"The series itself is a comedy/drama about James (a suit and tie office worker) who moves into a share house on a street named "The Verge". James quickly realises that he is the "normal" one in a house full of eccentric archetypes (stoner/drug dealer, promiscuous young uni student, closet case homosexual Goth, tyrannical law secretary), and due to events that lead him to live at "The Verge" he must accept his fate and become a member of the house.
Come to the place where anything can happen in one of the craziest share houses in all of Australia. Some believe, "the world becomes wilder, when you're living on the edge..." Others say: "Welcome to The Verge".
Set in modern day Brisbane, 'The Verge' is an interactive web series about a house of 20-somethings, living, working, playing, partying and loving every minute of it. The house mates form an eclectic melting pot with casual flings, heady relationships, good friends, jealous rivals, sex, drugs and a killer soundtrack to boot.
Set in a house on a street called 'The Verge' the show is about a group of housemates with very different personalities all trying to learn to get along and live together. Follow the weekly adventures of James, Nate, Rachel, Blake and Bec in the most unruly house you will ever come across!
This first video is our extended teaser trailer with many more shows to come.
KateModern is the sister series of lonelygirl15. The series, which was announced on April 16, 2007, began filming on July 9 and the first video, Fight and Flight, was released on July 16. The show is produced by LG15 in partnership with Bebo. It ended on June 28, 2008, slightly less than a year following its original release.
KateModern is set in East London, England, and bears many similarities to its parent series. Both Kate and Bree are avid video bloggers and carry a dark secret. There is an alternate reality game component of the series as well.
"KateModern ran from 16th July 2007 to 28th June 2008 and was produced by the creators of lonelygirl15 - EQAL. During it's highly successful year long run it was nominated for two TV Craft BAFTA awards, a Webby Award and won the Broadcast Press Guild Award for Innovation 2008."
Kate Modern herself was killed off at the start of the second series; a bit of a bold move you might think, but the format of the show means it is constantly breaking new ground.“You can interact with the story, talk to the characters, comment on the plot – we get feedback all the time,” explains Rushton.
“What I find so interesting is the fact that people are coming together and discussing the show, but they’re also coming together to discuss things that lie outside of the show that affect them. People actually come to you on Bebo and share their experiences and they feel like they’ve got a place to do that. It’s the way that communication is going.”
We told you last month about the planned wrap-up of KateModern, the very successful Internet television show exclusive to the AOL-owned Bebo social network.
Well, today’s the day that all is put to pasture. KateModern is having its finale, and it’s going out with 12 episodes in 12 hours. The countdown to the series close began earlier this morning and will stretch to 7PM EST, with hourly videos releases complemented by live chats with and among the fanbase.
In fact, due to its viral achievements EQAL was able to secure both a $5 million Series A funding round and CBS partnership in the space of a single month.
BEBO's Kate Modern has become an internet sensation since being launched a year ago. More than 66 million people have logged on to view the interactive online drama's 'webisodes' since July 2007.
TV Biz has an exclusive preview of this week's season 2 finale for your pleasure. It features Ralf Little and man-of-the-moment Noel Clarke - who wrote, directed and starred in the Kidulthood and Adulthood films.
Who killed KateModern? It's the question that has been occupying several million minds since the beginning of the year, when the heroine of the eponymously named online drama met her end. Kate, for those who have been living in a bunker since July 2007, is, or rather, was, a troubled teenage university art student living in London. She had a dark past that she was unable to remember and was somehow connected to a secret organisation called The Order.
Social networking site Bebo is to shock fans of hit online drama Kate Modern by killing off its eponymous star in the first episode of its new series.
The series' first sponsors - which get to see their products placed within the video - will be Cadbury's Creme Egg and Toyota's youth-targeted car Aygo. Sponsors of the first series included Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Warner Music, Paramount and Orange, which each paid up to £250,000 to appear within the show.
No figures have been revealed about what each company might pay to be involved with the second series.
However, each company stumps up cash based on the amount its brand is integrated into the storyline, which includes monitoring the number of times it appears in the video and is mentioned in the script.
KateModern, the flagship online drama broadcast by social networking site Bebo, will wrap up for the last time at the end of June, it was announced today.
The last part of series two will air on June 28, with Bebo promising a "high octane" ending with multiple episodes.
Featuring Royle Family star Ralph Little, the interactive drama has run for more than 300 four-minute episodes since it launched in July last year, racking up more than 57 million views.
Bebo wanted the show to "encourage unprecedented interactivity" with its audience and has also tried to distinguish itself from rival social networking sites by building up original content.
Users are given interactive tools to "talk" to KateModern characters and producers from the series, suggest storylines and solve puzzles in the plot.
The Bebo president, Joanna Shields, said KateModern has "created a new genre and demonstrated the power of media on a social network with gripping storylines and peerless production values".
"lonelygirl15 was an interactive web-based video series which began in June 2006, and ended on August 1, 2008.
