Your Stage : Want to do a Webshow? Voice of Experience here to help! by Kathleen Burns

Fantastic! You have a story you are passionate about and you have a brilliant vision as to what it should look like when you complete production. You don’t have much if any budget but you have friends that can help! How do you get to that final brilliant vision? For someone who has never participated in professional productions outside of some TV courses in college, producing my own show has given me practical knowledge of being a showrunner. I am also director, producer, casting director, sometimes camera man, editor, and actor. Preproduction, Production, and Post Production on “The Player Characters” Preproduction on “The Player Characters” How do I make a webseries? http://www.reelseo.com/creating-web-series/ The Script: I started with an idea back in April 2012. https://www.celtx.com/about.html- Program I used to write and storyboard (Free!) Writing a show is never easy and like school essays, you tend to want to bang them out quick, have the teacher read it and say its perfect on the first draft. I recommend having someone go over your script with a fine toothed comb to make sure it has all the elements you want, gets the point across, and doesn’t make for a boring episode to watch. It must make sense if you are doing any kind of narrative show. Tough to do in 6 minutes or less. For someone new to production in general, expect a lot of rewriting: when your actors read it, when your actors are acting it and while you are filming. Tips to keep in mind when writing: http://dannystack.blogspot.com/2009/01/joss-whedons-top-10-writing-tips.... http://www.writersstore.com/character-emotion-makes-the-plot/ By May 2012 after sending a few different drafts out to friends, I had a pretty decent outline and about three episode scripts written. The entire show scripts weren’t finished but I wanted some of my cast opinions on the direction they wanted to go. Casting: You have actor friends! You are acting in it! Casting is a snap! (NOT) I spoke with two friends that had been interested since the beginning if they would like to be part of the show. Great! Three actors down for my main characters (including me). I only needed to find one more major cast member and the NPC characters. The reality is it took until June to find all of my cast with a few dropping out last minute and some joining up to help me in a pinch. I recently cast my last actor for a bit part in the show. You are always looking. Equipment: Sometimes you have to buy, sometimes you can rent, or sometimes you get really lucky and a friend has what you need. I had to buy. I did it as smart as a can as cheap as I could but with as much quality as possible. (Amazon.com has some great deals if you know where to look. Read customer reviews! They help a lot!) The camcorder had a mic jack that I could plug in a DIY boom mic and it worked pretty well as long as the batteries in the mic held up. While you could record the sound using just the camcorder mic, it really doesn’t sound that great. Sound makes your show (remember that!). Multiple cameras would have made everything much faster but work with what you have. http://filmflap.blogspot.com/- DIY tips and tricks to help keep production cost down Storyboarding: I’ll just watch a lot of movies and copy them. You don’t need to draw, there are some pretty nifty free programs out there that can help you plan out the shots you need in order to visually tell your story. You need to know where your camera is going to be, where it is in relation to your actors and the action happening, and visual clues that are often used in film. Some people get away with not doing these at all but for our show we did some minimal story boarding. The Player Characters had some really ambitious plans in the beginning as to how complicated each scene would be, especially for our action scenes. But sometimes you need to sacrifice what you want to what you can do. Most of the time, dialogue scenes are very straight forward. But the more complicated the scenes, the more you realize from a production standpoint that you are working in film and not real time. You can cut away, chop the scenes into sections, cut the action around to make it visually make sense even if in real life on set, the whole fight scene was really four different fights and scenes happening seperately. No one is going to yell at you that it isn’t real. Of course it isn’t, it’s film. Production on “The Player Characters” Even if you are filming on a no/low budget, feed your cast and crew! No exceptions! Filming: “The magic of editing” was often quoted on set. Film Riot is your best friend: http://revision3.com/filmriot The first film day arrived mid-June 2012. The first film day is now nicknamed the test day. We worked a solid eight hours on different scenes. We had plans to get a lot done in a very short amount of time. Like all productions, we ran into some problems with some completely out of our control and some not. Film days kept getting delayed as work requests wouldn’t go through, scheduling issues with some actors, bad weather, Otakon vacation, etc. Sometimes we had each actor go behind the camera as the camera man when our crew ran short on some days. The things you do to keep on schedule… We always ended up watching our “dailies” after filming so we were more educated on what we wanted for the next day. It was a good relaxing time and helped us figure out what worked on film and what didn’t. Never expect your filming to go entirely smooth when you are working as a low budget with friends. That isn’t to say it will be like that for every production, but be aware of challenges you will face. :) Tips on Directing and Camera Shots: http://actioncutprint.com/film-directing-tips/ Post-Production on “The Player Characters” While the show is just entering this aspect of Production and beginning the editing stage, there are some things I’ve learned that I can pass along. Where are you going to post these completed episodes? (Youtube? Blip.tv? Vimeo? Your own website?) Do you have anything behind the scenes you can show? Interviews? Bloopers? Promo pictures? Where is your webseries network? Don’t have one? There are lots of websites out there designed to be your TV guide to webseries; know them and what their submission guidelines are so you can submit to them as you are airing your show. Festivals are always looking too! Build your social media platform early. Know your audience and try to get them interested. While your show might not have a lot to show off in the beginning before you post episodes, know where and what you will show to your fans to keep them engaged. Hope this little insight helped you along. I’m always willing to answer questions. Speaking of fans, we like ‘em. We want more of ‘em. :) Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ThePlayerCharacters Twitter: https://twitter.com/watchthepcs