Bite Me, Machinima‘s original zombie apocalypse comedy series, is coming back for seconds—this time on TV.
Today Machinima Chairman and CEO Allen DeBevoise and Lionsgate’s Curt Marvis announced an expanded second season of Bite Me premiering on March 6 on the Machinima Network and FEARnet, the Lionsgate, Sony and Comcast backed television cable network for horror, thriller and suspense.
“Bite Me is yet another example of the type of premium content that we know resonates with our global audience of highly engaged and influential young males, said DeBevoise. “We’re thrilled to partner with Lionsgate on the second season and look forward to expanding this into a global franchise.”
Has Bite Me outgrown its online roots?
Not only will FEARnet be the exclusive TV home for Bite Me, it will also feature extended episodes, behind the scenes content, and special presentation movie length versions of the show. The cable outlet will also offer sneak previews of upcoming episodes prior to their appearance on YouTube.
“Lionsgate is committed to creating and delivering original content that bridges the gap between traditional and digital screens,” said Marvis. Bite Me is a perfect example of our win-win approach to traditional and digital platforms, launching both on Machinima and FEARnet. Machinima is a dynamic and innovative company that is helping to change the face of the internet, and they share our entrepreneurial culture and game-changing vision. We will continue to explore these types of synergistic partnerships in the future.”
Bite Me, produced by Epic Level entertainment, garnered over 14 million views on YouTube for Season One with an average 1.4 million monthly unique viewers per episode. The series stars Yousef Abu-Taleb (Lonelygirl15), Justin Giddings (Pretty Little Liars), Ryan Welsh, Dani Lennon (The Casting Office), Risdon Roberts, and Morgan Benoit (The Forbidden Kingdom).
Be on the lookout for some Tubefilter Exclusive interviews with Bite Me Co-Creator and Co-Writer Andy Shapiro, Special Effects master Michael Del Rossa, and the Bite Me cast which includes some surprising cameos!
Hulu is part of a not-so-secret Evil Plot to Destory the World.
It was first revealed in 2009 in a commercial during Super Bowl XLIII featuring Alec Baldwin. The star of 30 Rock explains how the entertainment industry is populated by aliens and television is simply a tool by which those aliens are turning human brains into “mushymush” so they can “scoop them up with a melon baller and gobble them right on up.” Hulu is a fundamental component of the plot, allowing unassuming earthlings to consume television content anytime, anywhere.
In addition to Baldwin, Seth MacFarlane, Eliza Dushku, and Denis Leary have all served as spokespeople for both Hulu and its overlords’ plans for world domination. This year, will Arnett of Arrested Development will take on the role of promoting the latest weapon in Hulu’s arsenal to the Super Bowl-watching public, Hulu Plus. Here’s the teaser:
The company is self-described as “the first global online video network dedicated to the next generation of fashion and beauty,” which when said in non-PR-speak roughly translates to “new media studio and YouTube network that creates original high-quality style-oriented content and aggregates and distributes programming from the most creative and style-savvy YouTube gurus.”
If that description makes StyleHaul sound sort of like a Machinima geared towards people who like and know a lot about clothes instead of people who like and know a lot about video games, that’s sort of the point.
The thinking was Horbaczewski and the DeBevoises could recreate those stats in a different content vertical. So far, they’re doing a great job.
StyleHaul currently claims over 500 content partners, produces a handful of original web series, and sees 120 million video views a month from nearly 25 million monthly unique viewers. The company’s been able to leverage that kind of viewership into creating branded online video campaigns for a variety of designers and fashion industry brands, including Olsenboye, Steve Madden, Michael Kors, Armani Exchange, Nine West, Bazaar, Teen Vogue, and many more.
Horbaczweski hopes to grow StyleHaul’s views and viewers and expand that list of advertising partners with the influx of cash. “We are going to further focus on the expansion and development of our global community, extend the reach of our original content and programming, and grow our sales efforts,” she said over e-mail. Anderee Berengian is confident she can make all that happen.
The lead investor at RezVen Partners behind the StyleHaul deal explained it wasn’t one particular metric, statistic, or case study that attracted him and his team to the company, but the company as a whole. “We made our decision based on StyleHaul’s model and overall operation, not any single statistic or component of the business,” Berengian said. “We particularly are impressed with StyleHaul’s leadership, the company’s business model, the vertical that they’re focused on, and the growth and scale of the online video ecosystem.”
