burbank.” Now, Hayden’s story has a wonderful twist to it that you will not want to miss.

First up is Joel Bryant. Now, tell us a bit about your story?

Joel: Absolutely. I was originally born and raised in Albuquerque in New Mexico. Lived there until I was 18 and came out here for college; actually, started acting in Albuquerque when I was 11 years old. No need to get into the arts because it was because I saw a buddy’s picture on a billboard for a local bank and he did a local commercial and everybody was talking about it and I really thought he was really cool for doing that so I thought this acting thing sounds like a blast.

So, I started looking into acting. I went into some acting classes and as soon as I started getting acting classes, I just got hooked on it. The bug kicked in so I was roped into acting classes and then after that, I started standup when I was 16 years old. I told my mom to take me to a club and to try an open mic, did it and it was great to be the young kid in the club.

I started improv when I was 17 and all that culminated in winning Outstanding Acting Award of the New Mexico Theatre Festival, which kind of cemented the fact that maybe I’m doing the right thing. I went out to Pepperdine University in Malibu on a theatre scholarship and since then, have been living in Los Angeles doing what I do.

Michael: So, my question is then what is the 16-year-old comic’s point of view in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Joel: When he was a 16-year-old at a comedy club, it’s amazing because your voice is so unique. There’s obviously not a lot of 16-year-olds there, so you’re talking about how interesting like girls are and I wonder what sex is, I wonder what drinking is and you’re so innocent and you’re naïve and the people are really on board with you because they’ve all been through that and no one can really represent that voice except coming from a real naïve 16-year-old point of view.

And it was interesting because after college just like a few years off of standup, I got back into it in my late 20’s and I tried to revisit some of those jokes, it didn’t quite fly because when you’re in your late 20’s, you’ve had the drinks, you’ve had the girl, you’ve had all these life experiences. So, it was an interesting obstacle, an interesting mountain to re-climb getting back on stage again and finding out, okay, what is my voice now? Obviously, I can’t be the naïve 16-year-old. I have a driver’s license now and not in school anymore. I have bills to pay. So, that was an interesting thing but I love being the 16-year-old. It was fun to be the kid.

Michael: So, you leave Albuquerque for LA and take us through that journey.

Joel: The reason I came out here for college, I only looked at Los Angeles schools because I always wanted to come to Los Angeles. As soon as I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I was in love with the idea of what Los Angeles was and so we came out for a vacation and went to Hollywood and finally realized, it’s not really glamorous there but I was still in love with the idea of it.

And so I just looked at schools out here in Los Angeles. I looked at Pepperdine and a couple of other schools and I just kind of went to the school that would give me the theatre scholarship and the best deal and Pepperdine came through. The reason why I wanted is kind of dipped my toe into Los Angeles and kind of feel it out a little bit while I’m still getting some money from the government, from mom to kind of ease into it as opposed to packing everything in a car and just moving out here not knowing anything.

So, it was a nice introduction to be in college and kind of feel the city out and feel the industry out but then when I actually graduated, they didn’t teach you a lot of the business aspect. They taught you how to act in college and how to do Bertolt Brecht and the existential movement and all that sort of stuff and then when you leave, you have no idea what a headshot is or a resume is or how to network or anything.

So, it took me a number of years in trying to maintain jobs, trying to pay for college, trying to find out what theatre were or what it wasn’t, what was worth taking. So, it took me awhile to navigate the pitfalls of Los Angeles. I think a lot of other people, they got a strong programs or they have a good mentors when they get out and I was kind of on my own a little bit and trying to figure it all out.

So, I use my same black and white headshots from my first theatre gig in college and a resume I half wrote up on paper and pencil. So, it took me a few years to figure it out.

Michael: And Joel, what was your breakthrough moment?

Joel: Oh, the breakthrough. You know that’s an interesting question. It hasn’t really been necessarily a huge breakthrough. It’s been kind of a slow steady build, it’s like I’ve always been a very proactive person, someone who really hustles and finally, in like my late 20’s, all that work start to kind of culminating into consistent work.

One of my first breakthrough, I did a film called, “Life, Death in Mini-Golf” which I was guaranteed, I thought this is going to be a hit. This is going to be huge because the role is written for me. There was a budget. There were some actors who would actually have credits. Actually, Kristen Wiig from Saturday Night Live was actually in it way before Saturday Night Live and everything. So there were all these talented people and now, with the film, I was sure it’s going to be a huge hit so that made me quit my waiting table job. So, I was like, “I’m just going to quit waiting tables. I’m taking the leap of faith now.”

Obviously, that didn’t work out as a hit movie but it did give me the impetus to, “Okay, now, I don’t have a job. Now, I really have to start acting.” Between that and meeting my wife who just has a great business mind. She has the business acumen. She’s the one who taught me that acting isn’t all living in your cars and doing black box theatre and doing three lines and a TV show or doing some small stuff. It’s a business and meeting her and knowing that business is 90% of it and then there’s 10% fun and talent, all the other good stuff that you love about it but really to focus into the business sense. She was the one that really guided me along.

Michael: Well, that’s wonderful that you have a partner that understands and keeps the business in rolling.

Joel Bryant: Absolutely, it’s the best partnership because we get to not only do we have our own individual careers. She has a huge online career. I have an online career as well as traditional media but we also tour around as a comedy duo together so we get to literally tour the world. We went to the troops overseas and performed for them, at Canada, all over the place and it’s so much fun when you get to tour with your spouse/comedy partner as opposed to calling her from the road and saying, “Hey, Italy is great.” You’re experiencing this together, the good and the bad. We did a series of prison shows. I want to do this with my wife, you know what I mean? This is how to actually experience this.

That became the goal for me later on. It was always to win an Oscar by the time I was 24 years old. That was the goal coming out of the gates but the goal slowly merged into, I want to enjoy what I’m doing and have fun doing it and that’s once I started reaching that level, I could finally step back, look around and say, you know what? I kind of make my own schedule. I’m doing things I want to do. I’m doing it with people I want to do it with and I think that became the goal. That’s the place I’m at right now.

Michael: So, then tell us a bit about your web presence. Tell us about “Suck and Moan”.

Joel: “Suck and Moan” is a web series that in the later stages of release, we have two more episodes to release. It’s played a number of festivals and it’s done really well. Got a lot of good awards which really makes me proud and it got some nice notices and reviews across the board.

It was the brainchild of a friend of mine, Brendon Fong who came to me with the idea and he had shot and everything and I’d been in the new media market for a couple of years working at other projects. He said, “I had this project ‘Suck and Moan’.” And so what it is? “Well, it’s zombie or vampires trying to survive during a zombie apocalypse.” I said that’s kind of clever. It takes two big pop cultural horror icons and smashes them together in a very satirical way so it’s kind of “Shawn of the Dead” meets vampire clerks if you will because the vampires are mad because the zombies are eating all the humans and they’re also really loud at night and all this. They’re kind of ruining the peace that these vampires have established for themselves.

It’s very tongue and cheek and it’s very fun but I’ve been in thedia, I got nominated for a Streamy Award for “After Judgment.” I’ve done some other guest spots and that kind of got me in that world and I realized how much of a fun, proactive community it is and how amazing it is that you can just create a project with a friend of yours, have other friends come on board, talented people and kind of shoot all that and meld it all together and make your own project.

So, “Suck and Moan” suckandmoan.com and we just had our big screening of our big rap party/screening of the last two episodes to a packed house up in Burbanks. So, it’s kind of, we’ve put the nail in the coffin, not to use a really bad pun right now, put the nail in the coffin on season 1 and then we’ll see where it goes.

Michael: And Joel, what advice do you have for someone coming from Boise or Springfield of Albuquerque to LA?

Joel: Coming from Albuquerque, there’s been a lot of us actually. Neil Patrick Harris from Albuquerque, Freddie Prinze Jr. Albuquerque, all went to my same high school. The advice coming from a smaller town going to a bigger town is to do everything you can within your small town before you jump into the bigger market. It’s a lot easier to gain credits and experience, be a bigger fish in a small pond before you have to jump into being a smaller fish in the big ponds.

Make your mistakes when the stakes are low. Screw up on stage in a small theatre in Albuquerque before you get cast in a huge equity show in LA and screw up there. I think that’s really the main key and then only come out when you’re ready to come out. I think people are going to want to rush coming out. Take your time. Ease into it. Find a good support system when you get out there when you got to LA or New York or Chicago. Don’t lose your head. I think the main thing is when you start actually working, don’t burn bridges and don’t be an A-hole. Show up early. Be fun to work with, do a good job and then leave a good impression behind.

Michael: Superb advice. So, what is next for Joel Bryant?

Joel: Next for Joel—looking for funding for season 2 of “Suck and Moan” and selling that. My wife and I are going to be hitting the road during December to do some holiday shows, comedy shows, private corporate stuff, which is always a nice Christmas bonus.

I also got just a couple of firm projects in the (hop) I’m making the film festival route right now doing two plays here in Los Angeles, one in February and one in March, balancing that out and actually, recently I cast in a broadway show so I’m going to be going out there hopefully, in April, I think. I got to look at the calendar. I like to keep busy, I told you.

Michael: Wonderful to hear. So, where can we keep up to date on your busy schedule?

Joel: You can always go to joelbryant.net. It’s also devengreen.com, same website, devenandjoel.com. It’s all the same website. We have all of our stuff up there. Her videos, my videos, our calendar, some fun stuffs there and Facebook, email, Twitter, all that stuffs on there and we love interacting with people so give a shout.

Michael: And how about a parting shout, Joel, a great nugget to take away?

Joel: The nugget to take away from this, from Joel Bryant, your free nugget of the day, if you will, I think, I actually closed—I was lucky enough to go teach in my alma mater at Pepperdine last year which was kind of a big honor to go talk to the kids and it sounds weird to say kids and the nugget I told them was, constantly redefine your success. I think you always have to do that. There is obviously some major goal that you want but you have to—I think your success should be very fluid. So, when I graduated college, I wanted that Oscar at 24, the Oscar didn’t come so I want to just work by 25. Work didn’t come at 25 so I just wanted to quit my day job by 27.

So, I think, keep realistic goals in mind but realize it’s very fluid and a lot is up to luck. So, you know what? Just have fun on the journey.

Michael: Thank you, Joel Bryant, for joining us today on Spidcast.

Joel: Thanks for having me.

Operator: Spidcast.

Michael: Next up is writer, producer, actor, Hayden Black. Hayden, for the benefit of those listening who haven’t heard your name yet but they will, fill us in. Tell us a bit about your story.

Hayden: A little bit about me, Hayden Black. Well, I’m from England. I come from Manchester, I moved to Florida which is not fun but been in LA for a while and I do a few shows on the web one of which is going to television which is “Goodnight Burbank.” So, I guess, the first thing about me is I identify as a writer, first and foremost.

Michael: So, tell us a bit about the process you take as a writer and also how that role expanded and evolved.

Hayden: Well, the writing is something that I’ve always done since I was in high school and then it was 2006, I was taking a class, an improv class at Upright Citizens Brigade, UCB and somebody there mentioned that they had access to a green screen studio and we should shoot stuff for the web and for mobile and this is 2006.

So, all of us, myself included were basically like, “What’s that all about?” So, I did some research and saw what was coming and I went, wow. This looks amazing. Plus, it’s a great way of letting people producers and whatnot see your stuff. So, I wrote this pilot episode. We shot it a few days later and we kind of hit the ground running but it became so successful, we started to do more and that’s when I found myself not just as a writer any longer but as a producer.

And I hadn’t acted before and I was acting in it so there were just many new hats that I suddenly found myself wearing and because there was no pressure to do the most amazing work that a billion people are going to watch immediately. It allowed me the time to learn the craft better and to do more and that’s what we have over the years.

Michael: Now, you mentioned being involved in online content as far back as 2006 which makes you a bit of a pioneer but your web series has done something quite unique. Share that with us.

Hayden: Well, we started about just over a year ago 2010, I guess it was, took a meeting with Hulu and they suggested doing a half-hour version of “Goodnight Burbank.” Up until that point, we’ve done about 30 odd episodes and just again, learning, learning, learning. And then I went back to England, I haven’t back in years and met with a couple of networks over there and pitched them some ideas one of which was a British half hour version of Burbank and they were very interested in that but they asked the question which kind of threw me. “So, what does a half-hour version look like?”

And I realized, I don’t really know. I’d original had an idea for a half-hour show. I whittled it down to five minutes so it became “Goodnight Burbank” but that was so different to this original half-hour that I’d initially created back in 2005 that it was like starting all over again. So, I then spent two months just working on developing what a half-hour version of Burbank would look like.

And then I started casting it with a new cast. We got the amazing Laura Silverman. We got Dominic Monaghan. People like John Barrowman came on board, Miracle Laurie, Camden Toy, people from the world of Dollhouse and Buffy. It was just phenomenal how just things started filling up. I wrote all six scripts which became the first season and we shot them slowly because our resources were fairly limited because now, I was in a whole new world at this point. Now, I’m producing half-hour, at that time, we couldn’t technically say half hour television but I was producing a half hour show that I’d written.

And so again, big learning curve and when we finished, two things happened. One was a company called Zodiac, the third largest production company/distribution company in the world, they saw a rough cut of the first few episodes and snapped up the global TV distribution rights and then we premiered on Hulu, it was April 25th or this year 2011 and Mark Cuban was watching and he snapped up the show for US cable the next day.

Michael: Wow. That is an amazing story. Now, everybody who gets in this business wants fame or fortune or however they measured their own success and you have achieved that. I’d like for you to tell us how that feels.

Hayden: Like it’s surreal. It’s the first feeling. I mean, it’s funny you should ask this because when we’re doing it, when you’re in the middle of it, you believe in it and you’re constantly striving to make it better and better and better in case you get the chance to go to that next platform. And you pour your heart and soul into it and as does the rest of the cast and crew by the way, this is not a one-man operation.

And so you got all this energy and you’re pouring into it and you’re all hoping and then it happened and I think when it happens, it really made me realize—I do come up with sayings but I came up with an expression that day explaining to my mom what had just happened. I said there are a million reasons to say no to something and only one reason to say yes and that is that you can’t think of a million reasons to say no.

There’s so many—just because Mark was watching the show didn’t mean that he was going to then want to pick it up for his network. So, so many—it’s just unbelievably surreal that he did and making it even more astonishing was that he wanted it immediately.

Michael: So, what were your first thought when he said, “I want to sign this.”

Hayden: Well, I was doing at the time, because I produced this whole show while doing a full time freelance day job. So, it was two careers kind of going on at the same time and I was still at the day job when we premiered and I got the email the following morning and I was then at an open-plan cubicle office over at NBC and I had to contain myself. I don’t know how I did it but I’m sure people probably still heard me jumping up and down.

Michael: That is a wonderful story. Now, knowing what you know today about the whole process, what would you do differently?

Hayden: Well, I think that the only thing that—I’m really, really glad that I put in the time to develop a show, write the scripts, keep rewriting the scripts and then rewrite the scripts more and then to keep rewriting the scripts. That was so important to the process. It was amazing, some of the things I learned as I went like watching how the crew—excuse me, the cast, kind of started jelling and finding their own chemistry. If you watched the six episodes, you can see certainly by episode 3 the cast really starting to find their feet and really starting to come together.

I think some of the pitfalls that we wound up and it’s because we have such low resources, it wasn’t until after we’d shot some of the shows that we found some issues with either sound or we’d shot on P2 cards and I think there were two scenes overall that did not transfer. One we managed to re-shoot because it was very simple and the other, sadly, we couldn’t remount so we had to take the scene as is and edit it completely way down because I think we had one angle and because the other angle was lost and these are things, if I had known, I would have ensured somebody was watching every single P2 card as it was being downloaded on to a computer, stuff like that but just keeping a big eye over things production wise.

Michael: I would guess that each of us has at some point loss some P2 footage, I know I have, right. Now, tell us about how collaboration via places like Spidvid has helped it.

Hayden: Oh, boy, when we started the original, I spoke to a guy over a company called Live Video and they were very, very happy to give us use of their green screen office. Literally, it wasn’t even a green screen studio. That was a space outside their office that was painted green and they allowed us to use that in exchange for I was allowing them to put “Goodnight Burbank” on their platform which I did not have a problem with and I think the collaborative thing is taken every step further when you start producing. You’ve got actors who are bringing their game to the table and their choices of how they deliver the lines and what they can even possibly add.

You’ve also got the crew. You couldn’t do it without a fantastic crew pitching in and taking care of things and keeping an eye out for things that only they can see and certainly stuff I’m not going to see. So, it’s an entirely collaborative medium, entirely collaborative. You couldn’t do it by yourself. Like I said, I was working two jobs. I would come back from the one job, if I’d had a bad day, I had to literally leave that at the door because it’s all trickled down if I was in a bad mood, everybody else is going to be in a crappy mood too. And that would have been the height of unprofessionalism.

So I just really had to go that extra mile sometimes, not all the times, thank god, but sometimes you just don’t have a great day.

Michael: This is great advice for the young filmmakers. Thank you so much. I’d like to know now how you found an audience for “Goodnight Burbank.”

