Oh, ye gods. What a horror.
I watched an episode of “The Apprentice”.
For those who don’t know – “The Apprentice” is a UK reality TV show where a bunch of alleged experienced businessmen and women compete in a variety of allegedly business-related tasks to become the “apprentice” to alleged business guru (and, to be fair, successful tycoon) Alan Sugar.
It’s horrifying. “Normal” business practise is presented as a mass of sniping, backbiting, and bullying from Lord Sugar on down. The tasks bear about as much relation to actual business as that dude in the bear suit at your local mall does to an actual grizzly.
And the contenders are both spectacularly odious – sexist, overbearing, pretentious, backstabbing – and incredibly stupid. Stupid to the point that a team of seven of them, in an entire day, couldn’t figure out what a “cloche” was in the context of a posh hotel. (To be fair, they weren’t allowed to use Google, which would have put my personal time on that task up from 30 seconds to, ooh, about 3 minutes).
And yet these guys and girls are all very successful in business. One had made 70k a year whilst studying at the same time. Another ran a not-that-small company.
And this got me thinking. If you forced one of these morons to run a web series, would they do as well at that, in spite of their deficiencies?
Quite likely. Why?
Balls.
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It’s easy to get tunnel vision on the Web. You make Web series, you read the forums for your chosen form of video (live action, Machinima, whatever), you read Web Series Network, you check the Twitters for #webserieschat…
And that’s about it.
No kidding, there’s a hell of a lot of useful information on the indiefilm/webseries/etc blogospheres. But particularly for a new medium like the web series, a lot of the most valuable info I’ve found over the past 13 or so years has come from sites in other fields – whether they’re internet marketing, aimed at people running pro blogs or making webapps, there are a lot of people out there trying to solve some of the same problems that hit us.
Here are four completely non-visual-media blogs that I would recommend you pretty much consume from start to end – and I guarantee you’ll come out with a whole bunch of new perspectives.
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When you’re guerilla showrunning, you’re always short of time. There’s always more you want to do in less. You’re playing catch-up to industries with millions of dollars that themselves are always hurrying. You’re trying to make a show with you and a friend in your garage on a weekend, when the guys making “24″, with millions of dollars and top-name stars, spend as much time panicking about how much time they’ve got as you do.
The last things you need are goddamn time vampires.
Time Vampires? Yeah. Those little invisible buggers that soak up hours and hours you don’t notice. They aren’t the big important tasks that take ages (like editing your episode, for example), they’re the little things that just sit there eating time and leave you pissed off and frustrated to boot.
Some of the biggest improvements I’ve made to my show creation over the years have all been about staking time vampires to the nearest solid object. Because if you’ve got an invisible annoyance sucking hours out of your project, it doesn’t matter how 80/20 you are getting about the rest of the gig, it’s still going a lot slower than it could.
You need to stake the damn vampires, now. Or, to put it another way, fix the sodding dripping tap, already.
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Gantt charts.
You’ve heard of them, right?
Enormous great wall-planner things, listing every single thing that you’ve got to do on your Masterwork Project, all with neat time schedules, and lists of what depends on what, and colour coding that Means Important Stuff, and…
Aii. My head hurts just thinking about it.
Do you spend a lot of time feeling guilty about not having a Big Master Plan for your series?
Not having Everything You Need To Do carefully mapped out and controlled? Did you try having one, but felt like you spent all your time updating it?
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