Web

Quick Streamys Follow-Up

In Web on 13 April 2010 with Comments Off

I had started writing up some of the reaction spreading to the Streamys debacle, especially focusing on members of the International Academy of Web Television, but as frequently the case when once has a full-time job that isn’t in any way related to this sort of industry, events moved more quickly than my capacity to keep up.

But I did want to drop back in briefly to make sure I didn’t leave my prior post hanging with no follow up whatsoever. For a more complete and comprehensive set of links to reaction around the web, see The Streamys: Post-Show Community Feedback and Discussion by Jenni Powell over at Tubefilter.

• The Streamy Awards: A Producer’s Apology And Its Three Fails (NewTeeVee)
• 2010 Streamy Awards (iJustine)
• A Horrible Turn at the Streamy Awards (Chance McClain)
• If the shoe doesn’t fit… (Andrew Seely)
• Open Letter from the Executive Producers (The Streamy Awards)
• Letter from the Chair (International Academy of Web Television)
• WebTV Week and The Streamys – Celebrating the Space and the Medium (Bernie Su)
• The Streamy Awards: How to Unwreck the Car (Mashable)
• Response to Streamy Producers’ Apology (Sandeep Parikh)

I’ll give the last word here to Kim Evey, producer of The Guild and creator of the late and lamented Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, who tweeted this reflection: “Dreamt I dressed for an awards show but wound up in a rec room basement watching teenage boys getting high & lighting their farts on fire.”

Addendum: I lied, and am giving the final word of this post to myself, because I forgot something I posted in a Facebook thread earlier today that I’d like to repeat here.

One thing I find interesting and useful in this mess is that despite the web series community’s (communities’?) diversity, reaction was pretty shared across the spectrum. Disastrous misfire that the Streamys were, the nearly unified (without being coordinated) response does help demonstrate anew that there is a consistent community (or set of communities) with shared values about the form in which they’ve chosen to work.

The event was a disaster. The various communities actually making and supporting the form are just as engaged after that disaster as much as they were before it. They knew that about themselves to be sure, but it’s important for those of us on the outside looking in to make sure that set of shared values and commitment is seen by others, all the moreso because of the distorted and tarnished view presented to the outside world by the Streamys event.

The Trainwreck Awards

In Web on 12 April 2010 with 7 comments

Late in the game at this evening’s second annual Streamy Awards, it was suggested that it was good practice for hosting The Trainwreck Awards next week. Alas, I think that most of the remark was aimed at the series of unfortunate technical failures. But, far and away, those were the least of the problems for what should now be deemed a troubled endeavor.

The single biggest complaint about the awards’ inaugural year in 2009, heard over and over again, was its mind-boggling reliance upon the same, stale, stilted, painfully bad patter and piss-poor comedy bits that so afflict more mainstream awards shows, rather than striving to establish for itself something different, in the spirit of the work the awards are meant to celebrate.

This year, the Streamys addressed those complaints by including seemingly twice as much stale patter and piss-poor comedy, much of it written by a scatologically-obsessed twelve year old. Or, it occurred to me later, possibly by a marketing consultant who dictated not only that “real awards shows” have embarassingly awful routines and s must me emulated but also that, to show that this whole web video fad Comes With An Edge™, there should be an over-abundant fixation upon puerile “humor”.

All told, it was an extraordinarily asinine and disastrous means of displaying the world of web video to a growing audience hungry for alternatives to traditional fare, and the entire approach needs to be overhauled. This was not what the world of what the Streamys detrimentally insists upon calling “web television” is about.

Unfortunately, most of the chatter appears to be about the technical failures, most of it critical yet forgiving. If we allow it, this will allow the Streamys a sort of escape route: as long as they address the technical issues, they’ll have a window of opportunity to ignore the more pressing issue.

There was some very astute buzz during the latter half of 2009 and the first half of 2010 about the need in the world of web video for true criticism. If we care about the form, we need to be able to call out the shit for being the shit that it is. As much as this goes for the work being produced itself, it certainly goes for the self-appointed judge and jury of what represents quality work in the world of web video.