There’s a secret to building a hit web series; to writing the perfect story or cultural commentary that people can’t help but share. It’s elusive and the people who accidentally stumble upon it grow fewer with each passing year. Today, the overnight viral sensations (like Shit Girls Say) tend to be intentional and cautiously developed over time (SGS creator, Graydon Sheppard, built a 54,000 person twitter following before creating a corresponding online series).
Still, idiotic, super-cute, and extreme videos keep landing in my Inbox. It may be because we humans have a difficult time turning away from spectacle. But more than that, those videos might possess the elements that web series producer and show runner, Tim Street (VP of Mobile Video at mDialog and creator of French Maid TV) frequently and publicly proclaims to be the key to engaging an audience: Activate two or more emotions at the same time.
(Which emotions are conjured when seeing two toddlers seeming to have an intense conversation in baby-jibberish? It’s hard to articulate and probably different for each viewer. Awe? Laughter? Adoration? It’s difficult to pinpoint, but that’s beside the point. The key is that it conjures more than one emotion.)
Imagine plopping down a camera as you train your toddlers in the ways of baby-jibbersish and try to capture that perfect million-view moment. Invariably the best moments will happen off camera and be unrelated to your intention. So, what happens in those unusual, candid moments that you can recreate in a story, commentary, or other online video moment that engages an audience to the point of liking, sharing, or subscribing?
The Earlier Days of Web Series
For years, web series creators have been hearing and talking about “personality driven” content. On the surface this seems really obvious. Person on camera plays self or a character and is the central figure driving a show.
Before there was YouTube, Cenk Uygur fronted The Young Turks. In another corner of the Internet, Andrew Baron sat Amanda Congdon at a desk in front of a paper wall map to deliver news and commentary in a quirky-techie way and called the show Rocketboom. Both shows built loyal followings. In 2006, little more than a year after YouTube came into existence, Miles Beckett and company created an epic, multi-episode drama called LonelyGirl15, which released new episodes for more than two years. Character, story, and a reveal that the work was fiction (no one had ever done anything like it) drove views, news coverage, and then even more views. And, while spectacle (of newness perhaps) drove some early viewership, character and story kept them for the long run of the show. There were many other success stories over the following years, too (including WhattheBuckShow, Good Night Burbank, Wainy Days, etc.).
The Right Now of Web Series
Fast forward to this month when Felicia Day and Shira Lazar swept the IAWTV Awards, each going home with arms full of statues and happy fans. Both women write, produce, and star in their own shows. Lazar’s What’s Trending is informational and presentational and full of personality. Day’s The Guild is a character driven, niche fiction featuring Day as a gamer in a story that delights gamers and non-gamers alike.
While these two women were collecting their awards in Vegas, Franchesca Ramsey was having what seemed like an overnight success as her referential Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls climbed into the millions of views in just one day.
Ramsey wrote, produced, and starred in her poignant bit of cultural commentary in which she (a black woman in a blond wig) mimics things she has heard white women say. Like Lazar and Day, she has infused the work with her personality and worked for years to build an audience. (She stars in shows on two channels, a comedy channel and a channel about hair.) The way Ramsey’s Shit White Girls Say (which spoofs Shit Girls Say) rocketed past the success of her previous videos gives us an opportunity to look at what she did differently.
Overnight Success Developed Over Years
In truth, Ramsey has spent the past five years perfecting her on-screen personality. In a recent hair retrospective (and homage to her fans) she showed her many looks over the years. It’s a fun evolution from her initial online posts to the savvy, self-confident woman of today.
Today’s Ramsey deftly and poignantly assumes the roles of various white girls delivering uninformed and hurtful comments. She is spot-on accurate in her caricature of various archetypal white female personae and she maintains near-constant eye contact with the camera. Using the two-emotion measure, Ramsey easily hits the mark with shock, laughter, admiration, and more. But she has much more going on in the video. Here is a quick list of unique qualities impacting the overall success of this particular video:
Referential – Spoofing an already popular series
Camera-Ready – On-camera personality developed over many years
Spectacle – Juxtaposing conflicting images pertaining to race
Culturally Relevant – Providing an often unspoken perspective on race
Audience Engagement – Activates more than two emotions at the same time
The Secret Sauce of Success
Of the three women, Day has consistently and significantly grown her audience. Certainly, sponsorship has helped as well as the loyal adoration of the gamer community. But, perhaps there is another factor at play: form.
Literary theorist, Kenneth Burke, in Counter-Statement, describes literary form as the “creation in the mind of the [viewer] an appetite, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.” Sounds simple, right? Create a desire. Fulfill the desire. For example, every good love story has literary form, usually some kind of longing (think Romeo & Juliet). So does every good story about overcoming adversity (think The Pursuit of Happyness).