Hayden: Well, the original show in 2006, what happened was we got a couple of reviews and one of the websites apparently was being monitored by the guys over at iTunes who were looking for stuff themselves. They saw the review of “Goodnight, Burbank” again, this is back in 2006 and then put us, they went and watched the show and then put it on the front page.

So, we got very lucky. We were one of the first ones out then we were also one of the firsts to do really well. So, we could take advantage of that. This time around for the half hour version, we have an arrangement with Hulu wherein they give us some promotion and marketing and I think, it’s just so competitive these days with so many people uploading their stuff on a daily basis, it’s not hourly. Any bit of promotion and marketing can really help.

Michael: Well, it certainly can’t hurt. Hayden, where can people see your stuff?

Hayden: They could see “Goodnight Burbank” either at goodnightburbank.com or hulu.com/goodnight-burbank and they can follow the Twitter because I update the Twitter account with jokes taken from the news every single day and that’s @goodniteburbank, with the night spelled, N-I-T-E, in the Twitter account. N-I-G-H-T everywhere else and you can also follow me on Twitter @Haydenblack where I’m writing crazy crap all the time.

Michael: Yes, as you are but it is very entertaining crap. All right, Hayden, our time is short. You’ve had a degree of success. I was wondering if you could pay it forward just a bit. How about some free advice for someone just getting ready to dip their toe into producing web content?

Hayden: I would say, when you’re doing this, this is a fantastic form that’s open to us all. We can all now use the web as a means of distribution but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. It’s a great, to me, like when we started “Goodnight Burbank,” it wasn’t done in a sense of, “Oh, my god, let’s conquer the web. Let’s show the world how brilliant we are.” It was really done more out of a sense of let’s see what we can do and let’s see how we can learn and I see this, it’s a fantastic learning opportunity but I see a lot of people are so terribly impatient and they want everybody to look at what they’ve just done and oftentimes, it’s not there yet. They haven’t spent the time working out the scripts or casting it well or whatever.

And I think that we all have to do those things to learn from them but we shouldn’t be imploring everybody else to watch our mistakes. We should just be learning from them and that’s how we started “Goodnight Burbank.” We didn’t start out perfect. We’re still not perfect but just being patient and really realizing what this medium can truly bring to you. It’s a fantastic lesson, every time you do something and upload it, you’re learning and that’s how—Spielberg still I’m sure learns from every project he’s done and continues making even making better content.

Michael: Hayden, I got to tell you, stories like yours and series like yours is what keeps new filmmakers jumping in and making new and exciting content. We thank you for that. I’m so tickled for your success.

Hayden: Oh, thank you so much. I am too, still feel very surreal.

Michael: As well you should be. Thank you, Hayden Black, for joining us today on Spidcast.

Hayden: It’s my pleasure, Michael.

Michael: Thanks for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at spidvid.com or at our Spidvid blog and you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with quite possibly our best Spidcast episode to date this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on the early days of web series and traditional filmmaking too. October’s Spidcast features the incredible co-creator of Lonelygirl15, Mesh Flinders, and James Chressanthis has had 2 Emmy nominations for his cinematography, among many other elite accolades. They are our amazing guests for Spidcast 12, October 2011 which you can listen to below.

Our Guests

Mesh Flinders is a filmmaker, copywriter, and the award winning co-creator, writer, and director of the ground breaking web series Lonelygirl15.

His latest short film, Further Lane, has played numerous national and international film festivals including Palm Springs International Shorts Fest, the Hamptons International Film Festival and Indie Shorts London, where it was nominated for the Grand Prix.

Mesh also gives talks on the intersection of film and social media at film schools, festivals, and media panels.

James Chressanthis, ASC is a filmmaker who has earned a diverse range of nearly forty credits since the early 1990s, including studio motion pictures, independent features, television movies episodic drama series and documentaries. His cinematography has been nominated for an Emmy® twice: Four Minutes Roger Bannister’s quest to break the four minute mile barrier and the acclaimed mini-series Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. He also shot critical additional 1st Unit photography on the Oscar® – winning Chicago. Other notable credits include Urban Legend, the controversial mini-series The Reagans, “3” (The Dale Earnhardt Story), The Music Man, Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime (both with Julie Andrews), Judas Kiss and Brian’s Song.

Chressanthis began his film career shooting break-through and first music videos for such artists as NWA, Dr. Dre, John Wesley Harding, Hammer, and Bobby McFerrin as well as James Brown and a Grammy® nominated clip Smells Like Nirvana for “Weird Al” Yankovic. More recently Chressanthis has been a director and cinematographer of the popular CBS dramatic series Ghost Whisperer completing five seasons and over 100 one-hour episodes. His feature film directing debut No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos about the legendary Hungarian cinematographers and the American New Wave, premiered as an official selection of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and has been seen in more than twenty-five film festivals worldwide culminating with a national broadcast on PBS and his third Emmy® Nomination: Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming.

James Chressanthis trained as a sculptor and today exhibits large mixed media digital prints and paintings when he is not shooting films.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Mesh and James talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full show transcript below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with James Chressanthis, cinematographer and director, and also indie filmmaker, Mesh Flinders. Twice nominated for Emmy awards for cinematography using James’ work on the miniseries “The Reagans,” the film “Chicago” and breakthrough videos for “NWA”, “Dr. Dre”, and also Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana.”

Mesh Flinders credits include being the co-creator of the massively successful web series “Lonelygirl15” which got him widespread media coverage from “Time” and “Newsweek” magazines to the “Times of London” and the “New York Times”, to the “NBC Nightly News”, ABC’s “Nightline”, the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and the “Daily Show”. A wonderful Spidcast on tapped today, settle in. Here we go.

First up is James Chressanthis, ACS. James, welcome to Spidcast.

James: Hey. Hi, Michael

Michael: So tell us a bit about yourself so people can get to know you about how you came to be an award nominated cinematographer.

James: Well, I grew up in kind of modest circumstances in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The L Train was my earliest memory. Not a place close to Hollywood but I was always interested in photography and my father and mother encouraged me in that and so I’ve been taking photographs since the age of 10 and then I started making films in college but very slowly moved toward movies. I studied Fine Arts, black and white photography and sculpture and drawing and so I had a very, very strong Fine Arts education.

And then at that point, I started making little films and one thing led to another but it took me like a 10-year odyssey to finally go to Hollywood.

Michael: Wow. Well, take us, Reader’s Digest style now through those 10 years.

James: I did sculpture and drawing very strong Fine Arts. I actually did bronze casting, did a lot of life drawing. I started doing multimedia installations and I started with shooting film and video with those and doing projection pieces, stuffs of dance and performance. I was sort of on the periphery of movies but then I started making, I made a couple of student films in 16mm and they started to get noticed.

But even then to make a living, to work in Hollywood didn’t seem like possible to me so I made this documentary about a Greek mountain village, a life of a Greek mountain village from the end of winter to the summer wheat harvest and that film got on PBS and it was in a festival in Houston, I think, and the director Bill Richert who did “Winter Kills” was there and he said, “So, kid, you directed the film. You shot the film. You edited the film. You mixed the sound. You cut the negative yourself. You promoted it and got it on PBS and you’re teaching college in Michigan? So, kid, they pay you to do that work out in Hollywood.” So, at age 30, I packed up and went to the American Film Institute and chucked my job and starved for a bit and then started shooting out here in Los Angeles.

Michael: And what was that film? Can we see that somewhere?

James: The film? Gee, it’s on YouTube. I put it on YouTube. That film was “Remembrance of a Journey to the Village,” 1980.

Michael: Now, as I understand that it was your time at AFI when you really blossomed?

James: What happened at the American Film Institute, that was the first time I really started collaborating and working with crews and not working in a solitary fashion and I had the good fortune to be the intern to Vilmos Zsigmond on “The Witches of Eastwick.” And at the end of the show after working on it for 100 days, Vilmos had me shoot some pickup shots and some inserts and some special effects inserts for the movie. So, I went from intern to kind of second unit (DP), in one fell swoop and then I started doing music videos and I shot the music videos of Bobby McFerrin, Hammer, NWA, Dr. Dre. I did about 80 music videos in that period and had a Grammy nomination with “Weird Al” Yankovic in “Smells Like Nirvana.

So, that was a great training ground doing the music videos but especially doing the west coast rap and hip hop artists being right at the beginning of that was very, very nice and then I moved into narrative features and movies and television from there.

Michael: And these music videos must have been really great training for you?

James: Yes, Rupert Wainwright, the director and I, we had a great collaboration and we always tried to do narrative. We always tried narrative music videos, not just performance related videos. I think the business changed a bit and the record companies who were very powerful at that time, they didn’t really want narrative videos. They just wanted simple performance-related showpieces for their music artists but we were always trying to do a narrative and we did an amazing Hammer video called “Turn This Mutha Out” which was terrific and also the video “Straight Outta Compton” which Rupert and I co-directed which was about the gangbangers and the kids in South Central LA being profiled and being arrested for no reason though wouldn’t premiere on the MTV. It premiered on Nightline because it was so controversial.

And then a few months after that, we had the “LA Riots” and “Rodney King” and so forth. So, it was actually a very timely piece and I enjoyed working with NWA. They were great.

Michael: Now, you bring up an interesting term and I want the young filmmakers to really understand this. You said you wanted to make the music videos with a narrative. I’m guessing that came from your documentary background.

James: My documentary background shooting real people, real things, not the phony reality TV we have today which is actually scripted, most people should realize. Most reality television is scripted and manipulated. It’s not real at all, far from it. So, my documentary background shooting real people observing reality, real observing from his life and then trying to visually portray it, it was really useful. When I did, “Straight Outta Compton” we were trying to show what happened on the streets of LA in (East) Compton if you’re a black teenager.

So, that was, I think bringing that sense of reality from my documentary background was very useful in narrative cinema and again, a great narrative film makes you think it completely suspends your disbelief, makes you think it’s real, completely real. It’s happening in front of you and you’re completely subjective in with the characters and a great documentary also has terrific narrative thread, narrative structure strength so you are really invested in the characters that you’re seeing but in this case, it’s their lives.

Michael: So, advice to those just getting into this business in regards to telling the story is what?

James: Any filmmaker, you should really learn the basics of narrative storytelling. This is what you do in documentary is we’re doing dramatic work. Know your Billy Shakespeare, right? I remember when I was in school, Sam Shepherd, the actor and playwright and a great writer came to our school and the kids were all asking him, “Sam, what writers have influenced you?” And of course, they were all expecting 20th century writers to be listed and he looked at us on and he said Sophocles.

So, knowing about drama and dramatic structure is probably one of the most important things a filmmaker can know and also just having a great liberal arts education and knowing about the world. I mean, I really don’t—everything you can learn technically about filmmaking, you can learn in two or three years but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is do you have a story to tell and do you know how tell that story?

Some students asked me, “How do you decide how you shoot something?” And I said it’s very simple. The camera is pointing device. The camera is a pointing device. You point it at what’s important and a lot of young filmmakers don’t do that. They point the camera every which way. You got to know what the story is about whether it’s a music video, a documentary or a narrative piece.

And in terms of technology, I mean, I’m doing, as I said before we got on the interview, I’m going off to Russia and Mongolia here in my living room is some DSLR’s and a sound package and a backpack. So, I’m going to do a whole documentary narrative feature out of that backpack with my laptop and hard drives and so forth. I just recently shot something on the iPhone and I’ll use the iPhone as a backup camera.

So, the technology is tangible. It keeps moving and changing. Probably what doesn’t change is your sense, again, that’s why I talked about narrative and storytelling a structure and the other thing that really is fundamental is do you know aesthetics and composition? Have you developed your aesthetic sense? That’s very, very important. A cinematographer should know or a director should know the history of art of all people of all times. Now, that’s sort of an impossible task but you should be familiar and conversant in art from all through the ages, not just films and photography of this past century but from all time and all culture. If you have that kind of knowledge, you’re going to enrich the kind of movies you make.

Michael: James, you touched a moment ago on emerging technologies and such. Give us your thoughts on collaborative venues like Spidvid.

James: Oh, I don’t know. I think, it’s sorts of anything you need to know is out there and I think it’s what’s valuable is if, unless someone is listening now, they want to see MC Hammer’s “Turn This Mutha Out” they can go on YouTube and see four or five versions of it, various levels of quality. I mean, I think the social media and just the internet in general is useful as an educational tool and as a way of opening our eyes and seeing how other cultures work.

And the project I’m doing in Asia involves film students in Russia and Mongolia and they’re making a little two-minute films and I’m asking them to limit their films to very, very short lengths and we’re constructing a mosaic of images of the work they create and I’m in turn of doing training my cameras on them and doing the documentary about the making of these films and their view of the world because the world is in a tough place right now. So, that’s what my film is about. So, the social media, I think is very, very important. I think all of this is still influx and still there’s a lot of newness to it and it’s basically interesting to see how it all settles out.

Michael: And if you would please tell us about your latest finished film?

James: Well, you need to see, “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos” a featured documentary that I did. It was kind of a 20-year dream come true. I made it about Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, the great Hungarian cinematographers who as film students filmed the Hungarian revolution and the subsequent crushing of their revolt by the Russians and with overwhelming force and their tanks and then they decided to smuggle that film out of Hungary to the west. No YouTube in those days so they had to physically take the film out.

And they were nearly killed and they left all their friends and country behind and they had to decide what they were going to do and they said, “Well, we’re without country, we’re broke, what should we do? We’re cinematographers. We should go to Hollywood.” And that’s what they did and they (tourist)-changed world cinema with films like “Easy Rider,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Paper Moon,” “Deliverance.” They shot 140 American movies and really changed the landscape in the forefront of the American new wave.

So, but what was also interesting was they had an amazing loyalty and friendship then they helped each other through their immigrant experience and helped each other climb out of the underbelly of Hollywood where they were working. Since the film has premiered at Cannes and it went on to about 35 film festivals worldwide and still showing today, and it won an Emmy Nomination for its run on PBS in the television version and Vilmos Zsigmond and I, together, and sometimes I by myself have given master cinematography classes all over the world; Argentina, Chicago, Greece, Poland, Romania, Moscow, Russian, Ulam Bator, Mongolia and the list goes on.

Michael: And where can see that film now?

James: Laszloandvilmos.com. You can Google “No Subtitles Necessary” and it will come up first, the film website and it’s also on Facebook at No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlou and Vilmos.

Michael: Fantastic and I know that people listening will want to learn more about James Chressanthis. Where do we do that?

James: Chressanthis.com is my website and you can link to all these other things.

Michael: Thank you so much, James. Safe travels.

Next up is independent filmmaker Mesh Flinders. Mesh, welcome to Spidcast.

Mesh: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael: So, let’s start out with a quick overview of Mesh Flinders.

Mesh: I was raised in a small community in Northern California and I was isolated from media almost entirely, didn’t have television. Obviously, we didn’t have the internet in those days and it made me very curious about the world outside of the community where I grew up. First films and television shows that I saw sort of seemed like messages from another planet because I didn’t know about high school or elementary or anything. I was pretty isolated and that’s how I became fascinated with films.

The first films that I saw that made a big impression on me were “Goodfellas,” well, “(Strada)” the “Indiana Jones” films, so kind of a wide variety of stuffs when I was like 13, 14. At first, I really wanted to be in them, I wanted to be an actor and actually started writing screenplays as a way of creating roles for myself in high school, roles that I wanted to play.

When I was 20, I moved to Los Angeles. I went to Occidental College and I quickly lost interest in acting and started writing screenplays and directing short films. After college, I worked as an assistant to several filmmakers. My first sort of break came when I was 25 and I was hired to write a horror script for a company called Blue Omega. I was 25 and all of the sudden, I was a professional screenwriter and I thought this is not hard. What’s everyone complaining about? But then, of course, reality set in and the movie didn’t get made and pretty quickly, I was not getting writing work. It was early 2006 and I was sort of struggling, didn’t really know what I was going to do next and that’s when I met Miles Beckett who have this idea of creating a fictional blogger on YouTube and sort of having in despair. I also met Greg Goodfried and his wife, Amanda Goodfried around this time and together we created “Lonelygirl15.”

I actually didn’t know very much about YouTube at that time. Miles was very passionate on online video and had been experimenting with web video. Before then, Greg was also very passionate about the space. What really excited me about the project was the chance to create this character that had to be totally real, that had to be completely believable. I thought that was a really interesting challenge and to try to kind of create a voice that was authentic enough that people would really think this is a real person.

Michael: Excellent. Now, take us back in time a bit and tell us about that very first thing you wrote that did go into production.

Mesh: The first thing that I was able to produce was until college and it was called, “In the Time of my Undoing” and I think you can actually find it online, if not I’ll put it up on my blog so people listening can just look at it. It was a film made of Occidental College and it was extremely ambitious. It was around that time that “American Beauty” came out and I was really inspired by that and so you’ll see a lot of similarities to “American Beauty”. I was a big fan of that and it was just a short film with actors that I cast from, I think it was a freshman and I cast actors in my class and just went and shot it and I was pretty pleased with it. It was on video. It was pretty early days of videos and not even like high-def, I don’t think, but it was a fun project and that was the first film I ever made.