It’s an open secret, and hopefully no one will be shy about expressing it. The second annual Streamy Awards were a complete and utter unmitigated disaster. Not because of the technical failures, and not because of the selection of winners (whatever one might think of them), but because the awards show itself simply did not — in the words of Felicia Day — “honor the evening”.

If you care about the form, if you care about encouraging what the form represents in addition to what it produces, do not let the Streamy Awards damage the cause.

Addendum: Streamy nominee Horrible Turn, tweeted that they walked out halfway through. Judging by the state of the house, they were not the only ones.

Addendum: If you’d like to weigh in privately to the Streamys, you can contact them via their website. Alternatively, contact their parent organization, the International Academy of Web Television.

Also, keep an eye out for public reaction, if any, from the inaugual IAWTV membership (pdf).

After And Before, Together

In Web on 15 March 2010 with Comments Off

At some point, possibly months ago, the old original podcast link for the web series After Judgment (which I tout constantly on Twitter) stopped updating. This is somewhat unfortunate because I prefer to re-watch the series in the intermixed order of After Judgment and Before Judgment episodes as they originally were released, and which that feed maintained.

While I think you can still pull up all the data from that original feed, and while you now can subscribe separately to episode of After Judgment and episode of Before Judgment, for convenience (if you happen to want to watch After and Before episodes intermixed in release order, as I do, I offer below the full list, to date, of intermixed After and Before episodes in their release order.
Read Full Entry →

Nominate Unofficial M.E. (Again)

In Fandom, Web on 5 January 2010 with Comments Off

Back in November, I tried to cajole people into nominating Not The Official Twitter of Mutant Enemy for “Best Brand Use of Twitter” in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.

Despite failing to convince enough people it was worth their while, I’ll try again now that the nomination period for this year’s Shorty Awards is underway. My argument is the same now as it was then.

It’s a long shot — a ridiculously long shot, in fact — but I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could push an unofficial account promoting a given brand that doesn’t have an official one.

The larger argument for the utility of the unofficial account in question is outlined in On Mutant Enemy And Social Media, also posted back in November. Most of the case for the account’s successful, if unoffocial, representation of the Mutant Enemy brand in social media is made by spending some time browsing the past several month’s worth of its updates.

Unlike the Mashable awards, as near as I can tell from the rules, you can only nominate once for a given account under the Brand category in the Shorty Awards. Or, rather, you appear to be able to nominate a brand multiple times, but I believe it simply replaces your previous nomination with your new reason (you have to supply a reason with your nomination).

So, please consider nominating @UnofficialME for the Brand category in this year’s Shorty Awards. It’s still a long shot, but it’d still be interesting. Just remember: You must include a reason for your nomination to count.

Update: In addition to the official Brand category, I invite you also to nominate @UnofficialME in the community category Fan Brand, created as a kind of fallback position. If there’s enough support for a given community-created category, the Shorty Awards might convert it to an official category.

Update: See the @UnofficialME profile on the Shorty Awards site for the instructions on which categories in which to nominate.

The Flat And Lifeless Riese

In Web on 4 January 2010 with Comments Off

I tried to like the web series Riese, which premiered in November with a substantial production budget behind it. But it’s a problem for any show when its lead goes about her business looking nothing so much as bored for the entirety of the roughly 45-minute story.

I should explain up front that this is the second version of this review. I went into my first attempt intending a piece mainly about disappointment. I feel bad about it, but upon my re-watch of the entirety of the just-concluded Chapter One, it’s become a piece that can’t help sum itself up at the start with the bluntness above.

It’s true that the strange quietness of the almost dialogue-free opener, embedded above, and the vague intimations of steampunk in the series’ design and promotion, intrigued enough for me to want to see what the series had in store. But it didn’t take long for that initial interest to turn, mainly, into a sort of impatience. What little online discussion I read tended to gravitate to the same early criticism: poor pacing. Too little seemed to be happening in a series whose episodes clocked in at around eight minutes in length each.