Ramsey masterfully uses literary form, so, I add literary form to the list of success factors:
Literary Form – Creates a desire for the viewer and adequately satisfies that desire
In many ways, form is related to the two emotions rule. To activate two or more emotions, the show creator must create a desire, hold it in tension, and then adequately satisfy that desire. The moment she appears on screen in a blond wig and begins to parody stereotypes, Ramsey creates a desire for equity and a step toward the end of the scourge of racism by placing the viewer in her shoes. The accuracy and humor in her stereotypes take an important step in the conversation on racism. Ramsey creates a desire then satisfies it extremely well.
What About My Web Series?
Recently, I sat with an old friend who’s been creating web series since the beginning of YouTube, and prior to that had a successful career in traditional media. Spontaneously, we got talking about successful web series, which turned into a quick let’s-construct-a-web-series session.
“What are you passionate about?” he asked.
“Politics,” I said.
So he asked, “What’s your background in politics?”
I gave him a brief overview.
He continued his line of questioning. “What would have been the best outcome of your career in politics?”
“A job at the White House.”
“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
That was easy. “I negotiated an agreement on behalf of a candidate who then reneged on the agreed upon outcome.”
So it was simple. “Here’s your story: Your main character negotiates a deal on behalf of a politician he’s working for. The politician reneges on the deal, then steals his job at the White House.”
The Secret Ingredient in the Secret Sauce
It sounds so simple, something I could infuse with Ramsey’s success elements and Burke’s literary form. It also sounds like a pretty good story. But it didn’t connect for me and I’ve struggled for the past couple of weeks to figure out why.
As I looked at some of the webseries and creators I admire, the reason it didn’t connect for me became apparent. My friend’s retelling of a story that incorporates my passions, desires, fears, and more lacked something critical: I wasn’t in it yet. Like the Tin Man at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz, this story had not yet been infused with heart, with my heart. He picked something I was passionate about because, ostensibly, it would be easy to infuse the story with my passion, with heart. But, until I infuse the story and characters with heart, it’s not there.
Recently, NBC’s Brian Williams mentioned web series in a segment tease on his show Rock Center, then he repeated it like he’d said a dirty word. If the last few years have seen an explosion in web series creation and viewership, we’ve only scratched the surface. There are so many tangibles that web series creators must get right. But, what caught William’s eye about Shit Girls Say was the authenticity with which the main character (a man in drag), delivers fascinating things that girls say.
Simply put, in addition to having all the tangible and technical shit nailed, the series is full of heart. Franschesca Ramsey gets how to infuse a show with heart; and so do Felicia Day and Shira Lazar. Heart is a quality difficult to define, but you know when it’s present. In the case of these women, it comes in the form of trust. They quickly build trust with their audience and do an excellent job of sustaining that trust. But that trust happens because these women have infused their show with heart.
Like trying to describe the taste of chocolate, it’s easier to provide a sample. Sample the current work of all three of these women. And, make no mistake, Ramsey’s recent and explosive success is no accident. She combines all of the best ingredients (see above), years of work perfecting her craft, leverages literary form, and best of all, she infuses her show with heart.
J. Sibley Law is founder of the TangoDango Network and has created numerous online series that have been seen by many millions of people. Additionally, he runs the IAWTV Webseries Writers Group in New York City with Annunziata Gianzero. Out of Focus Heart on a TV photo by d3l.
Online video enthusiasts may also recognize Sherer from the pilot and/or trailer of My Gimpy Life, a comedic web series produced by Sherer’s Rolling Person Productions, directed by The Guild’s Sean Becker, and written by Gabe Uhr that’s inspired by her own sometimes awkward adventures of being a driven actor navigating through Hollywood in a wheelchair.
But soon, consumers of online entertainment will also know Sherer from more than her role in The Guild and the pilot and/or trailer of her web series. That’s because the web series will soon be more than a pilot and trailer. Sherer is beaming and proud to announce her online original’s secured funding for a five-episode first season.
The funding comes courtesy of Steven Dengler and his company Dracogen Strategic Investments. I caught up with Sherer over e-mail to ask her how the relationship with Dengler came about and what her expectations for My Gimpy Life are now that it’ll soon be a fully-fledged online show.
Tubefilter: How’d you hook up with Steven Dengler and Dragocen Strategic Investments?