Michael: Now, if you would, Mesh, take us back to that time of you being the co-creator of the smash web series “Lonelygirl15.”

Mesh: Well, at the beginning, it was like being on a roller coaster. I was surprised by how quickly the show garnered an audience and a really passionate following among its fans. After meeting Miles and Greg and writing, I think, just a few episodes, we very quickly set out to cast it and found Jessica and Yousef and shot these episodes and put them up, it was like June 16th 2006, I think, was the first episode.

What was the most fun for me in those early days was being part of this really tight-knit creative family. I mean, we did everything together. We were all working so hard on the shows. There was so much to do. We basically were working around the clock from dawn until late into the night everyday and I think every young filmmakers should have that experience at least one in their life of going all in on something and then seeing it worked seeing it really catch on.

After about three months of the show growing popularity, fans writing back and forth to “Lonelygirl” everyday, us posting videos probably three or four days a week there in the early stages so really a very fast-paced production schedule. After about three months, we’ve had a very difficult choice to make. So there was a lot of buzz in the press in those first three months of the show and we were faced with a very difficult decision to make which was we could have staged sort of behind the curtain but the pressure was mounting to come out and say that we were doing this and that it was not a real teenage girl and that was a surreal experience.

I thought everyone would hate us and some people did but for the most part, after we came out which was almost exactly three months after the show had premiered, it was September 14, 2006, I believe, for the most part, people were just excited that we pulled it off and wanted to know what the experience was like.

Michael: So, all that buzz and frenzy, what effect did it have on your career going forward?

Mesh: In terms of my career, to date, the “Lonelygirl” is by far the project that I’ve the most success with and so it was very difficult to leave. We work together on the show while I was there for almost two years and in that time, we produced, I believed something like 250 episodes together and so it was like a family and it was just a ton of work really satisfying work. I think the most satisfying thing for my career was that it was instant response to your work. You’re writing something, you’re directing something, you’re editing it all within about a week and then it goes up and the next thing you know people are responding to it. They’re talking about it and its part of this longer sort of bigger narrative and that was incredibly satisfying.

So, and then also just having all that press, I mean, I was able to leave and go do what I initially really wanted to do which was to make films and by the end of 2007, beginning of 2008, I was ready to do that. I was really burned out and I wanted to try a different medium. So, I left and I took a long break from web video and I threw myself into film.

I made a short film and I traveled the world with it to many film festivals and I tried for two and a half years to put together my first feature but it was right up to the economic collapse and in hindsight, I was probably asking for too large of a budget and about a year ago, I finally let go of that project. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done but it needed to be done and it really let to where I’m at today.

Michael: Well, and then that, of course, begs the question, where are you today? What is going on?

Mesh: Well, I forced myself to take a really long, hard look, when I put this film down and decided I wasn’t going to try to make it. I’ve been on it for almost two and a half years at that point. I took a really long, hard look at where film is today and why it’s so difficult to get specific kinds of work produced. Projects that don’t rely on already existing fan bases like sequels or adaptations, these are the kinds of films that I love and it’s very hard for these films to get made. It’s hard for them to find audiences and I sort of came to this conclusion that in the 20th century film was arguably the most powerful medium in the world and it just isn’t anymore and that’s very hard for filmmakers to accept.

In the ‘90s, a lot of us came of age; a lot of my generation came of age almost what he talked about. It was the de facto water cooler conversation. Did you see this over the weekend? Did you see that? What did you think of it? And that (isn’t) the case anymore and film is having a hard time adjusting from it.

So, the more that I talked with my colleagues and friends, the more I realized that I really needed to throw myself back again to social media and the more that I talked with my friends, I realized that this was where I needed to be, that the web video world was where the innovation was taking place, that it was where new models were being experimented with. I think that social media gives you the power to find people with similar passions, interests and speak directly to them.

You don’t have to have these big marketing dollars. Going back to “Lonelygirl”, we never had a billboard on Santa Monica Boulevard but we managed to get our work out to millions of people. So, about a year ago, I started consulting on web series. At first, it was honestly, I was more of a student than a teacher because I was so behind. I had so much to learn. I’ve been focusing exclusively on film for almost two years. I owe a lot of friends like Kathleen Grace and Wilson Cleveland who were colleagues and real influencers in the space and it really helped me to see what’s possible and helped me find my passion for that space again, the web video space.

And so in the last year, I’ve worked on a variety of web video projects for clients everywhere from American Express and (AMC) to About.com. I’ve worked for agencies like DigiTalks and like (artists) and I’m directing my first feature next year but the thing that’s really exciting about my feature that it’s actually grown out of social media not the other way around. I think that the mistake I made with the feature that I was trying to put together about a year and a half ago was that I created my dream project and then looked around and said, okay, how is this on social?”

In this I’m taking the opposite approach. I’m starting with social media and sort of filmed it up from that. In addition to that, I recently started a blog that covers filmmakers. We’re using social media in like really interesting ways. This is called social-film.com and there’s like an interview every week with a new filmmaker and new content everyday.

Michael: Now, Mesh, a moment ago you mentioned that you never had a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. How does someone producing content for the web get noticed?

Mesh: First and foremost, content creators have to be aware that as more and more content moves online, they’re competing for eyeballs with professionally produced show and so you have less money. You have less resources but audiences are not going to be distinguishing between your work and “30 Rock” because they’re going to be watching them on the same box.

What we do have, what levels of playing field is our social networks and I think that content creators like Felicia Day, Freddie Wong, iJustine, I think they’ve done a brilliant job of this on YouTube, of creating a large, engaged social following and then of course, on the independent film side, you got people like Kevin Smith, Joe Lamberg, independent names that certainly aren’t as well known as Felicia and Freddie but they have a dedicated social following, a large social network and they leveraged that to give themselves freedom to produce what they want because they know that they don’t need to go through Universal or Paramount to find their audience, that their audience is right there online literally at their fingertips.

And I think that this is potentially incredibly liberating for filmmakers. It’s not—there isn’t one model, there isn’t a one-side fits all model there right now and fill this highly experimental space and of all six of those people that I just mentioned, they’re all actually doing very different things with it but I think what they’ve done has been very effective so I think they’re good examples. There’s a lot of experimenting going on and new models sort of being rolled out everyday.

Michael: Wonderful advice. Young and new filmmakers have a lot so they can learn from you. Where do we find out more about Mesh Flinders?

Mesh: You can go to my website, social-film.com.

Michael: That’s it for this show. Thanks for listening to Spidcast. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at spidvid.com or on our Spidvid blog and you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with our best Spidcast episode to date this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on storytelling and passion. September’s Spidcast features the incredible John Gray, who’s the creator of TV show “Ghost Whisperer” along with the amazingly talented Melissa Jo Peltier who’s the co-executive producer of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

Our Guests

John Gray is a writer, director, producer, who is the creator and one of the executive producers of the CBS television series Ghost Whisperer starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. He has also written and directed many high profile movies for television, such as the remake of the 1976 film Helter Skelter, Martin and Lewis, The Hunley, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, among others. He has written and directed feature films as well.

Melissa Jo Peltier is a two-time Emmy Award-winning writer, director and producer. Melissa wrote and directed the primetime documentary special, Scared Silent: Exposing and Ending Child Abuse, hosted by Oprah Winfrey. She’s also a Peabody & Humanitas Film & TV Writer/Producer/Director & NYT Best Selling Book Author. And she’s Producer of the indie film White Irish Drinkers.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Melissa and John talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with John Gray and Melissa Jo Peltier. You’ve recently seen John’s work as a producer on the TV series “Ghost Whisperer” and in TV movies such as “Helter Skelter”, “Martin and Lewis” and a lot more. Melissa’s credits include executive producer with the “Dog Whisperer” and co-executive producer on “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. They collaborated together on John’s semi-autobiographical film “ White Irish Drinkers”. I’m certain you’ll enjoy their similar but quite unique stories as well.

First up is John Gray. John, welcome to Spidcast.

John: Well, thanks for having me.

Michael: Tell us a bit about your story?

John: Well, I was very, very luck to know, at a young age, that this is what I want to do. I used to think I wanted to be an actor when I was very young kid because I thought the actors kind of did a role and then it started to dawn on me as I made films with my uncle’s Super 8 camera and got more involved with what it takes to actually put a little movie together and tell a story, I realized that there was a sort of presence, another brain that was behind the camera that pretty holds the stuff together. And I gave up the idea of being an actor which I think is good news for the world and really got committed to writing and directing and they both came to be one thing to me.

I was very young when I made that commitment. I was also very lucky because I was so young and because I grew in Brooklyn and knew no one in the film business or the television business; no connections whatsoever. I had no idea how hard it was. I really did have no idea how impossible trying to break it to the business. I just kind of went on my way just thinking this is was what I’m going to do with my life and I’m going to make it happen.

It took about 12 years, I guess, before I can actually start making a living at it but I was just really persistent and always try to make movies on my own, always trying to do a lot by yourself and writing all the time and it opened to me that I got an opportunity to direct some educational films in Washington, DC that were dramatic films but they were for classroom use and it was great experience.

To make the very long story short, there’s the script I had written that got me signed by an agent in LA, and that’s what started my career, in earnest, I was then able to really make a living just writing and openly to directing and I got started in television. My first film was actually an independent feature and I started doing TV movies which I really enjoy because I was able to do really, I felt, really interesting stories. It really had some great material to work with. That’s sort of the really telescoped “Reader’s Digest” version of how I got started.

Michael: John, you touched on something just a moment ago. If you had known just how difficult this business can be, would you have taken the same career path?

John: You know, that’s a great question. That’s a really great question and that’s something that I often think about. One of the reasons why I think I’m so lucky that I didn’t know. Because maybe if someone sat me down and say, okay, you’re 18, (you’re going to reach to) 30, by the time you can actually make a living doing this.

I don’t know maybe don’t want to do that. I don’t know. I’d like to think that I was committed enough to not care, but in my mind I was going to be a (success) tomorrow. I’m going to get this next thing done tomorrow. That’s how the attitude had a little…so I never sat down and went, “Wow, this is taking a really long time. Should I give up?” The more obstacles I found, the more determined I got to do it. It’s really important here you’ll be desperate too because you’ll realize I didn’t think I was suited for anything else in life really than to be a filmmaker. That was really what I felt I was here to do. That’s a good question. I’m glad I didn’t have to answer it for real.

Michael: Tell us a bit about how creating content for television differs from content for the film world?

John: I think the big difference is that if you’re for TV, of course, for broadcast television, you’re trying to get that big here wide audience but at the same time, at least in terms of movies, not so much series but in terms of movies, the subject matter you can tackle is so much more interesting that what you can usually do in the feature world. I made movies about the first Civil War submarine. I did a movie about the partnership between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. I did a movie about Lincoln assassination.

I was able to indulge a lot of my own personal fascinations by making movies about them for television which, in the feature world, you’re probably never going to get those movies made unless you have some mega star casting. That’s why always love working in television movies particularly. I did a lot of movies for TNT and for CBS. At that time, there are not very many made now, but at that time, it was easier to get to do something little bit different and really kind of interesting and each movie I did was vastly different from the other.

In the feature world, I found it difficult to try to anticipate what’s commercial and what isn’t. As a writer, I’m more attracted to sort of character-driven material. That’s very difficult to do in the feature world. I knew I’ve made a few features and I hope to make more features but mostly I’ve tried to stay in that indie sort of sensibility where you just sort of make new what they’ll consider small movies but to me are very big movies about relationships and people and humanity and how we all deal with each other.

Michael: Hey, John, I’d like to hear about your most recent film, “White Irish Drinkers”. Take us through that.

John: It was a script I had written about 10 years ago that I really, really wanted to make. One of the character piece, it was a very goody kind of violent look at growing up in Brooklyn. I could never get money raised to actually get it financed as a feature. For those 10 years, I just kept revisiting it and trying to figure how I can get this made.

A lot of people read the script in the business and liked the script and in fact, it got me a lot of work like writing work, but no one really wanted to make it. It even just felt like, you know, the character that’s small…so what happened during those 10 years then, really three things, I guess, one is that the technology changed so drastically in those 10 years. And then also, I was lucky enough to get a successful television series on CBS that lasted for five years so I had some more financial resources that I’ve never had before. The only thing was that I married Melissa, who’s a really brilliant producer and she kind of convinced me to not give up on this movie and so we have sort of teamed up. I realized that I could probably spend about $600,000 and make this movie digitally and call in on favors in people I’ve worked with for the past 20 years and that’s really how that came about.

We shot it for $600,000. We shot it in 17 days, all in Brooklyn. We have a wonderful cast Stephen Lang, Karen Allen and Peter Riegert and then some really exciting young actors Nick Thurston, Geoff Wigdor, Leslie Murphy, people I think that are going to be huge in the years to come. It is a wonderful experience. It was great making a movie just as what we wanted to make it. There was no studio. There was no network. It was just us.

The movie was released. We got a small release. We were out at about 25 cities. But that in itself is a miracle these days because the climate that the independent films in. It’s on DVD now and Blu-Ray and Netflix and iTunes and it’ll be on Showtime in the fall. It was a great experience. We got the movie out there and it was something I’m dying to do again.

Michael: And we do hope that you get that opportunity again. As you said, “Ghost Whisperer” allowed you the financing to make that film. Take us a little bit of the story of “Ghost Whisperer”?

John: It was really interesting because I’ve never done a series before. In fact, I’ve never even pursued a series. This opportunity just came to me because the executive I work with in CBS had wanted me to meet this woman who the “Ghost Whisperer” was based on. When I met this woman, I realized there was a way to maybe really do a series that for me to be really interesting in this was (meld) horror with emotional character-driven stories. That’s kind of how I pitched it and probably most people who get involved in the series is that they never believe they’re going to go and I wrote the pilot and I figured that that’ll be the end of that and then they said well, let’s shoot it. I thought, well, okay, I’ve never directed a pilot. I’ll see what that’s like and I’m sure that’s as far as it’ll go.

We made the pilot and they said, okay, why don’t you do 13 of them? I was like, “Oh no, I have to do this 13 more times. I don’t know if I could do it”. And they openly gave us a full season pick up and openly we went to do five years. I loved a lot of it. I wrote many, many episodes, directed many, many episodes and that was really fun because it was so fast. You get an idea for a show and then two months later, it’s on the air.

In that respect, it was very (heady) and we loved the cast and the crew’s really like family to me. That part was really great. The part that I enjoyed less was the kind of a show on her aspect of it where the first two seasons where it was really kind of dealing with more administrative things and creative things. Of course, writing, I guess were the biggest creative job but it was dealing with the network and dealing with the studio and dealing with agents and dealing with physical production and things that a producer does and things that I’d never aspire to do. I just consider myself a writer-director and that’s really what I wanted to do.

In that third season, we brought in P.K. Simmons to be the real show runner so that I could sort of step back and pursue other things but also keep writing and directing for this series and that was a wonderful change for me and that’s what openly allowed to write some of the pilots and also to get “White Irish Drinkers” off the ground.

Michael: So you have gotten one of your dream projects off the ground, you’ve had it made, you’ve had it distributed, but John, if you were a 20-something, just trying to break in to the business, what is the career path you would take? What advice do you have for the young filmmaker looking to get in?

John: I think the really advantage that young people starting out today have is again, the digital possibilities of cinema. When I wanted to make a movie, I had to do what I do it either in Super 8 or the Kid or 16mm. It was a huge expense but I mean, now, you see people making movies on their iPhones. To me, that’s really exciting and that’s what I really advice and I always advice everyone to do is get out there and make movies. Learn. Learn how to tell stories to the camera. Learn to how to work with actors.

That’s what I always emphasize because I feel like what’s happening with young filmmakers today is that they’re so involved with the technical aspects of it which are really fascinating and limitless. But I think what we’re losing a little bit is people being interested in storytelling and in creating performances with an actor and collaborating with an actor.

A lot of times, you’ll see a director on the set these days and they just hide behind the monitor and they never talk to the actors. That’s an art, I think, we’re losing and so that’s something I always encourage young filmmakers to learn. I encourage them to read not just scripts but read the great novels, learn storytelling in the best possible way, see every movie you possible can, and take acting classes. Learn what it’s like to be an actor. It doesn’t matter if you suck as an actor, but you have to learn what actors go through. And be a friend to the actor. Don’t be afraid of actors. To me, those are the best things to do. It’s a scary atmosphere today as it always do because the business is contracted and if you’re movie’s been made and there isn’t any longer that incredible reservoir of television movies where you can go cut your teeth and learn on. Now, I think, it’s just be who’s any young filmmaker to go out there and make your movie, make it as great as you can, learn from it, make another one, get it out in the internet, get it on YouTube, get it seen and just keep working that way. Just never rest. Just keep going.

Michael: Excellent advice, John for the young filmmakers. Now, as you said, you’ve seen in your lifetime the whole process of filmmaking change completely. Let’s go forward maybe to the year 2021, ten years from now. What do you see? What will filmmaking look like then?