By the time we got to this week’s release of the fifth and final episode in the series’ first chapter (the second chapter shot in December for a release cycle to start in February), that frustration expanded to a more encompassing theme: almost everything in the series — pacing and energy, action and dialogue, the performances themselves — is, in a word, flat.

There’s an almost complete lack of variation in tone, events happen at more or less the same speed, and no one seems particularly invested in anything they are saying or doing. For all the attention the project has generated — whether due to its creator’s use of social media and a sort of alternate reality game (ARG), or through some attempts at comparing it to Sanctuary, which went from the web to television — the end result has been something of a disappointment.

Where there should be a serious attempt to generate a real and palpable tension, Riese instead presents us with thumping music played over lugubrious camera work. On occasion, an actor apparently was told to breathe heavy. In essence, the series indicates tension but never actually presents tension.

That might be the crux of most of the series’ deficiencies: it indicates rather than presents. There’s no sense of who any of the characters are as people, until and unless we get one of the stray moments in which one character says to describe another. Indication instead of presentation.

During my re-watch, my notes for this, the second version of this post, became increasingly staccato. It might make sense just to combine by theme and offer them up here as bullet points.

• Over-reliance upon thumping music to tell you to be interested, or to try to compensate for flat movement. Pointless Batman-like camera angles, to go with the thumping music, to try to get you interested in nothing happening on screen. Endless shots of Riese walking through the forest, or walking through hallways, or walking outside buildings, or standing around breathing heavy isn’t tension, especially not just because there’s thumping music. It’s just monotonous.
• Unfortunately, the lead mainly comes across like she’s playacting, not acting. Everything she does is exactly the same, via the exact same lack of expression. Half of the time when Riese is in danger, she just looks, in fact and instead, bored. The only variation comes when the director apparently told her to breathe heavy to indicate tension.
• Dialogue is stilted, or too on the nose, or too clunkily expository, delivered with no life in it. Why does everyone talk so slowly? Countless pauses (in conversation or even within a single character’s lines) and laconic delivery isn’t, again, tension or interesting character dynamics. It’s just boring.
• No sense of character comes from the performances.

One realization that struck me during the re-watch necessitates a comparison. While my introduction to web series came through Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild, it was After Judgment which convinced me that dramatic science fiction not only could successfully take to the form, but be done well.

The first season of After Judgment (leaving out the intertwining, and semi-separate Before Judgment), consists of sixteen episodes totaling around an hour of story. While a bit more happens in terms of plot development and exposition in that hour than happens in Riese’s forty-five minutes, it isn’t enough more to explain the differences. After Judgment, unlike Riese, flows smoothly and offers a clear sense of an entire range of characters just from the performances alone.

But in Riese, I have no sense of even just the title character beyond what someone else says about her — unless I’m supposed to be getting something from the fact that she’s bored all the time and breathes heavy.

For all of Riese’s much-vaunted budget, After Judgment manages to best it on almost every count — proving, if nothing else, that it isn’t money or connections or marketing savvy that makes for a good web series. All things considered, I’ll take a lively script and dynamic performances but no real budget over the opposite any day.

There was some chatter from the series’ creators on Twitter that they were reading the criticisms from certain quarters and taking some of them into consideration as they put together the second chapter. Most of those early criticisms were generally about the pacing issue, but my re-watch made it clear to me that the pace of Chapter One is inextricably bound together with a larger set of issues.

And casting a number of recognizable genre actors for the upcoming episodes (see the series’ blog for details), as much as additional talent can often prompt others to step up their own game, isn’t going to be enough.

Addressing the issues above would invariably have an effect upon pacing, sure. But the problems aren’t that limited, or simple. It remains to be seen if in Chapter Two the series graduates from merely indicating to the audience how they should consider a given scene to actually presenting something which will instill the intended reaction.

I do still plan to check in with Riese than the series returns in February. But given that Chapter One led me from mere disappointment to something far more critical, they’ll have to overcome a fair amount of skepticism to snag me for all of Chapter Two.