Teal Sherer: We shot a pilot about a year ago and shared it with our friends and peers. Based on that, Steven Dengler and his company Dracogen decided to sponsor our first season. Dracogen also invests in a lot of other interesting artistic (Fallout: Nuka Break and the second season of The Jeff Lewis 5 Minute Comedy Hour) and charitable endeavors.
Steven and I met through Twitter (he followed me because of my work on The Guild). I tweeted about being at Niagara Falls with Jacob Drake and Steven offered to take us on a sightseeing flight over the falls in his plane. Unfortunately the timing didn’t work out but ever since then we’ve been friends.
TF: How many episodes of My Gimply Life are you making?
TS: We’ve already shot one, our “pilot,” which might not end up being our first episode, and we’re going to shoot four more episodes this spring. So five total or one shy of what the Brits call a “series.”
TF: Getting funding for a show is a great achievement! But what’s the ultimate goal here? Would you like to see My Gimpy Life get picked up by a distributor?
TS: Like all other web series, our goal is to find the audience that’s right for our show and tell them a story. Most web series have to build that slowly over time, but we’re in a unique position where we have Sean Becker, the director from the biggest web series out there, and lots of other talent and crew from that world.
We’re going to distribute ourselves on YouTube because it has the biggest potential audience for us and their reporting and accounting are completely transparent. For a long time, YouTube was kind of like this worldwide public access channel, and more and more, they’re becoming an on-demand destination to challenge the networks and cable. And I still own the show so there’s the potential to license to other outlets down the road. So, it would be great to get “picked up” by a cable channel or whatever, but it’s not like ten years ago where if you independently financed a pilot and none of the big guys wanted it, you had no outlet for it.
TF: Are there any advertisers on board?
TS: We’re open to partnering with sponsors that fit the show, but again, we’re in a unique position because this first season already has a main sponsor based on the pilot.
TF: I see Felicia Day makes a cameo appearance. Can we expect to see any more recognizable faces?
TS: Amy Okuda. We’re still breaking our stories and writing scripts, but we’ll most likely have at least one more familiar face from The Guild, and hopefully some people you’d recognize from TV.
Each 3-5 minute episode is shot from Wentworth’s kitchen and features cameo appearances by Wentworth’s husband, Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos (see the first episode).
Based on the popular first-person shooter video game series, Halo: Helljumper premiered earlier this week. It’s a perfect example of quality fan-generated content. Director Dan Wang used his passion for the Halo universe and Tobias Buckell’s novella Dirt (which, for the neophytes in the room, is part of Halo: Evolutions, which is a collection of official Halo stories released in print and audiobook forms) as inspiration for creating the live-action series every Halo fan has been dying to watch.
“I’ve wanted to do a Halo movie for the longest time” said Wang over email. “I began to read a lot about the universe through the books and Halo wikis. At the time, I had just started getting into film so I made it my goal to make a Halo movie.”
The series follows the exploits of Gage (Bradley Rose), a dying solider who shares the exploits of his time fighting against the Covenant, a hostile alien force. Flashing back to the time Gage enlisted, the series chronicles his life from when he discovers his home planet has been attacked by the Covenant to his subsequent tours a soldier in the Human-Covenant war.
It’s amazing to see a fan-created original web series that looks this good. And while there have been a great deal of great-looking fan films and trailers over the last year (Dan Trachtenberg’s Portal short and Alex Albrecht’s Voltron: The End come to mind), that’s all they’ve been. Great-looking fan films and trailers. Wang’s Halo: Helljumper is one of the few committed to releasing multiple episodes.
While the series doesn’t have the budget of studio-produced derivative content, Wang’s contagious enthusiasm for the franchise helped secure some of the funding. He put $20,000 of his own money into Halo: Helljumper before raising another $3,100 through an IndieGoGo campaign.
Bringing the world of Halo to life in a fan made series presented challenges, but Wang found a way to overcome the many obstacles.
“The experience (of the crew), when combined with determination and passion allowed us to push the limits of what’s normally possible on our budget level,” Wang said reflecting on the production.
Halo: Helljumper is a love letter to fans from a fan. Check out this online original you, Arby, and the Cheif are all sure to enjoy at Helljumper.com.
Just as Mitch Hurwitz, Jim Vallely, and Dean Lorey begin writing the new 10-episode season of the once-cancelled-and-recently-internet-greenlit Fox television show Arrested Development (scheduled to air on Netflix sometime in 2013), Crackle greenlights another entrant into the Long-Form-Content-of-Television-Quality-but-Distributed-Online fray.