John: It’s hard to guess because who knows what’s the next development is around the corner, but based on what I see now, I think everyone will be experiencing movies to their computers or certainly through the (ether). I think the idea of the DVDs, unfortunately, the hardware’s probably going to go away. I think that movies are going to get easier and easier to make, easier and easier to see, and I don’t know if that’s going to devalue them or if it’s going to make them more valuable. I’m not really sure how those all are going to shape out.

I think that we’ll probably look at it in the future. I believe that probably the only big studio movies that will get made in the future are big ten pole “Planet of the Apes” and gigantic event movies. I think the smaller movies like “The Help” and movies like that, I think we’re probably going to see more on demand or in delivery systems other that theaters because I just believe that it’s not going to be cost-effective in the future to make those movies and market them in theaters. I hope I’m wrong. I really do, but that’s kind of where I see it going.

Michael: Now, there you make an excellent point. The accessibility, the ease of use, the quality of equipment, but it still comes down to the writing. Am I right on that?

John: I think it does. I think, at the end of the day, the things that last, the thing that live on to people’s memories “The Godfathers”, the classic films, the Tennessee Williams’ movies…it’s all about the characters, the writing and the storytelling. The other part that’s great too, I’m the first guy on line to see the big effects movies. They just don’t go away. They will live on in the history of film.

Look at the movie, “Rocky”, couldn’t be a simpler film, done for I don’t know how much money, million bucks, maybe back in those days. People still reference “Rocky”, they still talk about it. They still it was just that movie about people. I think those are the kind of movies that live on and I would hope that there are more people that wanted to make those kinds of movies even though in the future, they may not be as widely distributed as the bigger effects movies but we need those movies and I think they’re starting to be eradicated a little bit by these big effects extravaganzas, which I think, I’m not down on those, I love them. I’m always there for them. But I just don’t want them to have to be all there is.

Michael: I am in agreement with you there, John. Tell us what is next from John Gray?

John: Well, right now, I’m in New Orleans. I’m directing a movie for TNT called “Hide”, which is a terrific thriller, which I did not write, but Janet Brownell wrote it based on a novel. Melissa and I are producing partners have another low-budgeted thriller called “Slander”, which is about hate speech that we’re trying to raise money for right now. We’re trying to do some casting attached. That’s another movie we’re hoping to make independently as a feature. I’ve written another TNT movie and basically just trying to stay busy and keep it all going.

Michael: Thank you, John Gray for joining us today on Spidcast.

Next up is writer/producer/director Melissa Jo Peltier. Melissa continues to produce the “Dog Whisperer” and co-executive produced “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding”. And as you’ve just heard, she is a frequent professional collaborator with our previous guest and is also married to John Gray. Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Michael: Tell us about your story and how did you break into filmmaking?

Melissa: Well, my beginning in filmmaking was due to my father who is 90 and literally just retired from teaching. He was teaching at Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement and he was at the time an audiovisual librarian but (by first-rated) filmmaker and he actually taught me how to edit films when I was 9. I made my first movie when I was 8 years old. I was doing plays when I was 4. He has basically taught me film theory before I knew what film theory was. I was bitten by the bug that young and I was just…the national storyteller.

The way I got into the business really was I went to Pomona College in Claremont, California, which I was a really wonderful school and I was an English major there but I was also in theater there. While I was a senior there, I got an internship on a documentary and that sort of sent me down the documentary path even though my goal has been to do drama. I got very addicted to doing documentaries. I got sort of caught up in the excitement of being a fly on the wall and being in people’s real lives and doing what I felt was making a difference because that’s how that social justice side of me show. That was my beginning and because our business was so varied and there’s no direct 1-2-3 path, you can take to do anything. I definitely geared from that over the years but that was definitely my start.

Michael: So you say that you learned to edit from your dad, you mean you we’re actually cutting film stock or digitally?

Melissa: No, it was a long time ago, there was no digital then. I was editing Super 8 film on little, teenie movie. I was with glue, cutting it with glue. I had small fingers so it actually made it even easier because I was only 9.

Michael: What a great experience.

Melissa: It really was. I think one of the things that I learned early off from my dad, but also my mother was a third generation English major and there was a lot of reading in my family. A lot of reading a lot of classic films and theater and I think just the building blocks of storytelling. One of the things that excited me about documentaries was I’ve never thought about how the building blocks of fictional storytelling can be used in telling real life stories. That was something that just thrilled me and took me off in that direction. And those are things I learned (mine) too.

Michael: Well, fiction or non-fiction, you’re still telling a story so it always comes back to the writing.

Melissa: I think so. One of the questions I know you wanted to ask me was advice to young filmmakers and want to be filmmakers and my main advice, I was thinking about this today is to learn storytelling and to learn it from the (great) tragedies, the real ones today to the most avant-garde methods of storytelling today and try to see the patterns because no matter what you can have the most original work in the world, you can be the most imaginative person in the world, but you still work hard about tradition and you will fall somewhere along that line even if you’re pioneering a whole new genre.

I just recently read an article about how there’s a lot of people who wanted to become writers who don’t think they should have to read and they don’t think they should have to read classic and there are…that way, but the truth is, you’re reinventing the wheel if doing that. Also I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to experience the pleasure of reading and singing classic songs. To me, that’s one of those natural highs of life.

I think learning the basics of storytelling is one of the most important things that any storyteller can do whether even if you’re a cameraman and you’re just going to shoot, you still want to learn storytelling, story (beads), how stories unfold and how it’s been done and the many, many different ways it’s been done over the years. Whether it’s a mini-story or reality TV or it’s an opera, it’s the same basic principles of storytelling and everything flows from there. I can’t recommend enough to young filmmakers to really study great things in every possible film all the way back to the great plays.

Michael: Excellent advice, Melissa. Now, you recently were involved in a project with a fantastic story, “White Irish Drinkers”, tell us about that.

Melissa: “White Irish Drinkers” came about because my husband, John Gray had been doing the “Ghost Whisperer” series, which he created for a number of years and that went off the air and he had written a couple of pilots for network TV and he’s really an incredible writer and the pilots stopped to that point where they were in the running…it was between his pilot and another pilot and which then that happened twice in a row and it’s a good way to make a living. It definitely pays the bills but he was getting frustrated about not being able to tell his own stories.

So he pulled this script out of the drawer and he said, this is what I wanted to make for years. Is it any good? I don’t know and I read it and I just said “I think that this the most honest thing you’ve written and I think we should make it”. We actually decided to throw our money, well it was really John’s money he made from “Ghost Whisperer” and make it and call in whatever favors we could. Nobody works free on it but everybody worked pretty damn close.

To really get out there and make and for me, it was my first experience. I’ve actually been involved in independent films before but it was my first experience really getting down and dirty on the ground making an independent film. And I had two other producers with me, Paul Bernard and James Scura. Jim was more of the guy watching the budget. He was not on the set. Paul was actually doing the first assistant director. John was there also.

But really, between the two of us, we were putting out all the fires our film that’s smaller than a lot of fires but it taught me first of all, that all my TV experience, learning how to do down and dirty and fast, actually paid off because we were able to a feature film in 17 days and do it well.

I think the other think that it taught me in terms of filmmaking was it taught me about the honesty of a filmmaker’s voice and if you can stay connected to that how it really comes out in every aspect of the film, I believe John’s so connected to this film that it was infectious for the actors, the production and to all of us. Everyone up to the last possible minute was amazing, actors like Karen Allen and Stephen Lang were going out on their own with no money, nothing, just going out promoting this film because they believe in it so much.

I think that’s something that I kept with me about the strength of your commitment to a project can really be infectious. There’s part of me I do have to just do it for a living and film it in but when you’re passionate about something and you get the right people behind you, you can really make miracles.

Michael: Passion certainly is what draws many people into this business. What would you tell a young, passionate filmmaker about how to go about breaking into the biz?

Melissa: It’s such a different time when I started in the business because the technology has changed so much. I think that modern technology right now is very important. I think learning the building block is very important. I think being flexible is key. I think in owning what we want is important but there’s people out there who don’t know exactly what they’re going to do in this business are still going to find that by working. You don’t necessarily have to get an MSA to do that. You can get out there and get on the set and work and be a PA and work your way from bottom and see what you really connect with. That’s something that was true when I was starting and that’s true now.

You have to find something that will make you stand out if that’s the only the way you want to get in. knowing your craft better and once again, some of the basic rules of just being a good employee really apply in the business. There are a lot of people and I’ve had this experience because I have a company for 15 years and there’s a lot of people who come out of film school who are very bright and kind of big fish in a small pond and they’ll start out as somebody’s assistant and then they’ll three months later will say, when do I get a chance to produce. It doesn’t work like that. You still have to earn your way just like in any field.

It’s important to really work your butt off. Work hard. Have a great work ethic. Have a great attitude. Don’t expect your dreams to come true tomorrow. Keep dreaming them and keep working toward them but work hard and people will notice your hard work and your attitude, there’s no question. Still, even in our business, it’s not that common, by starting out. People will notice that.

Michael: So, what is next for Melissa Jo Peltier?

Melissa: Right now, I’m looking at a couple of writing projects my book projects, but I’m also working on a film with my husband, another independent film that we’re trying to raise money for. It’s being read by film actors right now and actor’s reps rather. We can’t name them right now but we’re hoping that we’re going to get a pretty important name to play this role. The name of the movie is “Slander” and it’s a small movie but it’s a really, really powerful story that John’s written.

We want to put our whole team together that we have on “White Irish Drinkers” again because that was such great experience for everybody who worked on it and this time, we had a little more money and maybe a few more days to shoot. Everyone who worked on the film was like us we just love the process of filmmaking. So it doesn’t matter that we don’t have (players) and all the perks that you might have on a network television show because actually, it’s more fun to have less money. Once you’ve actually worked with money, it’s sometimes a lot more fun to just do it the way that you did it when you were 9 years old.

Michael: Well, certainly things have changed since then including what we’re doing right now. Share with us your thought about Spidvid and what impact it has on future filmmakers.

Melissa: I think what’s exciting about it is that…and I like this about Twitter which was how I found Spidvid and I liked the fact that you can communicate with people who share your goals and also some of your values and your tastes who might be very far away from you and I think that that’s an important aspect of the organization that you have which is that people can reach out to others and they have a vision that nobody near them connect with their vision. They may just not connect, but somebody 2,000 miles away might absolutely connect and might be the piece of the puzzle that they need to get it finished. I think that’s a really nice thing about today’s technology.

We were isolated starting out when I began and I remember writing letters literally…typewriter and typing letters to producers trying to get meetings with them and it’s much more comfortable to reach out in other ways.

Networking is easier and I think that if you use it right and in a discerning manner, I think that’s a real advantage to the technology.

Michael: Speaking of networking, how can folks get in touch with you and learn more about you?

Melissa: Well, I’m on IMDb, so if they want to see everything that I’ve done, pretty much everything since IMDb started. I’m on Twitter @MelissaJPeltier. Whiteirishdrinkersthemovie.com is the website of our movie. My television production company is called MPH Entertainment. MPHent.com is out website. We’ve done a lot of non-fiction TV including the show “The Dog Whisperer” which we still do. That’s probably the best way.

Michael: Melissa Jo Peltier, thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us today.

Melissa: Thank you, Michael. I really appreciate talking to you.

Michael: That’s it. Thanks for listening to the Spidcast Show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidvid.com or on our Spidvid Blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with another exciting Spidcast episode this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on collaborative filmmaking. For August’s show we feature a big Hollywood actor/filmmaker and a web series creator, director, and actor. These two individuals are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have James Morrison and Richard  Weigand on the show.

Our Guests

James Morrison is a filmmaker, playwright, poet, actor, singer/songwriter and yoga teacher, who was born in Utah and is a product of Alaska. James has been in some big Hollywood films and TV shows including, “24,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Jar Head,” “The One,” and countless others.

Richard Weigand is a web series creator, writer, director, and actor. Richard’s show, Curve Your Vampirism, is about a day in the life of a vampire.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what James or Richard talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Richard Weigand, he’s an independent producer. He produces a very cool web show called “Curve your Vampirism”. We’ll hear more about that in a little bit. And he’s brought with him a very special guest. A very recognizable face if you watch episodic TV at all, especially the dramas all coming up just a moment on Spidcast.

So let’s jump right in. Richard, welcome to Spidcast.

Richard: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael: So Richard, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into producing your own web series?

Richard: A couple of years ago, I started making small videos for the internet like my YouTube account and I’ve always wanted to do a kind of episodic, different kinds of things and wanted to branch my stories and create different kinds of characters and creating a web series allows me to put my ideas together and post it out there and get some feedback.

Michael: And how did you break in to the filmmaking world?

Richard: I’ve always kind of had this kind of creative mind of thinking—and I kind of perceive the whole world as one giant film; everything that I see and my mind creates the character and the dialogues and all that stuff comes by watching television and movies. I get an idea of how I piece (own songs) together and ever since I was real little, I’ve always wanted to do this and when I first got a camera, I was just able to film the different ideas that were in my head. That’s how it all came about.

Michael: After you get that idea and after you put it into motion, I’m going to guess the collaboration comes into play in a big way. Tell us about how collaboration has benefited your web series.

Richard: For this web series, in particular, I collaborated mostly with my sister, Rosella, just going back and forth (with any ideas we wake up with) for the show. We both are on the show. We’re both actors allowing her to take over some of the directing tasks of it. But outside of that, it was really an experience to get back in touch with friends through Facebook, to cast them in one of the parts in one of the episodes. The most interesting thing about this series is I got to collaborate with the UK composers. People all the way over there that are piecing our music together were really a true inspiration to beginning this series.

Michael: Collaboration is what’s it all about these days. What are some tips for some young filmmakers out there trying to get the most out of a limited or no budget situation?

Richard: Well, for one thing, having no budget has never stopped me from doing what I want to do and I’ve always felt the story as a character. And for something really important that I think that should be (dead) in what I film, you know, having no budget, having limited sets, using the same sets over and over again doesn’t take me out of my vision for what I’m doing. As long as I get it out there and I’m happy with the performances and the editing and everything, having no budgets or with limited budgets, doesn’t restrict me. I think I can actually hit that out with a little bit more creative ideas if I don’t have that much to play around with and that’s what really impresses me—not having big, a whole lot of financial support to pull off a big project or a small project. I think that people are really impressed with what I can do at the budget level that I’m at.

Michael: Excellent. Little or no budget, you get it done. But once you get it done, once you get that product finished and you get it on to the web, how do you get people there? How do you get noticed?

Richard: I used Facebook to get it out there with my friends and everything, but I can say that Twitter is the best way for this series to get out there because we started on Twitter, @curve_vampirism, to get our series out there. We started doing it before the show even started. We and my character Vladimir, he tweets to people and people tweet back to him and they’re kind of getting inside the world of “Curve your Vampirism”. And it’s getting people excited about it and it was really cool (when) somebody follows it and wants not only to follow the Twitter but follow the show and want more out of it and want to see more. That was really cool. But Twitter has been overall the best way for our show to be seen.

It’s also a really inspirational thing to get kind of a feedback instantly of they love Vlad or they love what he does and they want to see more. It inspires me to want to create more. It inspires me to want to take the whole world to a no (silly) level and then they’re part of it too…

Michael: Well, talking about characters. It’s a character that we know from a TV show we love. You brought a very special guest with you today. Why don’t you go ahead and introduce him?

Richard: Yes, I’d like to introduce you all to actor, filmmaker, musician, James Paige Morrison. Hi, James.

James: Hi, Richard. How are you, man?

Richard: Not too bad at all.

James: Good.

Richard: Not too bad. I’m excited that you decided to do this, which is really cool. Since this is an audio podcast and (put you) a face to the name, James Paige Morrison. Where we’re you seen lately?

James: Let’s see. I spent four years as Bill Buchanan on “24” on Fox. And on the big screen, let’s see, you would have seen me as the person who inspired Leonardo DiCaprio to become a pilot in “Catch Me If You Can”. I’m the captain who went to the hotel and he said I want to be that guy. Lots and lots of episodic television, well, for series, the “Space: Above and Beyond”. I was Col. McQueen on Fox for the sci-fi fan.

Richard: I’ll just leave you right into it because the reason why I chose to talk to you is because you’re not only an actor and a filmmaker and a musician, but you’ve also used parts of the social media like Facebook and Twitter to kind of get your ideas and your projects out there, so I’m wondering how has Twitter changed your life?

James: Well, I wouldn’t say that it has changed my life as much as it’s just given it another way to interact. I was listening to you talking about this. It reminds me of back when we used first started doing theater when I was a young actor in a smaller theater in LA and in the few places that I did in New York 30 years ago.

Any series really back before the internet, you would try to drum up word of mouth and that’s basically what we’re doing with Twitter. It’s just a word of mouth audience until it starts to catch on and if it doesn’t, it’s because we didn’t have the elements that were necessary for it to catch on. But you use any means possible to promote yourself as an artist and I think it’s just a great way to reach out and expand your audience.

