Five Minute Sitcom - A Blog About Webisodes

HOW NOT TO ADOPT A CHILD FROM AFRICA

2008-03-29T19:05:00.001-07:00

Technically a short, not a pilot, but I'd love to see this as a show.

How Not To Adopt a Child From Africa - Watch more free videos

New Web Series - Three Percent Enemies.

2008-03-10T23:13:00.001-07:00

My friend Barry sent me a link to this series. It's well written and reminds me of THE BURG, in a good way. The first episode clocks in at a daunting twelve minutes, but episode two has been brought down to nine. While I'm not a strict "five minute" fundamentalist, shorter generally makes things more watchable.

That being said, I liked this and look forward to future episodes.

Backstage West's 5 Minute Sitcom How-To

2008-03-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

What a Buzz Mill! (From Backstage West)

Their key points:

Keep it simple, keep it short, do it often.

Good advice for everyone. They have an interesting quote from an exec from the (now defunct) Revver, who says that 3.5 minutes seems to be the sweetspot. Speaking from experience, this may be the case as there's a definite 2nd act lag in most five minute scripts (including, alas, mine), but I'm hoping this problem is surmountable because 3point5minutesitcom.com doesn't really have the same ring.

John August on short scripts

2008-03-08T00:51:00.000-08:00

Www.fiveminutesitcom.com aspires to be 1/100th of the blog that johnaugust.com. John is both a great screenwriter and a nice man, and meeting him was a bright spot in the 2007/2008 WGA strike.

As I've taken to viewing his blog as the final word on pretty much anything, I was psyched to see him answer questions about writing shorts (not strictly the same thing as a five minute sitcom, but a 5ms is like a short that.

My favorite part: The hero’s fundamental problem/challenge/obstacle needs to occur by the time you get to the 1/3rd mark. So, if your short is meant to be three minutes long, the big event needs to happen on page one. If it’s a 10-minute short, it happens around page three. It’s not that you’re worried about your reader getting bored before then — if you can’t entertain us for three pages, there’s a problem — but rather that if you delay any longer, your story is going to feel lopsided: too much setup for what was accomplished.

Do yourself a favor and read this article.

Scripting a short film (from Johnaugust.com)

New five minute sitcom from Disney - Squeegees.

2008-03-08T00:27:00.000-08:00

Disney Introduces the 5-Minute Online Sitcom.
(From Romow.com)

Disney is imagining just such a scenario, and has produced the first ultra-short form sitcom: called “Squeegees.”

Squeegees is being produced by Stage Nine, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Disney Corporation which is dedicated to integrating online and television content. Stage Nine’s mission is to exploit the popularity of Web video sites such as YouTube and Myspace, and develop original programming designed to bridge the gap between online and television entertainment.

The new mini sitcoms are approximately 5 minutes long — and that’s including commercials! They will be debuted on both YouTube and ABC.com. Squeegees is a comedy about four characters who wash windows for living, clinging to the edges of high-rise buildings in Manhattan.

The article voices a familiar question: "Is it possible to grow to love and empathize with characters they see only briefly in five minute intervals?" It's a standard question, but people seem to forget two key points.

1) People like to return to fun characters. Lorne Michaels has made fortunes based on this fact.

2) Brevity limits the scope of storytelling, but doesn't hurt the immediacy. Five minute shows live or die on how well the characters are set up.

Apparently SQUEEGEES hasn't hit the sweet spot, but that's just a matter of cracking the formula. I always liken it to comic strips - vivid characters live and breathe in four panels a day, but it took decades to figure out the format for the modern strip:

Modern comic strip:

Early comic strip:

The article ends with a cliche, but it's good advice for us all.

If Disney wants to succeed with the five-minute online sitcom, it will need to take lessons from many of the most popular contributors on YouTube: keep it simple and keep it real.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

2008-03-08T00:16:00.000-08:00

The above is an example of "flash fiction," a six word short story by Ernest Hemingway (the great man considered this one of his favorite works). This story and others like it are evoked in this Wired article from 2006.

Personal fave: Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Some are funny, some are strange, but all strive to create a powerful, evocative context with just a handful of words.

Flash fiction is illustrative for students of the five minute sitcom. You've got five minutes in which to tell a story, and the little boxes you're streaming in hamper the audience's ability to read lips. Keeping lines short and potent helps you keep your final cut lean and mean, and keep your points, message and humor vibrant and punchy.

As the Simpsons say, "Brevity is... wit." Most jokes benefit from taking words out of the setup and stressing the punchline.

How Much do the social networks pay per minute for scripted content?

2008-02-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

From www.unitedhollywood.com:

WSJ today gives overview of social networking sites getting into business of producing online video. Article features three shows:
- Kate Modern, a mystery on social networking site Bebo.- Roommates, a soap opera on MySpace TV- Special Delivery, a hidden camera reality show on MySpace TV.
It notes that while MySpace and Bebo push into original content, Facebook hasn't and other internet companies - AOL and Yahoo, specifically - are backing away from it.
Article doesn't disclose budget for KATE MODERN but says Bebo sells sponsorships at $400,000 for six months.
Claims production budgets for Roommates and Special Delivery are about $1000 per minute.

$1,000 dollars per minute for ROOMMATES? Well, I guess the girls are sorta hot.

http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/2008/02/wsj-today-gives-overview-of-social.html

Cracked Magazine's History of the Sitcom

2008-02-22T03:45:00.001-08:00

Short and useful. What every aspiring sitcom writer should know.

