Say you had an idea for a group of characters and the universe in which you’d like to set them.
What would you do with that material?
The traditional method is to develop the stories yourself. Write prose, film screenplays, develop videogames, produce a TV series. Even in the most contemporary [...]
Adapted from a post on the message boards at the fantastic screenwriting site Wordplayer. Read everything everywhere on that site if you want a deep understanding of how to write a screenplay.
So with my web sketch comedy group Monkey With A Shotgun, I’ve got an actual revenue-generating video series over on Babelgum.
Babelgum is a [...]
Over on his blog today, Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja asks the all important question- “Is Online Video Dead?”
It’s true that the real successes of web video series can be counted on one hand. But then we’re still very early on in the game. The things people are trying now are [...]
One offshoot of SoCal Film Group is Monkey With A Shotgun, a group formed for the purpose of making sketch comedy shorts for internet distribution. The name isn’t just a moniker for the group, it’s also a sort of operating philosophy. Make a lot of different stuff fast and hope to hit some [...]
So here’s a funny video from my friends at SoCal Film Group- a comedy about the old days when you’d go in a store and rent “videos”. My memories of doing such are vague in this time of NetFlix and the coming age of digital distribution, but at least they aren’t driving those whacky [...]
You can’t sell a feature film on the internet. It’s both too much and not enough. It costs too much to produce a feature in relation to what you’ll get back from internet-only sales. But a single feature isn’t not enough to build a regular audience- people will visit and [...]
In a nice article on the digital film revolution, David Zelon of Mandalay Filmed Entertainment had one humdinger of a statement on microdistribution and the associated marketing-
“Without mass marketing, you won’t capture the attention of a mass audience, and the Internet is not a viable way to attract a mass audience.”
Talk about whistling past the [...]
In an interesting marketing ploy, The Weinstein Company has placed the first 8 minutes on “Lucky Number Slevin” on YouTube.
Now, it happens that the first 8 minutes of this particular film are pretty self-contained, like a nice little prologue to the film itself. There’s a story, more or less complete in itself, but that [...]
A little background on my DV experience:
For the last 4 years, I’ve been associated with the SoCal Film Group, a creative collective of writers, directors, and producers who have come together to take their filmmaking destiny into their own hands.
The group has had 15-20 members at any particular time, and about as many reasons for [...]