Richard: There’s also a really cool thing to be able to talk to the fans and have them instantly give you feedback on if I saw you on a show the night before, they could tweet that to you and you say thank you or whatever. I think it’s a really big deal when they get response like that. It is inspirational to hear from them. You see the performance that you get to respond to your favorite actor or…

James: Yes, I think it means a lot to them. But it will also means a lot to the artist especially those of us who are sort of crossover artists who are multi-disciplinary, I guess. It also goes with who make music or who writes or direct as well as act. There’s constantly a way to keep people informed about if we can afford the 10 or $20,000 a month PR firm to do it for us. It’s also, like you say, a way to maintain contact with the very people we want to reach.

Richard: Do you ever get tired of hearing the same messages over and over again?

James: No, because it’s the feedback that you don’t get from working on television and film that you do get when you’re on stage. The applause never sounded the same and never feels the same when it’s that live feeling of the laugh that comes back to you from the dark. It’s never the same. It could be, I guess, you could say that it’s the same every night, but it’s not because it’s in the moment.

If you hear two people say the same thing, they’re really saying it from a very personal place, I think that’ the—I don’t know what’s the best example I can give about it—no, I don’t tire about it at all in answer to your question.

Richard: How long have you been tweeting?

James: Let’s see, I discovered Twitter when I was in Canada. It’ll be two years ago just last April, so just a little over two years. I was up there doing a benefit for the Canadian Cancer Society and I’d heard that Mary Lynn Rajskub, who played Chloe on “24”, was on it and Jon Cassar as well.

I just went on to check it out because I’ve heard of it because I guess it must’ve been five years now Twitter’s been around?

Richard: Okay.

James: I just checked it out and what do you, wow, this is interesting. How did I not know this is here? I like to converse especially about current events and social issues and as you know from following me and from the things that I talk about on Twitter—

Richard: The documentary that you tweet about—

James: The documentary but also just what’s going on in the world. It affects us as human beings and if you’re connected as a human being and an artist, I think it’s should have an impact on what you create as an artist. Now, of course, it’s where I get all my news. I trust these sources on Twitter more than I trust certainly the mainstream media.

Richard: That’s the way that everybody’s look at the world. You’ve collaborated with filmmakers in both the television and the film world. I’m very interested in knowing that what would you say to those out there who use the Internet as their television and film world?

James: Well, I’m still beginning to understand all that. I’m sort of old-school. I still watch TV. I still go out to movie theaters and not quite as much now that I have a child but I like to go to live theater. I think we have to find balance. I think that’s what I would say is just like I read today on Twitter, as a matter of fact—I think it was the President who said this, “Don’t get all your information from one source and question the sources that you have.” If you’re getting all your information, if you’re using only one medium as a sort of a pitching post, untie and get out there and ride around a little bit. That’s the advice I would give.

Richard: It was Twitter how I found out that not only do you act and you have the documentary you’ve been producing, but you also are a songwriter and musician. For those out there who don’t know that you are a musician, what kind of music do you like to perform?

James: I guess it’s a folk rock. I was influenced by the 60’s bands like The Birds and Dylan, of course, and all the different groups that came out of Buffalo Springfield and those guys, that sort of sound that’s sort of cosmic-country-Gram Parsons-things. I was influenced by the Grateful Dead and those guys. And groups like Canned Heat, who’d come out of the Woodstock era. In fact, Larry Taylor, the bassist for Canned Heat, played on my album, “Son to the Boy”, which has been out for a little while and we’re just starting to tour to play live, to promote it. That was kind of cool to play with Larry. It’s that sort of thing.

Richard: Why did you choose the internet (to put your music in)?

James: Well, mostly because it’s just so immediate and the people are so connected to the digital download and also because I was self-produced, I’m not affiliated with a label. It seems the most cost-effective way is to just make it available before I can mass produce CDs, the physical CD and also it’s a little greener, I just didn’t want to put all that plastic out there.

Richard: Your album that’s been in fact available in digital form as of this past December, how long were you working on it?

James: That story actually is kind of interesting. That week that we started and recorded the first two tracks, my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor, so that was put on hold for seven months and it took about a year-and-a-half actually all told to finish it up.

Richard: You’re talking before about who inspired you as a musician, who are some of your influences as an actor?

James: I was really influenced by films in the early 70’s like “Clockwork Orange” and the Scorsese movies of the mid 70’s when I was in New York and I saw “Taxi Driver”. At that point, I just said this is what I want to do.

Richard: You who played Bill Buchanan on “24”, working the set of a show like that or any big motion picture, how has that helped your own personal project?

James: By the time I got to “24” in the season 4 or halfway through season 4, they were just about where they had developed this finely tuned precision machine—and I say machine but a human machine—so that they knew exactly how to shoot it, how to do what they did so well and it was precision. It was a well-oiled and worked together really well and most of that, I think, as I looked at it now had to do with the way Jon Cassar worked and he brought a lot of his artistry to the creation of that.

I think now, in answer to your question, coming away from that, I just realized how efficiently and how it collaboratively it benefits everyone if you learn how to work together, if you involve everyone. If you don’t, decide who am I to this person now as Jack O’Brien, a stage director, says in our documentary “Showing Up.”

I think there’s too much about if we’re all just worker among workers and we’re equals in this collaborative process, without the power trips and without the secrets and whatever it is that flows downhill as they say. Then the collaborative effort becomes as you on “24”. It was tight. It was really tight and they told the story really efficiently. They shot it that way too.

Richard: I think “24” is one of the best shows on television and good to see over the years (they’re able to) come in all of the people that pieced that show together. It’s really remarkable how every year they have new people come in and I found it interesting with all the new people coming in. That was a really interesting experience to (put) all these kinds of people have come in all the time.

James: The other thing I noticed was when I left the show and I think probably everybody who was there for while have the same issue in their own way, I would go somewhere else and they’d be working in whatever way they work, which is going to be different, and my first inclination would be to say, you know, in “24”, we—I have to stop myself because of course you can’t. You’re a guest and you can’t really tell them how best to work. You want to because they’re working inefficiently and you sort of feel a little bit superior, but then you have to, like you say, make it how it works best for you and you have to take whatever you have personal control over and apply the things that you learned without imposing that on somebody else. I think that’s where we get into trouble. We all bring those things where you got to “do it my way, my way or the highway”.

It takes time to develop that kind of ensemble feeling, so when you experience it, you want it to be an A in everything, but it can’t be. It’s a very rare thing. It’s like finding that one true love in your life.

Richard: That’s the best thing about following you in Twitter and why everybody should follow at @JamesPMorrison on Twitter is I instantly get the impression of how well you work with the after and behind the scenes. You probably work just as much with the cast as well as the behind the scenes people and if I get to know them, I will too because I see it in your tweet. You always tweeted to some directors and good people who are out there that you no longer probably worked with but you still, thanks to Twitter, get to interact with them.

James: That goes back to when I was to when I was about 21 years old. I was in the circus. I was a circus clown and when I first got to the winter quarters in Hugo, Oklahoma, the performer sat on one side of the mess hall, the cafeteria and the workers, the hands, sat on the other side and they never interacted. So I got my plate, went over and sat with the hands just to say hello. I mean, these are the guys that in some cases your life depends on them for rigging. They’re the workers.

I was immediately reprimanded and ostracized and taken to task for mixing with the working staff. I just thought, man, first of all, what this built this country? This is the people that built this country. They build the shows that we watch and if you bring that work ethic to—it’s the work ethic I learned from my dad. He worked in a construction business. If you bring that work ethic to what you do, then we’re all in this together. You can’t fail.

Richard: And that’s the impression people get when they log in you have over 5,000 people that basically listen to what you’re saying and they have the option to get your idea down there further. That’s why I find it truly inspirational not only reading your tweets but getting to know you kind of in a different light aside from on watching you on television. Getting into how you think inspires and I think it inspires a lot of people. My last kind of question is what advice would you give to aspiring actors and aspiring filmmakers out there?

James: When I was a young actor, I wanted to join Actors’ Equity, the union for stage actors. I went to the artistic director of an Alaskan organization and he sounds like 23 years old or something and I said, “I’d like to do this. Can you help me do this?” He said, “You really can’t think of anything else you’d rather do?” It was that school of hard knocks sort of thing. I said, “No, I can’t. I’m pretty sure I want to do this for a living.” And he said, “Okay, welcome to the ranks of the unemployable.”

It didn’t register then but what he was doing was showing me that there are going to be lots of people in the path in my journey through my life as an artist or as a man that are going to try to minimize my goal. If not giving me a hand up and certainly not a hand down, but there’s a way to encourage people that if someone says if this is what you love and this is what makes you feel good, then you have to do it because you’ll be unhappy if you don’t. It’s that simple really.

If what you’re doing make you happy, whether it’s accepted, how it’s received, all that stuff doesn’t matter. If you place qualifiers, good or bad before or after what you do, you’re going to minimize your effort, your contribution, your journey toward what you want to achieve and your pleasure in the moment. Be very sure and first of all, that’s what you want to do like the guy said to me. Can you think of anything else? But also just then just go, I’m not going to let anybody deter me from this. I’m not going to let them devalue me for whatever their personal agenda is. They’re unhappy in their own lives. They’re critics and that’s their job—to devalue, to feel like they can give something of value based on their word or their appraisal of it. Like Steven Spailis says in showing up, you have to take that into the room with you, that sense of value of your own personal value. That’s, I think, the most important thing I can say is get ready to stand up for yourself and what you’re putting out there. Just teach people how to treat you.

Richard: That is very inspirational. I’m always surprised by what you’re saying. I can’t thank you enough for—

James: Thanks. I appreciate that. It was a pleasure talking to you. I’m glad this worked out.

Michael: If I can jump in, James and Richard. What is next for James Morrison?

James: I just put together the first performance with almost all of the band that I’m putting together at the Hotel Café in Hollywood. We’ll be the musical guest with (some spoken word) artists. For a monthly thing, they do this. That’s sort of the world tour kickoff in Hollywood. Then we’ll have a CD released probably sometime in August or September with the full band and this is to promote the album, “Son to the Boy”, which is available on iTunes and CD Baby and Amazon and all of the other places digitally.

Michael: Excellent. If we’d like more information on what you’re up to, where do we get in touch?

James: If you’d like to find out more about this, I’m pretty good about keeping the website up-to-date. It’s JPMorrison.com then you can find out more about where we’re playing and what will be happening with “Showing Up”, the documentary. My wife and I just co-directed and co-produced up to the actors audition. We had a conversation with about 60 of our best working actors about what it means to them and ultimately ends up being more about just showing up for what you want to be and do in your life and we’re very happy with it.

Michael: Richard, thank you so much for brining James as your guest today.

Richard: You’re very welcome.

Michael: And when folks want to see your stuff, where do we see that?

Richard: Well, the web series that I currently produced, “Curve Your Vampirism”, you can watch at www.curveyourvampirism.blip.tv.

Michael: Richard, thanks for being with us today.

Richard: Thank you.

Michael: That’s it. Thanks for listening to the Spidcast Show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidcast Blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with another exciting Spidcast episode this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on collaborative filmmaking. For July’s show we feature two filmmakers and actors who have both created original web series. These two individuals are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have Gavin Leighton and Mike Lawson (both featured below) on the show.

Enjoy July’s Spidcast show, click play below to listen in

Our Guests

Gavin Leighton is a co-creator behind the web series Hitting the Fan, he also works in the creative and business aspects of acting, writing, music, producing, and collaborating.

Mike Lawson is also a co-creator of the Hitting the Fan web series, is behind Idiotscreen, and has appeared in a few feature films including “Friends With Money, Fast Track, and American Pie Presents Band Camp.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Gavin or Mike talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Gavin Leighton and Mike Lawson, both actors living in Los Angeles and both now blazing their trail to non-traditional video production and delivery and worldwide collaboration as well. They have, in fact, worked together but also separately both with great success. I’m certain you’ll enjoy their similar but quite unique stories as well.

First up is Gavin Leighton. Gavin, welcome to Spidcast.

Gavin Leighton: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here and thank you for the opportunity to get to speak with others that are like-minded who want to do what they want to do.

Michael: Gavin, tell us a little bit about your story?

Gavin Leighton: I live in Los Angeles. I moved to Los Angeles about 7-and-a-half years ago. I moved out here specifically for acting, music and writing. During that time, I’ve worked some as an actor and booked things which have been exciting, but I’ve also have, most excitingly, been able to work on projects where I helped to create or I was just a part of the process with a group of friends and getting to wear lots of little hats on various projects over the course of time that I’ve been out here, which for me, have been really fulfilling. It’s a different experience that just booking something and moving on. You actually create something which is pretty exciting.

Michael: Well, it sounds great. Now, tell us a little bit about how you broke into the business.

Gavin Leighton: I’ve had the honor and the good fortune to work with some really great people out here in Los Angeles. I’ll name a few as I go along, but just name some, I’ve had the good fortune of working with Peter Atencio, working with Jen Ci, and Elisia Skye and these are all people that have made some really incredible video content and had gotten some attention with their work for numerous reasons specially with the quality of their work.

One of the things kind of most notably for me was I produced something called “Barackula: The Musical.” We did this several years ago, long time towards the end of ’07, long before it was cool to jump on the Barack Obama bandwagon and making videos about him. We created this 12 minutes—I call it a short political-horror-rock musical and basically Barack Obama fighting vampires at Harvard Law School. It’s totally fun and two musical numbers and dancing which I composed for, I helped produce, I also starred in.

That was kind of my first experience with collaborating with others in creating video content and it got a lot of attention. We were featured on CNN, Fox, MSNBC. We were discussed with VH1 and MTV. We’re in newspapers. It was really cool. We got a lot of great publicity and it was all kind of unintentional. We were not aiming to get that kind of publicity. It just kind of fell into our laps because we released it at the beginning of February of 2008 like around Super Tuesday, just for fun, and it just kind of took off from there for awhile which was cool.

Michael: Now, I’m going to guess on that production that you took advantage of collaboration?

Gavin Leighton: Absolutely. So, what had happened was, some friends of mine, Mike Lawson who I work with quite a bit, Brooke Shirey, Justin Sherman—they were just making a short film and they wanted to know if I wanted to produce it along with them. It was just really a story about Barack Obama being at Harvard and that’s all it kind of was. I like the idea of collaborating because you get to spend time with friends in a really special way, in a way that you get to do something that you love to do. You get to create something. But then somebody came up with the idea of making it a musical and that really got my attention. I was really on board from that point on and then they decided to make it a vampire musical.

We just had a great time. The four of us working very closely together and we created a great script and we made some really great music and the script and music and the idea that inspired and rolled others to kind of be a part of the project.

We kind of enlisted a guy named Mark Mannschreck who had a RED Camera and it was the first time that any of us got to use or even see a RED Camera in the beginning of ’08 when it was really just kind of coming out. This guy Mark allowed us to just use his camera. He was just being a part of it just because he enjoyed the idea of it and so he got himself inspired to be a part of it. That’s kind of how it happened.

And something very, very small an idea that we had that we didn’t have these big, high hopes for, it was just something we just wanted to do for fun, turned out to be something much bigger than any of us expected and I think that got me really into the idea of collaborating with others.

Michael: Well, you’ve certainly whetted my appetite. Where can we see that?

Gavin Leighton: Thank you. It’s Barackula.com. People tend to misspell it but it’s just like the President’s last name. It’s B-A-R-A-C-K-U-L-A. Like Dracula but Barackula. Just Baracula.com and you’ll be able to see how press and all that but you can also watch the full 12-minute video in HD on there. Again, everything there, just so the listeners can know, it looks really good, but we shot it I think for about 2,000 or less and a lot of it was just from favors that we got from friends. We got food donated to us. It was really just one of those things where we know the right people.

We’re in that community of making video content and by knowing others and by being a part of that group, they come in and they help you with the thinking that at some point, you’ll return the favor and it’s kind of like a family that produces these projects and we have. Barackula.com. I hope people go and check it out.

Michael: I’m sure they will as will I. Now, you mentioned limited budgets, tell us how to get the most from a limited or even sometimes a no-budget production?

Gavin Leighton: Sure. I’ll speak to it with some experience. Most recently, we’ve produced a new comedy series called “Hitting the Fan”. It’s very, very small budget. The first place to start when you want to create something like a web series or just a show or just a single thing, the first place to go is have that clear idea of what you want.

Before you start calling friends over, before you maybe even start writing, you really want to think what is it that I want to create? How can I do this cheaply? Who do I know that can help me on this? People sometimes think that when you hear the word resources, you think in financial terms, but in this kind of world, in this kind of arena, with making video content, your resources are the people around you. If you associate with people that make video content or know people that do, they have a great wealth of resources for you that you may not even be able to imagine. At least start sending out emails or making phone calls and starting from there to see what people can do.

We had asked a friend of ours that the sound—our friend, Josh Bissett, he joined us on “Hitting the Fan”. It was all just a favor to us. We didn’t pay him pretty much at all. He should’ve take more, but he did it simply because he’s a part of that group and at some point, I assumed that will help him with something as well. That’s one way to begin.

Michael: Okay so you got the project done and now you’ve posted it. How do you get people to find it?

