If you're not working on your own television show right now because there's "no industry" in your town, get off your butt, grab a video camera, and make your own damn show. For less than the cost of renting a crappy theater in a part of town nobody but your best friend will visit, you can produce your own "Webisodes" and post them online for the world to see.

Article by Laura Palotie

On a mid-December evening, an 80’s-inspired indie rock band called the All-For-Nots took the stage beneath red twinkle lights at Lower Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge. Think of a tidy hipster haven and this was it: a young, casually attractive crowd stretched across the dark floor, from one exposed brick wall to the other, bopping their heads to the unpolished vibrato of its two lead singers. “Johnny” (Kevin Johnston) cradled his guitar and “Farrah” (Vanessa Reseland) tossed her blonde hair as the pair projected unapologetically passionate melodies about topics ranging from the end of the world to dive bars.

The All-For-Nots were impressively produced for a weekday bar act because, in the traditional sense, they weren’t one. The group had been created for an upcoming web TV show, and the gig was merely a way of bringing additional attention to the series.

This was the Monkees for the Do-it Yourself era: The actors played their own instruments, and writer and co-creator Thom Woodley stood wide-legged behind the keyboard. Starting this spring, the story will unfold on the now-ubiquitous eight-by 11 web screen.

For an actor, booking a traditional TV pilot can be as exhilarating and frightening as joining a Broadway cast. The thrill of getting cast through seemingly impossible odds quickly dissolves into new kind of anxiety: The knowledge that being part of a hit means grabbing a winning ticket twice in a row.

It’s no surprise, however, that the entrepreneurial freedom of the internet has quickly translated into a rare sense of power on the actor’s end. Launching an internet show requires little more than access to a camera and a group of like-minded peers. The end result can be a sizeable viewership for a very small monetary investment—not to mention the opportunity for an actor to take more substantial control of the creative process.

“Until now, the internet hasn’t been as much a replacement for TV than a bite-size thing, but with the episodic model, it’s changing,” said Tony Liano, VP of Content at Crackle, a Sony-owned distribution site for web entertainment. Indie producers can upload original webisodes onto the site for free, and Crackle representatives then draw attention to what they deem the strongest work. In some cases, the company even offers production deals.
“Sony knows that the next Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t there waiting tables in L.A, they have a camera, they are making content and putting it on the web,” Liano added.

For The All-For-Nots creators Woodley and Kathleen Grace, previous self-made success in the webisode scene attracted funding to the series. The show is co-produced by Vuguru, a Michael Eisner-owned studio for new media content. Less than two years ago, however, the pair had created and self-produced their first show, titled The Burg, about the upscale hipster culture of Williamsburg. Quickly after the show’s launch it grasped the attention of publications like Gawker and Wired, and viewer numbers went up. The Burg currently enjoys between 30,000-40,000 views per episode.

“I just wanted to do something fun with actors on a regular basis,” said Grace, “rather than saying ‘we’re doing an off-Broadway play where we put in $3000 to rent the space and ten people saw it.’ We spent similar amount of money on The Burg for the first six months to a year, and hundreds of thousands of people saw it.”

After being approached by Vuguru, the decision to produce a second series was an easy one. Woodley would star and co-write the songs along with friend Kyle Jarrow, while an audition process narrowed about 150 musically inclined actors down to the final five. Thanks to Vuguru’s funding, each actor is paid for his or her efforts.

“We wanted to do a roadtrip show, and we wanted to do a show about music,” said Grace, raising her voice against the thumping bass traveling from the stage into the Mercury Lounge bar area. “Vuguru could afford to do something this ambitious.”

Like traditional indie theater and film projects, most webisodes are paid from the producers’ own pockets until the show gains momentum and potential future funding. Besides keeping busy with The All-For-Nots, Woodley and Grace will continue to produce The Burg and hold day jobs outside of the two projects. The good news for aspiring web stars is, however, the low production cost of most do-it yourself shows: One episode can require a teensy budget, just enough for feeding the cast and crew and buying a prop or two.

Such is the case with The In-Betweens of Holly Malone, a New York-based indie show that has the feel of Sex and the City in three-minute bits (minus the frills and the lengthy voice-overs). Now between its second and third seasons, Holly is the baby of On the Leesh Productions, a local indie company. Its cast and crew works on a volunteer basis, and the budget has remained at about $100 an episode (total views thus far have been over 208,000).

