Going into our meeting, I didn’t know what to expect. It had been several months since we last checked in on the team at FM78. Their website, which I checked back with every so often, declares boldly, “The entire entertainment world is changing. Technological advances and the subsequent dissolution of the customary distribution model have set this sector’s business grid into chaos… this is bad news for Entertainment’s corporate establishment, but very good news for content creators.” It’s so brilliantly radical and forward thinking that I almost couldn’t imagine they actually believed it.
The FM78 team isn’t a group of amateurs with nothing to lose, maxing out their credit cards and trying to break into the entertainment industry; Bateman is a well known actress who famously played Mallory Keaton on Family Ties and more recently has appeared on Desperate Housewives and Arrested Development, Murrieta is an executive producer for Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place, Kushner has written and produced for Last Comic Standing and The Ellen DeGeneres Show (for which she won two Emmys), and Sereboff is a writer, most recently co-creating and writing the “Speechless Without Writers” campaign during the writer’s strike, which Bateman co-produced. So what could these old media players know about the web content realm and how could they compete with the likes of Felicia Day, Hayden Black, and Sandeep Parikh, people whose most successful work has been online?
The Molls Show is a resounding example that they can. As Kushner described McAleer and her show, “We became aware of [Molly] and thought she was fantastic and it was immediately obvious to us that she should have her own show. We’re helping her with her new show. It’s essentially entirely done by her; I mean the girl writes it, is in it, directs it, shoots it and edits it. Each of these episodes are roughly 10 minutes divided up into anywhere from 4 to 7 segments in each episode. [It’s] man on the street stuff, straight blogging, artistic collaborations with friends of hers, and so on. The way we see it with Molls, is that there a lot of people out there that might do bits and pieces of what Molls does, but we’ve yet to see anyone do everything that Molls does, with the voice that Molls has. And she has the respect of the blogging community. That speaks volumes. Those guys make and break trends and can see what’s solid before most.”
FM78 has also proven that they can turn that originality and make it bankable; the third episode of The Molls Show, which is out today, is sponsored by the upcoming Palm Pre. In addition to its site, it’s also being distributed on Blip.tv, YouTube, and now KoldCast TV. The company says that other distribution deals are “closing imminently.”
In recognition of what they’ve done so far, FM78.tv will be highlighted at the Digital Content NewFront in their “Ones to Watch” reel, and Bateman will represent FM78.tv at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June to discuss relationships between creators and sponsors.
In the past couple of years we’ve seen a lot of companies jump into original made-for-web projects without an understanding of even the most basic concepts of Web 2.0, and with that has come a lot of failure. The FM78 team is different- all four use Twitter and Tumblr actively, and envision an internet driven lifestyle that even teenagers who follow the cutting edge trends online can’t even imagine. They’ve even teamed up with Streamy-winning creatives behind You Suck at Photoshop, the Big Fat Brain crew (Troy Hitch and Matt Bledsoe), to do some viral spots for the Candy, Inc. launch.
The entire team had insights about everything from the impending death of newspapers to the distant future of technology. In fact, Sereboff jokingly mused about integrating Web 2.0 biologically into our heads, which was a joke and a sci-fi pipe dream until this month, when a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin sent a tweet using only electrical impulses generated by his thoughts. In a field that is dominated by amateur filmmakers who understand the web and professional filmmakers who don’t, FM78 has a rare combination of web brilliance and film experience, and a vision to show the internet how original web content can be done right.
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