Gavin Leighton: Okay, once you’re past the production aspects and you’re now on post-production, maybe editing or even past that, what do you do now? Once again, I would say, look around at the world around you. Follow the right people on things like Twitter. That’s certainly an amazing resource because if you follow the right people on Twitter, you can learn information that you really wouldn’t get unless you spend hours digging up online. These people are doing it for you already and you can do it and kind of live streaming in action.

Other ways to figure out how do you benefit others? Where does your content belong? For instance, you made a series, would a company like Netflix or Xbox, would they have any interest in having some original content? Is the quality of the audio and the video quality up to par with what they want if you’ve done some good planning on your end in pre-production and production? Maybe you have some really phenomenal quality of writing, of performances, video/audio. If you have all the four magic things all in place together, there’s a lot of places where you can go. Right now what we’re doing is we’ve shot two episodes of our show and we’re kind of on that same place, we’re reaching out to places where it might belong.

Another example, maybe check in with a website or a product or something—I’m just going to Target, I don’t know, for some reason, it comes to me. You contact Target and maybe for some reason, (pay) their own show on their website. Who knows the reason why, but they just might. Maybe your show has that original content that they’re looking for which they can also advertise on as well. All of the sudden, out of nowhere, you have some great financing that you never would’ve expected. It’s simply, once again, a matter of collaboration, but this time with a company.

Michael: Well, you’ve given us some wonderful insights into the whole process from idea to completion. What do you foresee now in the next say, five to ten years?

Gavin Leighton: It’s funny when that has had a hand in making video content. Now, people know that it’s an exciting time to be doing this because look at where things were five years ago? You never would’ve imagined the kind of advantage that we see with video equipment and all your equipment that we have access to now. Not only do we have access too, but also really cheaply. There was never anything like HD cameras. It would’ve cost a fortune five years ago, but right now, and there’s no excuse for anybody to not be able to make something that is worthy for a big screen, with lots of people watching it or worthy of having 10, 20,000, 30,000 people following it.

It’s just a really phenomenal, exciting time to be doing this because cameras are going to be getting better. Sound equipments are going to be getting better. They’re also going to get more affordable. Even this month, I think, final cutbacks with Apple (has got) software coming out, I believe, this month if I got that right. Even advances in just software can really take people’s production to a new level that they would not have imagined five years ago.

The exciting thing is in five years from now, it’s just going to be the same thing, but it’s going to be exponential. I see in five years now, everyone having cameras like the RED camera or better. Being able to make something that looks beautiful for under a thousand dollars or whatever it might be.

Once you have these resources available to you, the first place to begin is a good, proper planning. What do you want to write? What kind of script do you want? Get out there and speak. I suggest people to give their scripts to others and let them do a table read because technology can get better and you can have access to really phenomenal equipment that’ll make you look good. But you want to make sure that the content is good too. It’s all equal in form.

Michael: Well, there you make an excellent point. The accessibility, the ease of use, the quality of the equipment, but it still comes down to the writing.

Gavin Leighton: Absolutely. Every single time. Again, another example with our show right now, “Hitting the Fan”, we did a table read with a group of friends that we were not asking to help us. We just wanted to hear how it sounded out loud with me and Mike Lawson and Ron Fallica, kind of production he might have out here. And we liked having this table read but once people read the script, there are actors with great credit, people with great talent, people that their time is valuable. They said to us, how do we be a part of this? We just want to be a part of it. We’ll help any way that we can. This is a great script. It’s very funny. It starts with that. From that point forward, because we had a good product before the cameras are turned on, more resources became available to us and also for free. We got free location and things like that in nature.

Michael: Gavin, tell us a bit about how Spidvid has impacted collaboration and production for you?

Gavin Leighton: Absolutely, when I first learned about Spidvid, not too long ago, is impressed with the idea. It’s essentially just a place where people like myself and others, the same who’ll be listening to this, can really connect with others and it’s another great resource out there. That’s what it’s all about. You go online and you put out a video idea and before you know it, the world brings you something that you would not have expected yesterday. And now, all of the sudden, your project is jumping to new great heights which built the excitement and built the, I think, the production value as well.

I think it’s a great form for people to connect and learn things about themselves as video creators and also learn things about others and to produce even better content in the future. Jeremy’s is also just a pretty nice guy.

Michael: He is that indeed. If you could just wrap this up with a few easily digestible nuggets, what would they be?

Gavin Leighton: The four things that I think that are most valuable is that they’re your four pillars for a great project and that is great writing, great performances, great video, and great audio. If one of those pillars is missing, I feel like the foundation of what you’re trying to accomplish will fall apart if you’re trying to go for something grand. If you’re just wanting to make something just to make it and show friends on Facebook or YouTube or whatever, then you have a lot more freedom but if you’re trying to take it to a next level, you are getting financing or want to place it on a network, you really need to take under consideration, I think, these four very essential aspects to video creating.

Michael: Excellent. Now, Gavin, one more time, where do we see your stuff?

Gavin Leighton: You can see my new show, which I’m the star, the writer and composer of this as well, Hittingthefanshow.com. You can watch Barackula at Barackula.com and I can be emailed from any of these sites. The best one out is Gavin@hittingthefanshow.com.

Michael: Thank you so much, Gavin Leighton for joining us today.

Gavin Leighton: Michael, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

BREAK

Michael: Next up is an actor, writer and editor of Idiotscreen.com. He’s Mike Lawson. So tell us a bit about yourself and what’s your story?

Mike Lawson: Well, I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in a small town right outside of Dayton. I always knew that I wanted to be a part of films. I started making films when I was around four or five and my parents played different roles and I would direct them and write them and make remakes of movies that I really like, like “Red Dawn” and a movie called “Daryl”, which is a cheesy movie about a boy robot.

I write and I just continue to do that through my childhood and I moved out to L.A. like so many other people primarily to be an actor and a writer, but I really focused on writing first and (I was) in the acting first. I started working at casting offices just to intern and learn the other side and worked in script development in a couple of production companies also to learn that side. Slowly, I booked like kind of bit parts on TV shows and then the parts started to go a little bit bigger and did some independent films and started to write more and I started to produce my own stuff because I got tired of waiting around like so many people do.

I produced a couple of short films and web series and then I thought of the idea to kind of create my own site like a blog featuring interviews and panel discussions in our own content that my friends and I would do and have a hub for it. I created Idiotscreen.com and now it brings me to greater than right about now. That’s basically my story in a nutshell there.

Michael: So take us to the process from your idea to script to the finish product?

Mike Lawson: Well, my friends and I, we thought of an idea originally for like a half-hour comedy show and we wrote a pilot and we were like where do we take this? We didn’t have many connections with inside the big network studio system so we said let’s do this on our own. At that time, the people were, of course, creating their own content for the web, and we thought we can do this. We have the script and then we have to add the outline for the rest of the series. The show is called “Hitting the Fan” and we basically kind of pooled our friends together. We had a sound guy friend of ours that we said can we get work (cheaper too.)

We started creating the website just this WordPress site, found this WordPress theme and started learning that so you’d have the color scheme and then we just called all our friends and Facebooked them. Between the three of us, my friends Gavin and Ron, and we basically put in money we had into it, which was very little and created a test pilot shot on a HV20 camera this little mini DV camera.

We used China lanterns because they were super cheap. We used other kinds of light fixtures from Home Depot and when our sound guy couldn’t be there, we had the other actors kind of boom that first episode. We shot it and it took several months to edit it. We had a guy editing it, a friend of ours in New York. We were editing out here between our computers. Had a lot of bad luck as far as like computers crashing and there’s probably like five different computers that was on. Then we had a friend do the sound mix.

We created it. We had a screening and then we decided let’s do a second episode before we air anything. We went out and we put a little bit more money but not much but we have learned a lot from that from that first one way shot on the T2i Rebel and the Canon 70 DSLR HD cameras and we got our other friends involved and we used again, mostly China lanterns, not really any traditional film lights but we went out and we shot it and same thing, it was a lot quicker because we didn’t shoot as much footage. We improved a lot more that first one. We were a lot more efficient with our time and our schedule and the second episode and we kind of put it out there.

That’s kind of how that happened for that show, “Hitting the Fan”. And then another series that I did was a lot different. That panel show for Idiotscreen. Basically, I just contacted various people that I’d want to interview and schedule a day at a friend’s house and had the basic China lanterns and borrowed a couple of lights from friends and set up three cameras, two T2i Rebels and the one 70, had some friends come. We just shot interviews all day and then had another friend edit and put it out on the web and try to send it out to the influencers out there, the people that who’s opinion seem to matter, which I believe is everyone, but we send out to everyone and also those who have even more influence as far as views on their site whatever.

Michael: Now, through what you just said, there was a continuing thread—friends, friends, friends. Tell us about how friends and Spidcast and others have helped you?

Mike Lawson: Well, Spidvid and Facebook and them together are basically—for us, I can speak at least for how we do it. They need resources to find talent because like a lot of the people that I work with, I come mostly again from the acting background and at the time, I didn’t have a lot of friends that were—I have one sound guy friend, which was a blessing, but the other people, I didn’t have many DP friends or editor friends or grips.

In certain cases for acting’s sake, one of my friends are kind of playing the similar age to me, kind mid to late 20’s, but there’s not always, maybe like someone in their 40’s or a teenager. It was very helpful to find people who I didn’t have in my inner circle then and who wanted to do the same thing. Of course, by them helping us out, in turn, we owe them our help on their passion projects. It’s just a way to find people because very often, in our case, we didn’t have the funds and even so, even if we did, we would want to have a place to find them that we could trust, that we would have like obviously, if we have people who’ll vouch for other people in person and online, we can trust them more than if we just got a resume through Craigslist.

Seeing someone’s profile page and their example work all in one page, I think, is very helpful and on Spidvid and Facebook and Twitter in a completely different way, but for as far as connecting, Facebook, Spidvid and some of the other places out there are huge resource to filmmakers and they definitely were for us.

Michael: Well, you feel your collaborators have certainly helped to bring the future to reality. What do you now see in the near and distant future?

Mike Lawson: Well, I see it going on the direction that it is. It’s becoming, of course, more digital and that gatekeepers once were at these networks and studios. They, of course, fight on to it to keep their place but it’s slowly slipping away. If you think that when it comes to collaboration, there’s going to be more and more content and more and more avenues to watch it and it’s already happening the way everyone is watching on different devices, mobile and of course, on internet, on television and vice versa. We’re just going to see more of that.

What I don’t think is going to change too much or I hope not is the medium itself. I’m a huge fan of collaboration. I think that that’s an incredibly important thing, but I also think that having a specific vision, it was the one creator or a couple creators and of course listening to input is very important but what I hope that it doesn’t change is that personally, I’m not a big fan of interactive content. When I’m watching a story or reading a book, I want the writer or director to take me into certain place. I don’t think that’s going to change except for a couple of gimmicks here and there, but where will change and get better, I think. There’s more and more sites and keeps growing. We can find more people and we can monetize the content online.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has that hitRECord site which I believe just sold a first book from someone coming up with an idea of that site and they have a book deal, I believe, I just saw. I could be wrong. We’ll see more and more of that where the gatekeepers are going away and the gatekeepers are just you and me and everyone else who are have an internet account. That’s just going to continue to grow and get better. Unlike where the actual storytelling itself despite a couple of gimmicks and niches here and there, I hope that doesn’t change too much because I think there’s something to be said for classic storytelling. Pushing boundaries is one thing but that’s basically kind of what I feel about.

Michael: Mike, you’ve mentioned the phrase “gatekeepers” several times and is it that a wonderful thing that the process of those “gatekeepers” that their influence has changed.

Mike Lawson: Yes, it’s a great thing. It doesn’t cost as much to create something now that you used to. The gatekeepers are not as important they once were. We now have the ability to go out there and create what we want to create at a cheaper rate. That’s inspiring. You can also use that with the cost going down and more content out there, it’s harder to monetize, but I believe that the ones that really stand out—the films, short films, the web series, whatever it may be—the ones that are truly great will find a home and will make money and we’re going to make some money on their next one. I think that the good ones will eventually be found.

Michael: Now that we’ve had a chance to visit with you Mike and folks have gotten to know you, I’m sure they’re going to want to see your stuff. Where do we go find some of your work?

Mike Lawson: You can go to Idiotscreen.com or Hittingthefanshow.com and you can watch the panel shows and interviews that we’ve done and also the original series “Hitting the Fan” and then we’ve got a feature film called “The Deadbeat”. We’ll be shooting later this fall and there’ll be more information about that as well. Idiotscreen.com and Hittingthefanshow.com as well.

Michael: Excellent. And do you have a parting shot for all listeners?

Mike Lawson: No, I mean, other than I guess the typical, just set a due date and go out and do something, I think you’ll find it be the best thing. As Seth Goden says, “Ship it.” Just go out there and ship something out into the world and then keep and go out and ship something else and constantly we’ll better each time, but the important thing is to “ship it”.

Michael: Mike Lawson, thank you so much for taking the time to visit today.

Mike Lawson: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it.

Michael: Thanks for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidvid blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

We are back with another exciting Spidcast episode this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) with a focus on collaborative filmmaking. For May’s show we feature two filmmakers and actors who are both actively producing original web series. These two individuals are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have Cooper and Brendan on the show.

Enjoy May’s Spidcast show below!

Cooper Harris is a talented actor and web series creator of the pilot RELAPSE (embedded below) which won the Top Audience Award at the recent Celebrate the Web competition. The RELAPSE web show has been rumored to be fully produced in the near future, which is exciting news to its already established fan base. Cooper discusses her show and Squatters, and how collaboration means everything when it comes to getting things accomplished.

Brendan Bradley is the creator and lead actor of break out hit, and award winning web series Squatters (episode 1 embedded below). Season 2 is in full development now, leaving viewers anxious for its release in the upcoming future. Brendan talks about appreciating team members, how he leveraged collaboration to create his entertaining show, and gives a sneak peak into Season 2 of Squatters.

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Cooper or Brendan talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, and be sure to share this show with anyone in your network who can get value from its content!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Brendan Bradley from New York City. He’s a writer, director, and creator. I bet you’ve seen some of his work and probably not known it. He has some interesting insights to share. And we’ll also visit with Cooper Harris. She’s an actress and producer of web content as well, including not one, not two, but three web series, plus some feature film work she tells us about as well.

First up is Brendan Bradley. Brendan, welcome to Spidcast.

Brendan: Hey, Michael. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be on the show. It really means a lot and it’s been great having “Squatters” actually on Spidvid. So for all the fans out there that has been watching the show, thank you so much for tuning in.

Michael: Tell us a bit about you and your story.

Brendan: I’m the creator of an online series called “Squatters”, which you can find on Spidvid and at Squatterstheseries.com. You can also see me in the recent “Video Game Reunion” on Comedy Central’s Atom.com, “Jeff and Robbie Fail History”, which is a “Subway” web series, and a new series called “The Game Room”.

Michael: And how did the collaboration benefit “Squatters”?

Brendan: Michael, film’s an incredibly collaborative medium because they’re just so many moving parts. There’s this great expression, “it takes a whole village to raise a child”, which I know is kind of cheesy but “Squatters” is my baby. But I couldn’t have begun the project without my incredible team that supported me every single step of the way.

I made “Squatters” because I wanted to have a calling card as an actor and a writer, but the further in the process I got, I realized there are editors like Scott Turner and costume designers like Jenny Green, and cinematographers like James Rhodimer, and composers like Morgan Pearse; all these people who also want to make a name for themselves in their own departments, in their own creativity, and so let them. Bringing a larger team and collaborating with them and letting everybody bring their vision to the project just helped everything rise up and raise the bar.

Especially in the web area, it is so tempting to just do everything to just do everything yourself and act like a one-man band, but I always try to surround myself with these many talented and intelligent people as I can and allow them to put their stamp on the project and then take credit for it. But seriously, I think that’s ultimately what helps “Squatters” stand out, is so many phenomenally talented people all bringing their vision and putting their stamp and having their own ownership over the project.

Michael: Great managers hire the right people and let them do their job. So tell us, Brendan, how did you attract the big names that you had in the first season?

Brendan: Over the years, I have actually been very blessed to work with some extremely talented actors who I have been lucky enough to stay friends with. There’s just nothing more satisfying than creating an opportunity to play with your friends or people that you respect. So most of the roles in “Squatters” were actually offered to people that I’d worked with before or I wanted to work with.

I met Erik Scott Smith who plays Alex Selkirk on a short film and we’ve become real life best friends, which really helped with that banter between Hank and Alex. Sandeep Parikh from “The Guild”, he actually hired me for my first commercial in Los Angeles and my first web series, the “Legend of Neil”. I really just returned the favor to him. But then there’s people like Christiann Castellanos, who plays Ramira or Matt Moy, who plays Hung, the delivery guy, who we actually held auditions in Los Angeles and New York and they had practically no credits on their resumes at the time and immediately after they shot “Squatters”, they really just started exploding, which makes me feel really good that I’m not the only one who noticed how talented they are.

