2 weeks ago

Shaquille O’Neal. You may know him best as a very tall guy who played basketball a lot back in the day. What you may not know is that he has been pretty heavily involved in a variety of web series over the years and has his own channel on YouTube, back when courting celebrity channels was the future YouTube saw for its own growth (a policy since sidelined). We’ve covered these in detail before, but now he’s back with a new show: Talking Shop.

Information is a little scarce so far, but a trailer became available on Friday, October 4th. It can be summarised thus: ‘funny real people be funny and real!’

You know how when you go to get your hair cut by some hair-cutting professional person (because although you begrudge paying money for this simple act you know full well that you wouldn’t trust yourself to …

The Giant Web Series Competition (that we’ve heard so much about) is at last open for submissions! The competition, which is completely free to enter, has been put together by Giant Film & TV, who are an independent production company based in Britain. Organised with the intent of honouring talented and independent web series creators, the Giant Competition hopes to offer “young web series creators the opportunity to showcase their GIANT ideas to a panel of distinguished industry judges with the hope of giving new talent the online exposure they deserve to get their foot in the door, get their work revealed and get their web series connected to an online audience”.

If you’ve created a web series, or can put the wrap even one episode in your series by the contests close date, you’re eligible for entry. The contest is calling for anyone with …

2 weeks ago

Most you will probably know Colin Mochrie as the bald, witty cast member of the perennially popular, Whose Line is it Anyway. Since the show has recently been giving a new lease on life you would think Mochrie, now in his mid fifties, would want to take things slowly these days. Apparently not, as he  has just this year started a new web series called Patients Please.

Ok, you got me, the pilot episode got released back in March, so a few points deducted from me for keeping my eye on things there, but there doesn’t seem to have been much of a fanfare about it in general. In fact having Googled the show, only one other site has covered its release, a Tumblr dedicated to Mochrie fandom, and even that got only 24 notes, so maybe I don’t suck that …

Set to launch on October 14th is a new web series about finding love….for other people.

Rom.Dot.Com follows the life of failing 20-something Kate. Her boyfriend dumped her, her job as a journalist has disappeared, and she had to fall back on living with her grandmother; a women pushing for marriage at every opportunity. How does Kate attempt to get out of this rut? By taking the only writing job she can find: ghost writing dating site profiles for other people. The concept was inspired by a real Craigslist ad looking for just such an employee.

Rom.Dot.Com. is written by Suzy Evans and funding was sought through an Indigogo campaign. Despite the total collected being only just 50% of the $10,700 sought, the crew were able to proceed with production at a reduced budget thanks to Indiegogo’s Flexible Funding option. The show will debut on YouTube next week.

Rom.Dot.Com’s …

We recently covered the ITVFest, an awards gala that aims to recognise rising and outstanding talent in Independent Television, Web Series and Film. Founded in 2006, the ITVFest was notable for its forward thinking, which put them ahead of the curve, as an organisation with their eyes fixed firmly on the developing web series format. This unique perspective made the ITVFest one of the first events of its kind.

Seven years later however, and this once uncommon attitude – that web content can be worthy of award – is no longer remarkable; it’s with this revelation held firmly in mind, that some of the smaller cogs of the ITVFest’s well oiled machine seem to be getting a little wonky, because the entire events premise is in need of attention.

The organizers behind the event this year – a different team than those who founded it – were to …

Another of the nominees for best comedy web series at the 2013 Independent Television and Film Festival Awards was Prison Dancer (losing out in the end to ‘Preggers’).

The selection on offer for the award was very varied in style: Preggers dealt with the stereotypes around pregnant women; Stockholm covered a serial killer love story between kidnapper and kidnapped; while The Men’s Room assumed that what the people want is barrel scrapping from the blandest barrels in the effluent transporting barrel shop (the fact it won the award for ‘Best Comedy – Television’ is a damning indictment of the ability to throw money at stale insipid poop and make it look like it deserves attention). Prison Dancer is…..well, the best description I can come up with is ‘kinda interactive Glee style Philippine prison mocku-docu-soap-comedy’.

Prison Dancer is fictitious but inspired by (but not affiliated …

On the 29th of September, the Raindance Organisation wrapped up their first ever London Web Fest, a brief but busy two day micro event that took place within their greater film festival at the Apollo Cinema. The festival offered several workshops, courses, panels, screenings, some exciting premiers, and culminated by prizing its prestigious award – the winner announced at the end of the days screenings to conclude the midweek event.

One For Ten, a gripping web series made up of ten eye opening interviews with ex-cons who were freed from death row, won the award for Best Webseries… And strangely, nobody thought to inform series creators Will Francome and Mark Pizzey.

Outside of the live announcement at the event, no official press releases, formal statements or announcements have been issued by the Raindance Organisation on the topic. Nobody from the organisation emailed or contacted either Francome or Pizzey to let …

3 weeks ago

I last mentioned The Men’s Room back in our introduction to ITV Fest. My words at the time were far from positive, so I decided to give it a proper look, to really evaluate whether my hasty judgement was wrong. Was I too quick to condemn this new sketch show? Did the trailer give a false impression of The Men’s Room? Did I need to reassess my original view?