How To Promote Your Webisode

2008-02-22T02:52:00.001-08:00

Hey have you heard of my websitcom, LAZARUS? As the answer is probably a resounding no, this should inform you as to the extent of my knowledge on this topic. One of the main inspiration for this site was the fact that "How to Promote Your Webisode" returned zero hits on google.

I've attached some useful links to more useful documents published by people far smarter than I. At some point in the future, I plan on reviewing these in further detail.

Like all things on the site, this is a work in progress, but they links are sorted into three categories:

1. Grassroots Promotion: Youtube, Social networks, etc.
2. Monetization - Advertising, promotion, opportunities with grown up companies that pay.
3. Blog Stuff - As there's more info on promoting blogs than promoting webisodes,

GRASSROOTS PROMOTION
This is the most useful document that I've found so far.

http://willvideoforfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/popular-on-youtube-without-talent_v15.pdf

MONETIZATION
Take a look at the web series on www.veoh.com. They're not making any money either.

BLOG STUFF
This was helpful in getting my blog listed on google - I'm not 100% sure if it works yet, but if it doesn't, the odds of anyone actually finding this page are almost nil. I do webpages at a first grade level, so congrats on being on the ground level of my learning process.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1558/get_blog_google_72_hours

You'll need to add a sitemap, another potentially confusing element. Here's how: http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/02/submit-blogger-sitemap-to-google.html

Timeline (A work in progress)

2008-02-17T07:31:00.000-08:00

At present, the "five minute sitcom" is more of a philosophical conceit than an actual thing. The current term is "webisode." The wikipedia article on the subject is barely 100 words long, but it helpfully points out that webisode is a portmanteau of web and episode, then provides another helpful link to explain portmanteau. The etymology is a little muddy, but it dates back to New Media Bubble guys operating in the mid-to-late 90's.None of which does anything to explain what the term actually means. Hopefully, by putting the major developments of the medium in some sort of context, it will help build a greater understanding.

A work in progress outlining the state of the union of the medium. A lot of the dates for projects are approximate - it's frequently hard to figure out when these shows debuted.

1995 - TheSpot.com. The first web show, an online soap opera. Broke ground, and coined the word "webisode," the favored term for online shows. By 1997 it was off the air, a victim of the net bubble and the fact that bandwidth was super expensive back then. Status: So dead it's nostalgia.

2001- Channel 101 launched. The idea: a roving film festival that allowed comedy pros to produce short pilots and submit them before an audience. The most well recieved spawned more episodes. Finally, famous people were given an opportunity to shine on the web. Status: Spawned a VH-1 reality show, helped solidify the careers of Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon, who went on to make a lot of money in Hollywood, to the envy/joy of nerds everywhere. Nice guys.

2006 -
The Burg - A hip show about hipsters in Williamsburg. Initially, episodes ran about 15 minutes, but the producers quickly scaled them down to about five minutes. Cheerfully mimics numerous single camera, comedy tropes. Status: Aspires to make the jump from webisode to cable/broadcast. Experienced a brief flurry of net fame in 2006, but has died down, slightly.

Chad Vader - Originally spawned on Channel 101 (see above), Chad Vader follows the misadventures of Darth Vader's little brother, Chad, who works as a manager in a supermarket. Status: Despite the shameless theft of a Lucasfilm Trademark, the show is irritatingly popular and has been translated into five languages.

2007 - Minisodes begin floating around. Bastard hybrids of webisodes and real TV, minisodes are created by cutting actual episodes of TV shows down to clip form. Tech bloggers seem to universally disdain these, and generally make a joke about how they're for people who found the original SILVER SPOONS too hard to follow. Status: Mercifully, they don't seem to have taken off and they might be killed for good by the terms of the new Writer's Guild contract. I have my fingers crossed.

BuddyJackson.com - A single camera sitcom with admirably high production value. Status: As of this writing has served up 24 episodes.

PlanetUnicorn.TV - Really gay, really funny. The theme song alone counts for 90% of the virality, it's the sort of thing you WANT to forward to your friends. Status: Hipsters, gay bois and digerati eagerly await episode 6. If this doesn't get the creators a deal with Logo, Bravo or similar there is no god.

First Post (Pilot)

2008-02-15T12:40:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the first post of my new blog, or perhaps I should say the "pilot," heh heh. For folks in the know (or who have seen Pulp Fiction), they will know that a pilot is the first episode of a new TV show, the success of which determines whether new episodes will be created.

Then again, a pilot constitutes a more or less finished endeavor, whereas I'm not sure what the tone, style or content should be. So in that sense, this isn't really the pilot, more like the horrid development meeting in pre-production, where the execs are nice but clueless, and the only hot chick in the room is the rich girl who's married to an actress from the 80's. Grim stuff.

+++

Hi, and welcome to the first post of my new blog. This project came to me when I realized that people in Hollywood were talking about the mythic "five minute sitcom" that will someday be "broadcast," "podcast" or "streamed" on a wide array of "distribution platforms," but the actual google results on said term were pretty disappointed. When http://www.godaddy.com/ told me that http://www.fiveminutesitcom.com/ wasn't taken, I vowed then and there to start a blog and hopefully establish myself as an expert in a field that no one seems to know anything about.

So like I said, thanks for reading this first post. I plan to use this space to link to articles on the subject, keep abreast of trends in the emerging medium, and pimp the hell out of my own five minute sitcom, a zero budget experiment called "LAZARUS."

Welcome to the first step in a derivative media future geared towards people with no attention spans whatsoever.