To tall the actors out there, the advice I can take away with becoming involved especially in the web world, but even in the independent film world that I’ve experienced is, be reliable and fun to work with and just stay in touch and you will get hired again. But it’s all about cultivating those relationships.

Michael: An absolutely great lesson on networking as well. What did you learn from the first season that you’re applying to season two?

Brendan: God, we learned so much during the first season of “Squatters” that really just helped the show kind of evolve as we went. We shot off and on for over a year basically whenever I could save up enough money to continue shooting. And in that time, everything changed, with the web space changed, new media contract’s changed, the cameras that everybody was using changed. It’s such an exciting and fast-paced medium and I’ve really learned something new every single week.

The first thing I’m bringing to season two from the experience of season one is just to shoot everything all in one chunk with a set budget just to make it less stressful for my entire team—the cast, the crew and everybody. Just get everybody there for a month and do it right.

The other thing is people don’t necessarily find your show on the first day or the first episode. It’s something I’ve really learned that I’m trying to apply to future episodes is that the second season of “Squatters” will be a lot more self-contained and really push the boundaries of Alex squatting in that office and Hank really exploring New York City and really driving those two-story lines as far apart as we can.

Michael: What did you find was the best way to promote and get attention for the web series?

Brendan: I have to credit Felicia Day here who I worked on “Legend of Neil” and she said to tell a story that is true to you and make a show that you want to see and instead of trying to cater to what you think an audience wants. I personally love shows like “Psyche” and “Scrubs” and “Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, and “Squatters” is a hundred percent my sense of humor the way I like shows to look, the characters I invest in—all of it. I think that allows me to be totally honest with the audience. If you like what I like, you’re going to love “Squatters”. And if you don’t, no hard feelings. There’s a lot of other great shows out there.

We’ve had some support from sites that we uploaded to like Dailymotion and Blip and Stay Tuned TV. My entire PR strategy was allowing a hundred people in the cast and crew to just promote their work and feel proud of the final episodes because I really think that personal touch is what matters.

I get dozens of emails, Facebook invites, tweets, you name it, every single day and they’re all so vague. When a friend really reaches out to me and says, hey, I’m really proud of this, will you check it out? I will always take the time to watch and even comment or vote or whatever it is that can help that video and that creation. That’s been kind our key in promotion, as just being completely sincere about “we love the show”, “we’re proud of the show”, and we think the people who are like us and our friends and family will love it. It’s really helped us kind of find even a wider audience beyond our immediate circle.

Michael: Alright, Bradley, here’s the million-dollar question and of course, all pun intended, what are some tips to get the most out of a limited video project budget?

Brendan: I have to say be good to your people. I cannot stress it enough. I don’t think there’s a project in the world that couldn’t use more money or more time. The budget is always going to be limiting. If you treat your team well, they will work with you and they’ll bring their A-game every single time.

“Squatters” was burden. No one asked me to make that show. Everyday the people even showed up, paid or not paid, that was a favor to me and I really tried to honor that as much as possible by respecting what each department needed on the set and trying to give them a feeling of ownership over a piece of the project. I think that is ultimately the key to collaboration. You choose the people who bring out your best and want to bring their best to the work.

Michael: And can you give us a bit of a sneak peek into season two of “Squatters”?

Brendan: I would love to give you more than a sneak peek. The fun part about the internet is, like I said, it’s always evolving and we’re always kind of seeing what’s next. I’ve been involved with a lot of other projects over the past six months, but “Squatters” is still happening and still being worked on and I think at this point, all I can safe-fully say is we’re going to really try to keep going bigger, faster, and funnier. Really getting both Alex and Hank to fully explore those environments more like I was saying earlier. Let the love interest develop, get Alex really exploring the office and that environment, get Hank really exploring New York and a lot of other temporary housing solutions not just the comfortable pillow tops of a lot of ladies all over the city. And hey, drum roll please, maybe even resolve the bet. We’ll see how far we want to go with that.

The recent exposure like the Indie Intertube Awards and the Clicker Awards, we hoped that those will help us find financing or a sponsor that will really help us bring that next level of production to the show and to our fans. Fingers crossed everybody, for the Streamy Awards to hopefully get some love to my amazing team that just made the first season happen and really had supported me every step of the way.

In the meantime, I hope everyone will go check out episodes on Spidvid and Squatterstheseries.com. Make sure you let us know what you think and we’re also at @squattersseries on Twitter. Follow us and harass us and we just are so appreciative that people are out there watching. Thanks for having us on today.

Michael: You are so welcome and thank you, Brendan Bradley.

BREAK

Michael: You know how challenging it is to produce quality videos without the help from others who have the skills and talent you need. Well, Spidvid let’s you find the individuals you need for your video production project so you can create the internet’s next big viral hit. Visit Spidvid.com. Click the signup link and reserve you spot within our collaborative video production community today.

Next up is actress and web producer, Cooper Harris. Cooper, welcome to Spidcast.

Cooper Harris: Absolutely my pleasure. I’m excited to be here.

Michael: Tell us about how you broke into the web series world?

Cooper Harris: I broke into web series world kind of on a fluke. I and my producing partner had done numerous online commercials basically and we sold in to companies like Post-it Notes, Kimberly-Clark, Krazy Glue, and from there, since we’re both actresses, it kind of made sense then to transition into scripted content. That was right as the whole web series thing was really breaking two years ago. That’s kind of how it happened.

Michael: Cooper, how has collaboration help with the web series pilot?

Cooper Harris: I think collaboration is key in any project or any thing, but especially for web series, especially if you have a lower budget because to try to do everything yourself, it never turns out as good as what we’d hope. So I think bringing out other people whose creative vision fit yours is a really good idea. That way, you can all just fill in the chinks that inevitably will come from not having as much money as you’d want. “Squatters” was created by Brendan Bradley and I jumped on board and we produced the whole thing together from start to finish. I remember the very first reading, it was a really exciting thing to be kind of just put together and then from there, a year and a half later, we have the show.

Michael: Do you have some tips that you can share to get the most of out of a limited budget project?

Cooper Harris: Favors. That favor thing. I really do think also time management and planning, they say you can’t have the whole (league) trifecta production. You can have a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of quality, but if you’re missing one, you have to make up for in the other department. We do not have a lot of money for “Relapse” the kind that we just did (which won) “Celebrate the Web”. We also do not have a lot of money for “Squatters” either. So it was really crucial that we really planned it all out kind of even to the minute and also collaborated with people who had exceptional vision and equipment.

Michael: Now, you’ve mentioned “Squatters”. Tell us a bit about that.

Cooper Harris: Yes, “Squatters” is a web series created by Brendan Bradley and produced by myself and executive produced by Frank Kramer, who came on at the end and was generous enough to give us some finishing funds. Another example of, at least, monetary collaboration. It was really great to have him.

It’s a story about two roommates in New York who made a bet to live without paying rent for a year. It’s really fun. It’s a comedy. Dailymotion picked us up. We are to date, I believe, their number one original comedy, which is really exciting. We have everybody in there from Ryan Sypek from “Wild Fire” to Sandeep Parikh of “The Guild” and “Legend of Neil”, Tony Janning, and of course, I’m in it as Julie, the female lead, and I play an up and coming—actually, she’s a lawyer and she is kind of the girl who’s always getting away from Hank.

Michael: What did you find was the best way to promote and get viewer attention to a web series?

Cooper Harris: First of all, you want to have a really kick-ass show. That’s just kind of the basics so that when people do watch, they feel excited and not like you’re wasting their time. At least for “Relapse”, “The Celebrate the Web” pilot we did later, we were able to get a lot of kind of big YouTube personalities and people with large Twitter followings, definitely influencers, to watch the show like it and then tweet about it, which got up a huge number of votes which was how “The Celebrate Web” competition worked.

I think that was really successful for us. But again, it all hinders on having a really good and intriguing product that you’re showing people. Definitely Twitter. Facebook’s great. I actually send around good, old-fashioned email chain to my mother and all my tradition fans and North Carolina. Definitely drawing on the families, the old friends from back home who get excited to seeing what you’re up to out in California.

Then we had amazing success with “Squatters” in terms of—Tubefilter was very generous on their coverage and took a keen interest. They actually kind of broke the original sneak peek of “Squatters”. They were the first publication to do anything on it. We had a lot of feedbacks from that. Definitely targeting the online web media places. It’s really good .New Teevee, of course, Tubefilter, all of those, they’re really good.

Michael: You just mentioned something exceptionally important, that is that it all falls back in the writing and a good product.

Cooper Harris: Yes, definitely. It’s really important that when you’re pushing something, it’d be good. That sounds so basic but if you’re going to (inaudible 00:15:15) you want to give them something back. You want to reward them for the six minutes they’re spending by great writing or release fun, maybe unexpected casting choices, stuff like that. People they’ve seen in other places. Humor is always good or that tension. You got to give back.

Cooper Harris: Cooper, it’s been a bit of a challenge to pin you down for this interview. I mean that in a good way because you’ve been so very busy. Tell us where do we see you next?

Cooper Harris: I have so many different things going on. It’s a hard thing to juggle in my mind. I have a really exciting show coming up called “Mighty Woman” and that will touchdown, if you’d like to say, because she’s a superhero, in a couple of months. Of course, I also have “Relapse” coming up which is “The Celebrate the Web” pilot, which is very exciting. It sounds like it’s going to be a show. We can’t announce anything officially just yet, but that’s definitely in the works.

And a really fun, not on the web series field, but in traditional film, I have a romantic-comedy coming out called “Amy Alyson Fans”. It’s really fun because I think it’s one of the first films that really pays homage to the online phenomenon. It uses real YouTube video bloggers, like real YouTube stars in a film talking about this actress who is quickly rising to fame on the internet. It’s kind of a fun, blending, cross-platform project. I play the actress, Amy Alyson, so that should be really great. We’re screening at the (DCA) in two weeks.

Michael: Art imitating life there.

Cooper Harris: Exactly. It is kind of art imitating life.

Michael: And how about your web address? Where do we see you online?

Cooper Harris: Cooperharris.net.

Michael: Cooper Harris, thank you so much for being with us today.

Cooper Harris: Thank you so much and I really appreciate all that you guys are doing for the online video space.

Michael: Thank you for listening to our Spidcast show. We appreciate your time and attention. You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidvid blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast.

So we are back with Spidcast this month (listen in below and subscribe on iTunes) this time with a collaborative filmmaking focus. For April’s show we feature two filmmakers who are both actively producing original web series. These two guys are doing interesting things within the new media space, and it was our pleasure to have Ralph and Richard on the show.

Ralph Fontaine is a Spidvid member who is producing the web series Causality which is set to be released later this year. Ralph discusses his series, how collaboration has benefited its production, and he shares how his team is building an audience BEFORE the series is released.

Richard Boehmcke has just released the pilot episode for his web series Twentease and is quickly figuring out this rapidly evolving digital media landscape. Richard talks about tapping into social media, collaborative production, and how tapping into your connection networks can be extremely beneficial to filmmaking projects.

Enjoy April’s Spidcast show below!

If you’re interested in sponsoring next month’s Spidcast show with a product or service you sell that’s filmmaking related, then please get in touch. If you have something to say with regards to what Ralph or Richard talked about, then please post a comment below to continue the conversation. Thanks for listening, it feels super great to be back!

Full Show Transcript Below

INTRO

Michael: Hi. I’m Michael London and welcome to Spidcast, the future of collaborative video production brought to you by Spidvid.com. On this episode, we’re visiting with Richard Boehmcke from New York City. He’s a writer, director and creator and I bet you’ve seen some of his work and not known it. He has some interesting insights to share. We’ll also visit with Ralph Fontaine, creator and director, and he has a new web series called “Causality”.

I say we jump right in. Richard, welcome to Spidcast. Tell us a little bit about your story.

Richard: I’m a writer/director/creator of things. I live in New York City. I’ve been blogging for about three years and that’s kind of shoot me up into other things, short video, contests, playwriting and some stuff like that and kind of got into the social media world where I started into Facebook and got on Twitter and eventually, for me this is really the first super valuable things that come out of Twitter was coming across Spidvid. I saw the posting looking for anybody who wanted to talk a little bit about video collaboration and it’s something I’m passionate about and looking forward to sharing some thoughts on it today.

Michael: Well, since you brought up Spidvid, tell us a bit about your experiences with collaboration.

Richard: Sure. I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of great people around me that I work with. Some of the cool stuff that I’ve done recently are some short video contest that I did late last year which led into working on this short web series actually that I’m putting together right now. We finished the pilot in fall and submitted it to a contest. We submitted to the “Bing Decisions” contest. It’s a contest about decisions, so they wanted to see a short pilot about that. I needed help doing it.

I wanted to write/direct it but I needed people to get in it and help me put it together and I basically reached out to some of my trusted friends and said hey, do you know anybody who’s interested and basically was fortunate enough to get hooked up with some really great people and we put together this pilot and shot it and brewed it in a couple of weeks and shot in a day and edited it in about four weeks, which is unfortunately the worst part of the process. But put it together and it was a really excited process, now we’re actually probably going to be working with some of those people on some projects later in the fall that we’re putting together right now.

Michael: Excellent. We’d love to hear that. Share with us more specifically about some of those with whom you have collaborated?

Richard: When I got into this pilot, we knew that we needed a staff. We needed that in the past, there’d be a cameraman and actors, but this time, we needed a director of photography. We needed producers. We needed people to support the whole process and I didn’t have that in my immediate network, kind of my first connections.

I have some people who would help out with marketing of plays that I’ve written and directed in the past. I said hey do you anybody who likes doing this sort of thing and they knew what kind of I was all about and the things that I love to do. That was really a huge help in reaching out and I had a friend whose friends went to NYU Film School. They loved doing projects like this and so put me in touch with the director of photography and him and his buddy shot the actual pilot and through another friend, I was like I need some help putting this together. I can write and direct it, I was confident in that but reaching out to a venue, I didn’t necessarily know that I have that connection. Another friend who had seen some of my work said, I have a friend who’s looking to do some producing. And really what it came down to was being fortunate enough to have people who knew the kind of work that I was looking to do and knew people that were passionate about kind of breaking into this.

We kind of all helped each other out in this project and it was great because like I said, I didn’t have those connections and it’s so important to have people who know what they’re doing. I mean, you can kind of fake it in the beginning but it comes across real quick if you don’t know what you’re doing. It was super helpful to have that.

Michael: You are right there. You have found the creative collaborators but how about creating projects with limited or even no budgets?

Richard: It’s pretty easy. You just basically stop sleeping and just obsess compulsively over the project until it’s done. We had no budget for this project as we have limited budget for anything else. Basically, the budget is whatever spare cash I have in my bank account at that time.

For this project, it really came down to the conversation beforehand which kind of guided the project because like I said, we didn’t have any money, we didn’t have a bank roll or budget or anything to fund it. I knew I needed people who are willing to volunteer their services and who are going to be as passionate about it as I am.

It was interesting because one of the first people I was put in touch with about kind of doing this filming and being a director of photography for the project, we had the initial conversation and he was going to help us out. I was like, okay cool and I got off the phone with and I was just like you know what, he’s going to work for free and he’s got great equipment but I just didn’t get that good vibe of this is somebody that I really felt got what we were looking to do. I actually followed up and said, you know, I’m going to go to another direction and take my chances to see if I could find somebody else. Lucky enough, I was able to find somebody else willing to volunteer their services.

It really comes down to those initial conversations of how much are you willing to give and in the nicest way possible, not like in the sense of hey, you got to give me everything you have to give me. Everything, give me your soul, but more in the regards of hey, what can you offer and what do you have to contribute and can we make this together? It was volunteering of time and finding some venues that were looking to donate services as well.

I think that’s when you kind of have those best projects are when people come together who are all really interested in accomplishing a goal and their more passionate about seeing a completed project, seeing something thru the completion as opposed to just how we can make it the biggest possible. We left the project and one of the girls, who produced the show, actually said to us, “I’ve never had that much fun on a project before. I thought it was supposed to be stressful”. That was the nicest thing I heard at the end, which kind of validated our whole approach.

Michael: And without the fun, what’s the point, right? Now, talking about fun, collaboration has seem to somewhat lessened the backstabbing competition that is sometimes prevalent in this business.

Richard: Yes. We’ve realized kind of early on—and I say “we” and I speak in the royal “we” all the time—the most work I do is with my friend Andrea, who’s a childhood friend, we’ve been friends for 15 years and just kind of stumbled into working on this stuff together and she’s my editor, my producer, my everything in these projects. She’s like my primary collaboration in all of this. She is there for every step of the way.

One of the things we’ve seen kind of early on is that we just want to do something kind of unique and something cool and something that speaks to us and for us, it has come to the forefront of this project. We wanted to kind of create stuff that either we don’t hear or things that reflect our lives in the discussion that we’re having. You see other people doing stuff and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that sense of oh man, they’re two years younger than me and they’ve got this contract or they sold a movie or something like that.

