Fellow Streamy Nominee, Kristyn Burtt (The Web Files) and I at The Good Knight's Quest Premiere

First off, I want to congratulate all the Streamy Award Nominees. There were a lot of peers and pals that I deeply respect that scored nominations and that is just awesome. There were several I was so thrilled to see that it felt like I was more excited than the nominees themselves.

Anyway it’s just been a crazy week. So crazy that this blog post is coming 3 days after I originally wanted to write it. The good thing with the extra time for this post is that I can reflect more on what the nominations means to the team, the show, and me. I’ll admit, I was nervous as heck going into Monday morning (when they announced the nominations). I had figured that’d we pull in a few nominations and do well, but you never know until it’s official.

I am truly thrilled with our Streamy nominations. What the Streamy Awards means to everyone else is subjective, but to me it means a ton. Last year when we were finishing Compulsions, I set a hard deadline to my team. “This show is coming out in its entirety this year, distribution deal or not!”, and sure enough with grinding hard work, and the promotional support of Dailymotion, it premiered and has been extremely well received. One note to add, as one fellow deeply respected creator pointed out to me on Monday, the nominations (and any possible wins) will also hopefully give us enough recognition to propel us into a Season 2, which is and should be the goal for any Season 1 series.
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Craig Frank (right) and Janna Bossier in Episode 1: Unleash

Thank you everyone for reading my previous blog on Writing and Structuring Drama for the Short Form.  I was worried that the subject matter would get too deep into the thinking I put into my craft as a writer. So now I follow it up with an even deeper writing blog post.

I’d like to showcase how I tried to make Compulsions a truly thematic based series. As a writer/story teller, one of the challenges I placed on myself in tackling this show was whether or not a short form web series could be presented thematically.  And adding to the challenge, could a short form series support not only an overarching theme, but showcase different individual themes from episode to episode.

Stanley Kubrick once said, “A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.” (continue reading…)

Bernie Su (center) answers questions on the RadNerd post show with hosts Flitz (right) and Damian Beurer

Thanks everyone that watched my guest spot on the RadNerd Show on Tuesday night. It was an amazing experience and the guys over there are awesome. I had a lot of fun just Nerding it up and big thanks out there to those of you who asked questions in the chat room.

One of the great questions I got asked on the show was “What was the biggest challenge of making a thriller in 3 minute chunks?” – I did answer the Q on the show, which you can watch here at about the 48 minute mark, but I’d like to center this post on my thought process on  how I approached writing an intense drama in the short format.

Note: I am not claiming that this is the “right way” to write drama in short format, these are just some of the choices I made. This is simply one of many ways to approach the craft. Like any web series, this show was in a way an experiment. Whether it worked or not is for the audience to judge.
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It’s been a great week for us over here at the Compulsions camp. I’d like to lead off by thanking all of our friends and fans for the immense support for the wins. It was definitely very exciting on Monday night watching the Twitter and Facebook streams pop off  in support of our winners as they were announced. Second, a big thanks goes off to  We Love Soaps for putting together a great Inaugural Indie Soap Awards show and for doing a stellar job in raising awareness of Indie Dramatic content across the web. It’s also great to see an “awards season” start to unfold for the web space as a whole. Starting with the Clicker award, and now moving through the Indie Soap Awards and on to the Streamys and Webbys.

A great benefit to web content fans is that it gives us another outlet to discover content across the internet. It also proves how difficult it is to really be on top of what’s going on in WebTV. Going through the nomination process I had only heard of about half of the shows on the list, so even from my perspective it pushed me to sample several shows that were previously completely unknown to me.  (continue reading…)

With the Epic Fu Tubefilter event tonight (if you’re in the LA area you should go) I thought it’d be good to get back to some of the roots of the show and how it came to be.

Annemarie Pazmino in the IT Room set.

One of the big phases of Pre-Production is settling your locations, and one of the first knee jerk reactions is to go with the cheapest (read: FREE) available. Looking at our Season 1, you can see an array of locales but two that really stand out as challenging finds were the Warehouse and the Computer Repair Room. Early on in our pooling of resources we found two such locations that would have cost us nothing… “Great!” we thought, but we soon realized how they were both “Traps.”

The term “Traps”, was spoken often by Producer Robert Grand in Pre-production. In his vast experience in line producing (and it is VAST) he’s come across many such experiences and warned us about falling into them. He described them as Traps because on the surface they appeared great, economical, the easy path, but in reality crossing them would result in more problems and more money in the long run.

Trap #1: The Computer Repair Room – From Day 1, Producer Michael Tohl  spoke about a Computer Repair shop that he was friendly with. Quickly into planning we managed to secure a deal with them to shoot at their working storefront for free but with one big restriction; we could only shoot there at night when they were closed for business.

So what’s wrong with only shooting at night? Well for one you’re doing 7pm to 7am shoot days, and those of you who have been on shoots like these know they are NOT FUN. They are draining for everyone, people move slower, and they are tough to recover from. Also specific to us, we’d have to shoot night for day, which meant not only slowing us down but also we would have to o rent more lighting gear. Thus in reality shooting at the “free” location would have in reality ballooned our budget with extra gear and extra crew time. Thus… a trap.

The Compulsions Crew onset at the Warehouse Location

Trap #2: The Warehouse – Let’s take away from the fact that this was the make or break location of our series, we were willing to put some money into this. The story here starts similar to the IT room, we found a serviceable empty commercial space right away. By commercial space I mean like a store front.  You see a space in a mini-mall open it and it’s just bare, plenty of room to stick poor Seth Caskey in a chair and mess him up right? Sure, but again there was big caveat, it’s a mini-mall store front.

Many of us go to mini-malls every day, they’re great, but are they great to film at? This particular mini-mall is busy; you have a gym upstairs and dry cleaners adjacent. Add the fact that the mall faced a major Hollywood street and you have sound issues all day and pretty much all night.  Plus with big storefront windows it meant lighting problems as well.  Thus again, blocking out all the windows with light and sound would mean more needed gear and a slower pace for our crew so again it would mean more money and again… a Trap.

As a result in both cases we ended up with other locations that we sunk some money into. Both locations were better, easier to work with, required less gear, and thus cheaper in the long run. In indie Web Production nothing is ever truly “free”, so beware of traps.

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