As it happens, no. The Men’s Room is everything that is wrong with comedy. Over-funded, unfunny, hammed-up, lowest-common-denominator-baiting, stereotyped and offensively intelligence-insulting; this is probably the worst professionally created comedy series I have ever seen.

The Men’s Room substitutes ‘wacky’ non-sequiters for actual wit, the characters’ decisions make no sense, the humour is based on… well I’m not really sure where it’s supposed to come from. Of the two episodes currently online only one sketch made me smile a …

Jason Eksuzian’s new web series “Dinks” is as clever as it is flippant. Coming from one of the co-creators of the absurdly smart/ruthlessly poignant web series “I Miss Drugs“, this hardly comes as a surprise.

Dinks stands for dual income, no kids – a witty acronym from the late 80′s that perfectly sums up Bridget and her husband Ryan – two adults in their early thirties with with no mortgage, no children and no care in the world. With its subject matter laid out so plainly in the title, or in other words, explainable in five mere letters, it’s interesting to note that a show centered so closely on what I would consider an uninspiring subject, manages to achieve so much.

Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that shooting a comedy about a childless and carefree married couple is unoriginal, or even uninspired – it’s just well… Not a

3 weeks ago

Just when you thought that it was safe to venture back into the World Wide Web, supermarket goliath and generally acknowledged source of all evil, Walmart, unleash a torrent of despair by launching a branded web series, called Get on the Shelf.

Ok so the headline is a little melodramatic. Ok, maybe I’ve written more than a few articles about branded content before. Ok, maybe it’s time I just accepted that corporations using web series as means to promote themselves was always going to happen, is currently happening with increasing frequency, and will continue to happen with all the energy of a yappie dog that has just discovered how tasty its tail looks. I can’t help it. When you become enraptured with something you love (such as I have with web series) it cannot help but be disheartening when the advertisers …

There was a flurry of Twitter activity these past few days. If you search under the hastag #UnblockEA you will see a chirruping of epic proportions. The reason? A baffling decision by Twitter to suspend all transmedia accounts associated with Emma Approved, the upcoming web series from the makers of the highly successful Lizzie Bennett Diaries. Series showrunner Bernie Su used the medium to complain about the problem and to rally fans around pressuring Twitter into re-instating the suspended accounts.

I talked about the Lizzie Bennett Diaries and Emma Approved previously. A large part of the extracurricular fun involved is to do with transmedia. Characters from these shows have an active ‘in character’ social media presence. They talk to each other within the context of the show and can add a richness and fullness to the main programme that is fantastically unique to web series. The upcoming …

3 weeks ago

Shortlisted for the upcoming Independent Television and Film Festival Awards, Stockholm is a 7 episode dark comedy about the love that can blossom when being held prisoner in a basement.

There really isn’t any way to describe the central premise of Stockholm without it sounding uncomfortably creepy. Jessie is young woman who isn’t sure of her way and is losing patience in looking for love. So her life is understandably turned on its head when she gets shoved into the trunk of her car and thrown into the concrete prison of a serial killer: the Heartbreak Strangler (“they break his heart – he breaks their necks”). The series’ name derives from the well-known psychological condition known as ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ whereby captive and captor begin to identify with each other.

Stockholm isn’t trying to be edgy or controversial with this plot line which, taken out of context, is the sort of set-up that …

3 weeks ago

The ITV Fest, which kicks off in Vermont tomorrow have released their official show selections. Many of the series up for award will be unfamiliar to all but the most tuned in enthusiast, as the long running festival will actually be debuting a lot of the selections. Among the choices that are already available for streaming, there are a few familiar names and faces, such as Scott Brown’s experimental Stockholm, and the “irrepressible retro-funk pastiche” Dick Dribble. The selections are listed below, and can be found at the ITV Fest’s Official Site.

3 weeks ago

One of the most striking differences between television and theatre lies in their attitudes to reinterpretation. It seems to have been a centuries-old tradition for plays to be reinterpreted and re-imagined many times over – a version of A Midsummer Nights’ Dream now will look and feel somewhat different to when it was first written. Films have only recently begun taking part in this tradition with their much-maligned spate of remakes and reboots. Television, and especially comedy television seems never to have got onto that bandwagon themselves. Certainly shows like Hannibal and the up-coming Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D are based on previous works, but their basis is in the more shiny world of film, and they are extensions of those worlds rather than reinterpretations. Why is it that people will go and see A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, essentially the same comedy it always has been, over and over again, but if …

4 weeks ago

In a first of its kind event, a web series has won a 2013 Primetime Emmy Award with the Netflix original, House Of Cards, picking up the award for ‘Outstanding Directing In A Drama Series’, winning out against such high-profile competition as BBC’s Downton Abbey, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Showtime’s Homeland, and even the extremely popular Breaking Bad, from AMC. House of Cards is a political thriller in which duplicity and double-crossing in Washington D.C. leads to revenge and corruption throughout.

This award marks the first time that an award of this nature has been won by a web series. The Emmys represent the Oscars of television. They are international and considered the highest achievement that can be awarded onto a small screen programme. Whilst not detracting from the recent ‘Creative Arts Emmy’ won by the superb vlogging web series, the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, House Of …