I think it comes down to really as making something that speaks to what you’re looking to do and just being honest with creating the kind of work that’s honest about your voice and what you’re looking to create because there’s a great competition in it and having other people kind of in the same space doing stuff and innovating and that’s a really cool kind of competition but I’m not looking to blow anybody else out of the water. I want to do something that makes me happiest and I feel really helps the people that I’m working with all kind of reach our potentials and do the things that we really love to do.

It’s cool to work with somebody else. You want to believe that you can do it all yourself but all it takes it a couple of sleepless nights and some heart palpitations to make you realize that you can’t necessarily do that. If you could find those good people to work with, man, it changes the whole process. It makes it bigger that any one person.

Michael: Let’s do a one AV on this. Taking if from collaboration to direct competition, which you recently won a competition, right?

Richard: There were actually two contests that I won last year. Two video contests—one was the Fiji Water-Air Pacific “Two Tickets to Paradise Contest” and the other one was the Cold-Eeze “Worst Cold Ever Contest”. I won a vacation out of both of them, which the first thing I learned was winning video contest is a great way to finance your vacations. That’s a goal for this year.

The thing that I really learned was both of those projects, as soon as I read the summary or the bio of what the contest was about, I had the idea. It came to me right in that moment. I entered, I think, probably about a dozen video contests last year and some of them I kind of forced an idea into creation and try to make something happen when I didn’t necessarily have a whole bunch there. I realized from these contests that when I did have success in them that it really pays to go with what your gut says and attack those things that you know you can make a difference at. Because I can enter 25 video contests throughout the year but if I’m just kind of bringing to light some kind of 30% ideas, it’s not going to be a great success and it’s not going to validate me in the way that I want to create great art or work or whatever you want to call it.

What I learned from that really was that man, if I have a great idea about something and I feel that kind excitement in my chest, that’s something that I want to go for, yeah, I’m going to pursue it. Whereas, I don’t have to force myself to do something just to make something just to have it. I want to create a whole bunch of content. I want to create great content but I would rather have it stuffed that’s coming from inside me and things that are actually organic to my hopes and dreams. It’s a little over the top there but I think to the things that I want to do and really speaks to my goals and focusing on the things that I believe I can do something good in, I think that’s really what I’ve learned from that impulse (from that tremendously).

Michael: Well, let’s do go over the top a bit. What are your thoughts as you get that feeling in your chest, that feeling of anticipation about future projects and collaborations?

Richard: When you bring up that idea of anticipation, I’m anticipating about everything, about the next 10 years. That’s what keeps me up at night, just the exciting feeling of all those great stuff coming.

We’re working on two really big projects right now. One, we’re finishing writing the script for this web pilot which they’ll announce the winner in May so whether or not we win the contest or not, we’re going to go ahead and shoot the entire series and get it online and get it out there. It’s a series we call “Twentease”, kind of a play on words about the tease of being in your twenties. We’re writing that now.

We’ve got a play lined up for the fall. It’s a full length play. It’s called the “Lion’s Wager”. We’re shooting for October and we’re going to do some really cool stuff. We’re doing a two-month web series leading up to it.

We’re doing a whole bunch of multimedia stuff through Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook and a really unique approach trying to change the way people see live theatre and really kind of doing a grassroots, a term that’s thrown around a lot, but kind of a grassroots approach in that connecting people to the project very early on so that we’ve got this built-in audience so that there’s this kind of great lead up to this show that will go on for a week in the fall. We’re going to film it and put the whole thing online kind of like a high quality film. We’re working on those and putting all our resources towards both of those things.

Michael: Lots and lots of things in the pipeline. That’s what we love to hear. How do folks get in touch with you and see your work and perhaps collaborate with you, Richard?

Richard: We’re always looking for cool people to collaborate with and people who have ideas. I say “we” again, but Andrea and I, my friend who I kind of coerced into most of this are always looking for a new project. Everything is kind of found to the homepage. It’s Boehmcke.com and everything’s there. You can hit me up on Facebook, our Vimeo page, our YouTube channel and see all of the kind of work we’re doing and reach out to us that way. Of course, our blog as well which you can find out through Boehmcke.com.

One of the cool things is that we’ve been lucky enough to kind of find this podcast and this opportunity through Spidvid. I follow Spidvid on Twitter, so anybody else who wants to reach out on Twitter to Spidvid or to me, specifically, I think it’s a great kind of new tool for video collaborators because I think it kind of instantly puts it into your stream and instantly puts it into your kind of access point where it might not have been a couple of years ago or even a couple of months ago. It’s a great way to keep in touch.

Michael: Richard, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Richard: Thank you.

BREAK

Michael: Next up a visit with Ralph Fontaine. Ralph, jump right in here. Get the Spidcast family up to date on you.

Ralph: Sure. My name is Ralph Fontaine and I’m the director/producer of an upcoming web series called “Causality”. I started out awhile back as an actor and I’ve learned early on that although I really enjoy acting, there were some things that I missed about just having a little more control, a little more creative control of the process.

I started learning web directing and producing and learned that it’s one of the most exciting things in the world to see your vision come to life on a screen. I got more into that and kept up with the acting. I worked in Los Angeles for awhile as a reality TV producer and director and decided that reality TV was not for me. As everyone knows, there’s really no reality to it at all and there’s really not a lot of vision to it either.

I left that and I came up to Seattle and I connected with a lot of really good people and became sort of (inaudible 0:14:54) in the filmmaking world appear as much as I could. I’ve been learning more and just getting more involved and more involved in the world of directing and producing and as web series and web entertainment have developed, I really decided that I think that’s the future of entertainment since more people are more both creating shows for online distribution and watching them that way.

I think that there’s not reason to have to be in New York or Los Angeles anymore if you’re a creative and talented person. There are tons of them here in Seattle. I know there are others all over the country and I think that’s really the future. It doesn’t have to be segments in one of those two major hubs that have been before.

Michael: That’s great. There is a wealth of talent in those so-called flyover states that now have accessibility to producers such as yourself. Tell us about your latest production.

Ralph: Sure. “Causality” is a story of several time travelers who come from various times in the future for various reasons. One of our tag lines is “Every one has their own reasons for traveling to the past.” When they come to the past, they end up meeting together, much like settlers in the Old West that people who came from different places. In our story, they’re coming from different times but they meet one another, they support one another, they help each other survive in the sort of a foreign land. As they do that, they end up running into some people from the current time, which takes place in our current time around 2011, and someone else gets drawn into their story and into their environment and they have to work together to prevent some things from happening that really shouldn’t happen.

It’s really character-driven. It is a science-fiction and speculative fiction web series as we like to say. Because of the fact that we really believe that characters are what make good science-fiction good, although there will be some special effects and there will be some science-fiction scenes, we’re really focusing on the characters and the acting and the writing. We’re hoping that what that’s going to do is help us stand apart from some of the other shows that maybe have very high production values and very exciting special effects. In addition to having that stuff, we’re going to have as strong of acting and writing as we can possibly get.

I’m really excited about the cast that we have. We just shot a promo the other day that looked amazing. I’m really excited for it. The whole team is just really getting into the process and just developing the story as we go and we’re learning more about the characters and learning more about the situations and we’re hoping it’s going to be sustainable, something that we can continue for a couple of different seasons.

We’re talking what we call a transmedia approach to it and I don’t know how familiar people are with transmedia but what it means to us is that our primary means of telling the story will be the episodes. Each episode will be between probably five to ten minutes long and ultimately by the end of the first season, it’ll be about a feature film length, about 90-100 minutes or so. In addition to that, we will have character blogs, character video blogs that I call the Captain’s vlog, kind of like on “Star Trek” where there’ll be characters sitting in front of a webcam telling some aspect of the story that relates to the main story in the episodes but is a little bit separate and may give more back story for those that are interested.

We’re also going to have some written fiction that’s in the world of “Causality”, but again, related to but not exactly the same story that we’re telling in the episodes. For those that are interested, there’s going to be lots of different ways to go deeper, learn more about our characters, their situations, how they got there, why they do what they do in the episodes. It’s going to be up for the viewers. If they want to just watch the episodes, they’ll stand along and they’ll be hopefully exciting and keep them coming back for more. If they’re interested, there’s going to be more to watch and more to read.

Michael: That is a great added bonus. Love that. Now, if you would speak a bit about a collaboration has aided you specifically in the development of “Causality”.

Ralph: Collaboration is completely essential. I’ve worked on projects in the past as a producer and director. I’ve had some ideas that I was hoping would go somewhere and because of those times, I didn’t find the right people and the right situations, those ideas didn’t really go anywhere and part of the reason that “Causality” is actually getting some traction and going somewhere is because of the team that we’ve built. It’s a very strong team of passionate, creative, talented people who all bring their own—not just their own personal skills and talents—but also their own networks to it. Everyone who is part of the process has really brought more to it rather than just the talents. They brought new friends and new ideas and things that just bring it so much further.

I want to mention a couple of my partners in the process, Glynis Mitchell, is one of the writers and she’s also going to be one of the actresses and she’s the producer. She has really brought a lot to it with—I was mentioning earlier about the character-driven aspects of it. She’s a writer and an actress. She brings a very character-driven esthetic to it.

The other writer is Michael Montoure and he is by trade a horror and science-fiction writer. He brings the really strong sort of scientific and science fiction aspect to it. The two of them collaborating to write has really made it something more than it would have been alone.

We also have some Seattle talent coming in as director of the photography. We’ve had really good people because of some people we knew. We got a great location for our promo. Without the collaboration of people, we really wouldn’t have even gotten as far as we have and we’re still in the very early stages.

Where we really see the collaboration continuing is we have been active on Twitter, Facebook and blogging on our website to try to build some audience. We’ve really already started developing outside of our Seattle network of artists. We’ve started developing a strong collaboration with some of our fellow web series creators that we met on Twitter. I think that’s amazing because as I was saying earlier, I feel like the new world of entertainment that’s coming is coming on the web and it’s a little bit like our series. It’s the Old West and there’s no rules.

Everyone is doing their own way and there’s so much talent out there all over the country and we’re all trying for the same goal and yet the competition factor is not a negative thing. We’re all looking for more people to start watching and paying attention to entertainment online. For example, one of our friends is Michael Flores from Western X: The Series, he has built a great following for his series. Although they’re also kind of a speculative-fantasy-fiction kind of series, their competition is not negative with us because if he gets an audience and then shares that audience with and we build an audience and share it with him, now we both win because there’s more people watching online entertainment.

That online collaboration, the same thing with Spidvid, the fact that what you guys are doing and brining filmmakers together in wherever they are and whatever skills are, brining people together to create something is the only way we’re going to get this done since we’re not sticking to those hubs like New York and Los Angeles.

In those places, it’s easier to make the connections with someone else who’s in the industry because let’s face it, everyone in L.A. is in the industry so anywhere you go, you’re going to run in to someone who has a similar goal. The negative there is there’s all that competition where if I befriend someone in L.A. who’s also a director, we might be vying for the same work. In this case, we’re just vying for audience. We’re not taking each other’s jobs. We’re building audience together and we’re building awareness that is this relatively new form of entertainment. That’s really exciting to me and I don’t think that we’d be able to go very far with it if we didn’t have that collaboration. The more people that start watching this stuff online and start really enjoying the concept of sort of shorter episodic entertainment, the way web series tend to be, the more advertisers are going to take note. There’s going to actually become more money in this for the creators and to allow them to sustain their art the way that sometimes people can’t right now.

Michael: I love win-win aspect of this. Now, you mentioned about the blogging and podcasting to a not only in the marketing, but also the enjoyment of “Causality”, where do we find that?

Ralph: Our website is Watchcausality.com and what we have up there right now is still in the preliminary stages. We have a blog that we contribute to as often as possible. We tend to do at least three posts per week and the people that are mainly posting right now are myself, Glynis Mitchell and Michael Montoure, the creators and producers of the show. We do also have some of our cast members contributing blogs when they can. We’ve also began the process of talking to some of our web series creators to maybe add some more blog content about their shows as I was talking about with the cross-promotion.

Go to watchcausality.com, you’ll see our blog. We have a couple of promos up. They’re very simple, short promos to start to introduce our characters. We also have a Q&A session that we did at a local Seattle bar and restaurant here that was nice enough to host a reading of Michael Montoure’s, one of his fiction and horror stories and the crowd that was there were mostly friends and other people from the area who knew of his writing and they also knew of the series so they started asking us some questions of “Causality” and we shot that and sort of made a Q&A so the people would understand a little bit more about the series. Since we don’t have episodes up yet and it’s still kind of a ways off until you’re really going to get to see a full episode. We wanted to start getting people to understand what our world is, who are these characters that we’re going to hope you’re going to follow once the episodes are out and really building a community around the sights as the world of “Causality” that we’re creating.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about how to build an audience for a web series and one of the things I’ve learned is that what most people do is they go out, they create their show, they bring your team together, they create their show, they edit it and they put it up online and then they go why isn’t anybody watching?

Well, it’s not that they didn’t make a good product. A lot of times, they do. It’s just that it takes a very long time to build an audience and it takes a very long time to create a quality show. What I had learned from some of the stuff I’ve read is why not start early? Why not start during this process? It’s going to be about a year from when we started talking and planning “Causality” until we actually have a full season of episodes. Why not take that year and build awareness and build excitement for the episodes that are upcoming? That’s what we’re doing. We’re active one Twitter. We’re doing the blogging. We’re starting a podcast actually. We’ve already recorded a couple of episodes that’s called Podcast the Test. It’s not posted yet because we want to make sure we have several episodes in the can before we start making it available so that it can be a regular thing. Once a week or so, we’ll be able to release a new podcast and the podcast is going to be not specifically about “Causality” but it’s going to be about what we call sci-fi (inaudible 0:26:03), which is just about anything sci-fi. We’re going to talk a little bit about the world of “Causality” but we’re also going to talk about our influences, other shows that we like, other shows that maybe we don’t like. It’s kind of humorous and for anyone who’s into sci-fi, we’re hopefully they’re going to really enjoy listening to some of our opinions and maybe they’ll agree with me, maybe they won’t and they can write in and we can talk about that the next time.

We’ve got the podcast. We’ve got the blog. We’ve got the promos that are up there right now. We’re really just trying to engage people as much as we can and have them be there for us when the episodes are up.

Michael: We will all head over and check those out. Ralph, how about some take home points for those wanting to get involved in collaborative production?

Ralph: My advice to anyone who’s trying to create a web series is to have a plan. One of the things I said earlier is that we know a lot of people and we’ve heard about a lot of people that create something and they put a lot of time, energy, sweat and tears, all that stuff to creating something and then they’re frustrated with the fact that it didn’t go anywhere. Part of those is because we’re all artists. We want to create our art. That’s the ultimate goal of what we do but if you have a strong plan and that means sort of a production plan, a marketing plan, and a budget, these are all ways that you can really make your art even more worthwhile so that not just you and your close-knit family and friends are the ones enjoying it.

The more of a plan you have, the more people will see what you’re doing and the more sustainable that art will become. By marketing plan, I really mean think about how do you want to get the word out? Think about who is your audience. An artist don’t like to think about this stuff a lot of times, they think if I do something good, everyone will like it. Ultimately, that maybe true but to get people to know about it, you have to focus on the people who are going to be passionate about it. In our case, it’s science-fiction fans.

In other cases, you may have a niche. I have another friend in Los Angeles who created a web series called “WORKSHOP: The Series” and he was very smart about it. He created a series about a bunch of actors in L.A. that are taking a workshop to learn about acting and connect and try to get famous in L.A. They’re very character-driven and hey, everyone in L.A. can relate to these characters that they’ve created. He built a strong audience because he came up with something that people relate to and he knew what that was. He knew how to market it.

Whatever you’re creating, find out who your audience is and find out where they hangout. Go online, go on Twitter, go on Facebook, create a fan page and really try to have a plan that by this time, I want to have this many followers and this many likes on Facebook. Here’s what I’m going to do to get there. I’m going to release promos once a month. I’m going to some video content at least once a month. I’m going to do a blog post three times a week. Give people reasons to keep coming back to you and to tell their friends about what it is that you’re doing. If they do that, then your audience will branch beyond the initial niche people if it’s a good story and if it’s done well. That’s what we’re hoping for. That’s my advice. Just really use the network you have keep building that network online in places like Spidvid, places like other websites where you can post and repost articles and contribute, become part of the community.

Michael: Priceless advice, Ralph. Again, let folks know how they can get in touch with you and enjoy your work.

Ralph: Sure. The website for “Causality” is Watchcausality.com and my personal Twitter account is @rfontaine71. I also recommend that you follow @watchcausality on Twitter. You get more information about what’s upcoming for the show. If you like, you can follow a couple of the creators, @glynismitchell. She’s one of the creators and actresses of the show and writers. Then there’s @montoure. If you’re interested in horror-writing, you can check out his website at Bloodletters.com.

Michael: Ralph, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Ralph: Thanks a lot and for having me.

Michael: I’m Michael London. Thanks for listening to our Spidcast show, we appreciate your time and attention! You can now join the conversation at Spidcast.com or on our Spidvid blog. And you can join our collaborative filmmaking community at Spidvid.com. Tune in next month for another entertaining and informative episode of Spidcast!