Andrew Wallenstein at Variety reports the digital network, studio, and destination for television programs, movies, and a healthy amount of original web series just ordered six episodes of a half-hour anthology series dubbed The Unkown. Sons of Anarchy producer Chris Collins and the Co-Head of Fox Writers Studio Steve Tzirlin are on board to executive produce.
The Unkown will be in the vein of The X-Files, Creepshow, and/or Twilight Zone and is scheduled scheduled to go into production in March for a 2012 release. That’s almost a full year after Eric Berger, Executive Vice President of Digital Networks at Sony Pictures Television, announced Crackle would make a pivot into long-form, but still male-leaning programming. Previously, the network had been home to high-profile original web series like The Bannen Way, Angel of Death and Jailbait, which were released in short, palatable installments for online audiences and recut into 100-or-so-minute theatrical versions for DVD sales and overseas distribution.
The Unkown is one of three projects Berger revealed last May. The other two are Monster Heist (a show about a non-human group of thieves from Ghost Whisperer creators Kim Moses and Ian Sander) and Strand Street (a series from Milo Ventimiglia, Kevin Townsley and Russ Cundiff about “a rookie undercover cop who infiltrates a gang in his childhood town”).
Seth Green’s Issues (a partially animated online original featuring a disgruntled psychologist sorting out the “bizarre neuroses and psychoses” of animated superheroes) and Patrick Warburton’s Effin’ with Tonight (in which the Seinfeld star plays an animated talk show host) were two of the latest short-form web series to debut on Crackle.
Vevo is a joint venture among Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media and an online destination for music video and music video-related programming. Vevo.com received over 53 million unique visitors in the month of December, all of whom collectively viewed over 801 million videos, which makes it comScore’s second most-trafficked online video site in the United States. If those numbers aren’t impressive enough, you can add to them Vevo’s viewership stats from its YouTube network. Those clock in at a little over 53 million unique viewers and 782+ million video views.
That means last December Vevo at least racked up 1.583 billion (with a “b”) online video views across its website and distribution network in the US alone. Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff recently noted that if you include all the views from outside the US, the global monthly video views numbers top three-and-a-half billion.
“From a volume perspective our growth has been tremendous,” Caraeff told Ina Fried at AllThingsD’s D: Dive into Media Conference. “We had 300 million global views per month when we launched. Today we’re seeing 3.5 billion views per month. That’s about 42 billion views per year.”
Caraeff also revealed those billions of views per year translate into a few hundred million dollars of revenue. Vevo generated $150 million in revenue in 2011 and has paid out labels roughly $100 million over the last two years, which makes for a net positive on the company’s bottom line.
The CEO expects to reach the $1 billion revenue milestone within a “short period of time.” Vevo’s plans to distribute content on the X-Box within 30 days, as well as its planned expansion to six more countries in 2012 should help it get there.
NFL policy doesn’t allow for the New York Giants to send any tweets this Super Bowl Sunday, from 90 minutes before kickoff until all immediate post-game media coverage has ended. But NFL policy doesn’t say anything about not allowing the New York Giants to host a social media night for fans, complete with Google+ Hangouts on the Thursday before Super Bowl Sunday.
If you have something you’d like to ask a specific Giant, you’re encouraged to use the following hashtags:
Jake Ballard: #askBallard
Steve Weatherford: #askSteve
Tyle Sash: #askSash
Prince Amukamara: #askPrince
Join in on the social media action by following the Twitter hashtag #NYGsocial (or any of the hashtags above) and joining the Giants’ communities on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Go Big Blue!
ClevverNews is an up-to–the-minute news source for all of the latest in entertainment and celebrity gossip, and is produced by entertainment and broadcast journalists Deidre Behar of FoxNews.com and Katie Krause of Hollywire.
“We are very excited to kick off the New Year with the launch of our seventh YouTube channel,” said Michael Palmer, Co-Founder of Clevver Media. “We are committed to offering more celebrities, more entertainment and more up-to-the-minute news for information-hungry audiences.”
YouTube’s Original Programming Manager Terry Hurlburt added, “Building off their success-to-date on YouTube, Clevver Media’s ClevverNews channel will be a welcome addition to the YouTube line-up for those looking to keep their fingers on the pulse of entertainment and Hollywood.”
Today Machinima Chairman and CEO Allen DeBevoise and Lionsgate’s Curt Marvis announced an expanded second season of Bite Me premiering on March 6 on the Machinima Network and FEARnet, the Lionsgate, Sony and Comcast backed television cable network for horror, thriller and suspense.
Hulu is part of a not-so-secret Evil Plot to Destory the World.
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