Reflection essay

Using your experiences on this project and relating your programmes to other webisodes you have researched, discuss how taking account of the online audience affects the process of showing creative work.

 

During the research, planning, marketing and production of our 3 part web-series, lines I have learnt just how different the process of making a web-series is compared to a T.V. show or live event such as theatre.

One of the main reasons web-series are so popular is the fact they are available to anyone with internet access, and for those with internet phones etc, they are available to be watched literally any time and any place. This new availability totally eliminates the problem of missing a program on T.V. or not being able to get tickets to the theatre. Another big advantage to only releasing it online means you don’t have to abide by certification regulations like the use of offensive language, narcotics or taboo social and religious issues.  A prime example of this is the 5 part web-series, living with the infidels.  Living with the Infidels is a comedy about a group of haphazard, British Muslim terrorists, a show like this would probally never be shown on T.V. because of the nature of it, but there are no rules or regulations stopping it from being shown.

Because it’s shown online, one of the best ways to advertise a web-series is online. Because our show, Lines was a college project, about students in detention in school, the most logical target audience are students of a similar age as the actors, so they are able to relate to what is happening. To access this target audience we decided to use social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. We used Facebook because it is the biggest and most popular social networking site, giving us the opportunity to reach hundreds of people with just a click of a mouse. Myspace is mainly used by musicians as a common place to show their music, with this in mind we used it to advertise for music to use in our episodes and Twitter was linked to the two so what ever we posted on it came up on the other two. As well as social networks we also used conventional advertising techniques like postering around college to try attract others we couldn’t reach on the social networking sites.

By uploading our web-series to multiple sites and advertising on even more we get people viewing the shows at any time from anywhere in the world, this also meant we were able to get feedback almost instantly from all sorts of people. Anything from small, vague comments like “cool” or “alright” to 200 – 300 word evaluations.  But not only did we get comments on the videos, we were also able to get viewing information from YouTube telling how many people had viewed each episode, how many times they had viewed and where they had viewed from.

By gaining all of this information so quickly and so easily it meant we were able to act upon it immediately and improve the next episode. I think that our episodes have gotten better each time, and this is predominately down to this feedback. We were told the volume levels were too uneven and the camera work was too static and boring, with this in mind when making episode 2,  I made a point of getting the mic at a similar distance from each actor to make the recordings more standard and whilst Tim filmed more cutaways and closeups.