For the production team, the experience has been an opportunity to explore different artistic roles in a team of close friends. Northwestern-trained actress Jessica Arinella, who plays the bright-eyed and neurosis-prone title character, is the sister of On the Leesh founder Alicia Arinella.

“I think artists competing with artists on a direct playing field is so important. Once you get the studios involved, it’s basically money against money. And I really think the web is a chance for that. Someone sees a web series, thinks it’s amazing, and then goes and makes something even better,” said Jessica Arinella over lunch with her sister Alicia and producer and fellow cast member Julie Tortorici. “Ten years ago, I think, was a much harder time to be an actor.”

The three say that it took the encouragement of writer and series creator Phil Kain to get the series off the ground in the spring of 2006. For many, the concept of a web video still brought to mind the grainy, undirected clips of people fooling around on Youtube. Creating a series online was outside of the traditional roster of opportunities, but it simultaneously represented a new niche for On the Leesh.

“It was a great opportunity. We could hone out skills, we could put our teeth on this. Jess and Julie are fantastic actresses, but with all of the rules and regulations, there isn’t a whole lot of opportunity out there,” says Alicia Arinella. “Philip was really instrumental behind it. We’d sit around and talk about stuff, and he’d just say, do it, post it.” Episodes of Holly appear on seven different sites, including Crackle.com, Blip.com and On the Leesh’s own web site.

“It wasn’t really on the map yet so we treated each one sort of like a short film,” Alicia Arinella remembers. “Then it became really apparent, when we got to know the characters well, that we could shoot them really quickly.”

It’s not often, Jessica Arinella says, that a young actor has the opportunity to build and develop a character over several seasons. “We are learning all this on a small scale where it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes,” she says.
“I think it’s a great way to learn how to live on camera. Seeing the older episodes and some of the newer episodes, it’s such a great learning curve, and it’s better than doing a class on acting on camera. A class will never be like the real thing,” adds Tortorici, who plays Holly’s friend Francesca in addition to producing the show.

Performing routinely on the screen has, naturally, boosted Jessica Arinella’s confidence at other professional endeavors. When she was called to play a bad date in ABC’s short-lived Six Degrees, any intimidation on the big set quickly diminished when she noticed herself to be more than prepared to improv in multiple takes.

“They wanted me to improv, and I really believe that having done all these web things, I was so comfortable in front of the camera and I was able to really impress everyone on the set,” she says.

While some have found web series to serve as ideal springing boards, other directors and producers are using their success in other realms to fuel online projects. Joe Swanberg, indie filmmaker whose naturalist, improvisational works like Kissing on the Mouth and Hannah Takes the Stairs have made him a principal player in the so-called ‘mumblecore’ film movement, is currently producing his second web series, titled Butterknife.

Swanberg’s last webisode effort, Chicago-based sex soap called Young American Bodies, gained attention in publications like New York Magazine and attracted over 1.5 million viewers during its first season. Two seasons of the show are available on Nerve.com, and a third will soon be up on both Nerve.com and IFC.com.

“I think the first episode of Young American Bodies was probably watched by more people in one day than both of my movies,” Swanberg said in a phone interview. “It became really clear to me that that’s where the audience was. I like making feature films and will continue to make them because it’s cool to show your work in a theater and have that kind of audience interaction, but at the same time a lot of my energy now is invested in these web shows because so many people are seeing my work.”

Swanberg too relies on teamwork and improvisation in his work; actors in Young American Bodies pick their own character names, and production for each season begins with a meeting in which cast members share their ideas for upcoming storylines. As a director, he says, the most notable difference between film and the web is editing for a shorter attention span. No matter how compelling the writing and acting is, conventional wisdom states that an internet viewer’s concentration begins to dwindle after three to five minutes.

“With features you have a long time to tell a story, so in my writing I’m a lot more loose and meandering. I just shoot a lot of stuff and don’t always know where it’s going to go; I just let things happen. But in a web show we have to be a lot tighter,” he says.

What did you think of this article? Let us know!
feedback@actorslife.com