Commentary

We were fortunate to sit down with Jay Ferguson, director and co-writer of the new interactive, transmedia web series Guidestones. He offers insight into working on such a large scale with a relatively low budget and what he feels web series brings to the table as medium. Jay is an award-winning filmmaker who has contributed as a writer, director, producer and cinematographer to over 15 feature films. His work with institutions such as The National Film Board of Canada has garnered him several awards, including the top cinematography award at the Atlantic Film Festival (Animals, 2005) and from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers (Inside Time, 2008). He was nominated for a Gemini Award in 2005. Guidestones launches in early February! What is it about web series that made you interested in pursuing this platform? When I first had the idea to create content for the web, I understood the episodes [...]

We were fortunate to be able to discuss the making of the documentary web series, The Zeroes, with its director, Ivan Weiss. A North Carolina-based journalist and filmmaker, Weiss received his M.A. from the London Film School and spent a year on a journalism Fulbright in Moscow writing about extant remnants of Soviet culture. He has worked at several independent film and documentary production companies in London and New York, and as a journalist covering the Russian oil industry. Among his current projects is a series on contemporary artists. The Zeroes was made with Film@11, an independent media company based in Brooklyn, NY that offers video news on digital platforms. The Zeroes is presented as being based on Randall Lane’s book. How did you approach the creation of an episodic series that was essentially adapting the book, but nonetheless is an entirely different medium? Before we’d even read Randall’s book, [...]

John Kassab describes his experience as sound designer for last year’s Oscar-winning animated short film, The Lost Thing, and what he learned from the project. You can watch a trailer for the short film here.  Working on The Lost Thing created many technical challenges that I had not been faced with before. Most of the films I’d previously worked on were mostly grounded in a familiar perception of ‘reality’ and most came with a lot of location sound taken from the set. But there are no ‘real’ sets or locations in animation, as every scene was given to me as a silent blank canvas. This affords you enormous freedom, but it also throws up lots of questions and possibilities, which in the case of the film’s famous Utopia sequence can be a little daunting. In this 15 min film, there are 22 locations and 74 characters and all required stylized [...]

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to chat with Rich Mbariket about his extensive experience with web series and his thoughts on the medium. Rich is continually expanding the network of web series to better connect creators, audiences, analysis, advertising and news coverage, both digitally and in traditional print. He is the founder of www.webseriesnetwork.com, the foremost social networking platform for web series creators and viewers to form a community and which also offers exclusive tips and news on web series as a medium. Rich expanded on the site and the exposure of web series by launching the Web Series Magazine earlier this year – the only print publication about web series, also available online – for which he serves as publisher and editor-in-chief. He is also as a consultant and content creator. You should definitely follow Rich on Twitter: @RichMbariket. Enjoy the conversation and Rich’s astute insights [...]

written by Dylan Kussman I’ve been a professional film and television actor for a little over 25 years, and a professional screenwriter for almost 20 of those. I’ve spent a lot of that time living in fear: fear that I won’t make rent, fear that I’ve blown an audition, fear that my screenplay isn’t worth a damn. I’ve spent sleepless nights convinced that I would never get my shot to play ‘the part’ – you know, the Big One, the one every great actor eventually gets to play – Brando’s Stanley, Streep’s Sophie, the doctor or dropout or cop that distills the essence of a legendary performer. A career of playing ‘pedestrian #2’ and ‘neighbor guy’ wouldn’t be one to complain about, but I’ve admired the titans for too long to see it as anything but coming up short. So there I was, gnashing my teeth, waiting to hear about [...]