The show focuses on the life of a fictional teenage girl named Bree, whose YouTube username is the eponymous "lonelygirl15", but the show does not reveal its fictional nature to its audience.
After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences, with a complex story universe involving "trait positive girls" who are sought by an evil organization called "The Order".
Lonelygirl15 first came to international attention ostensibly as a "real" video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube. The show was eventually proved as a hoax by suspicious viewers as featuring a fictitious character played by American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose.
The three creators of Lonelygirl15, first revealed by the The New York Times, were Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney with Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, LLP.
The series began on June 16, 2006, and was slated to run through August 1, 2008. New videos appeared, at a clip of four to five a week, first on YouTube and lg15.com, also on MySpace. As of July 2008, the series has had more than 110 million combined views."
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried - creators of Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern and founders of new media company EQAL - talk with Josh Cohen of Tilzy.TV about LG15: The Resistance, why the series is different, and how the LG15 world comes to life.
"We call the shows that we produce 'social shows,' and they're very different from a TV show or a film,"
"The way that you actually construct the narrative, the way that the plot points flow over the course of the week, the way the site interplays with the video, the way the community works together and talks to the videos and talks to the characters, is all different,"
Building on its huge success, In The Motherhood, the first-ever online series for, by and about moms, is back for a second season! With a star-studded cast, newcomer Jenny McCarthy joins Leah Remini and Chelsea Handler as they portray the ever-hectic, yet always humorous adventures of Motherhood as told by real moms.
At www.inthemotherhood.com moms can submit their stories, vote for their favorites and watch as the winning submissions are turned into new episodes starring Jenny McCarthy, Leah Remini and Chelsea Handler!
The rallying of the community around the show to feed content back into the show. From bittersweet.com:
Each episode is being based on a theme and readers are invited to write in their stories on subjects like Bribing Your Child, or Explaining the Birds and the Bees, and entries are posted on the web.
If you don’t want to write about your kid using your lipstick on the cat’s rectum (photo above) or toddler taking a poop in a hardware store display toilet, you can still participate by reading and voting on the submissions.
Research determined that moms were hungry for direct contact with other moms and wanted to have real conversations about real topics that affect their daily lives.
We discovered that many marketers were talking at moms and telling them how to be the perfect mother, but none of them were talking with them.
What real moms wanted was to engage in a dialogue and they were willing to do so via an unique consumer generated comedic online series created by moms, for moms, and about moms, brought to them by Sprint Nextel and Unilever's Suave.
MSN ADVERTISING case study document here When marketers can transcend the transactional and enter into authentic conversation, moms respond... Whenarketers develop innovative solutions that cater to moms’ online behavior – as they make connections, find information, get things done, or seek entertainment – and then present those solutions in a way that honors the experience of motherhood, moms respond.
Starring 30-something Playmate/sitcom star Jenny McCarthy, King of Queens‘ Leah Remini, and E!’s Chelsea Handler, the series’ 7-minute(ish) vids recreate toddler-centric vignettes from stories submitted by real-world moms.
Each episode is basically a concentrated shot of jokes you’d hear from sitcom mothers, those overworked and frustrated (yet still affably sardonic!) foils to their husbands’ childish excesses — but without the contrived plots, laugh tracks and boring supporting characters.
Instead, each show features three, real-life, self-contained stories (toddler craps in show floor toilet, grandma fake-bakes unsuspecting 3-year-old, etc.), with the moms’ yuk-it-up banter segueing between segments. Some of the vignettes even go beyond antiseptic family sitcom fare, e.g., the first episode, when McCarthy’s kid uses lip balm on the family cat’s behind.
ABC has given a 13-episode order to “In the Motherhood,” a half-hour laffer based on the online series about the perils of parenting. Alphabet net announced at its May upfront presentation that “Motherhood” was being fast-tracked for development. The online series was conceived by brand entertainment firm Mindshare, which remains involved with the TV sitcom version
The skew of the article seems to be that it is difficult to achieve legally.
My sense is that it's difficult to achieve editorially.
The depth of an online community IS the show - rather than something a TV series would graft to itself.
Here's a thought: Was Television seen as a "way to develop shows" for radio... back in 1950? So are we right to apply that logic to online shows today?
This tale of three moms, which has its debut on ABC on Thursday, was created by a marketing company as a Web video series. After drawing millions of views online in the past two years, it was transformed into a traditional network sitcom, making it the first Web show to be remade for network television. But what made the Web series unique — an interactive style of storytelling — was quashed by the legal engine of Hollywood.
On the MSN.com edition of “Motherhood” (since discontinued), short segments about funny, frazzled mothers were inspired by the real-life stories that viewers submitted via an Internet forum. ABC, similarly, asked for story submissions on its Web site (itm.abc.go.com) and said that they “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”
But ABC’s call for ideas from moms drew the attention of the Writers Guild of America, which said this type of request for submissions was “not permissible” under its contract with the network. This week ABC abruptly removed the language about “inspiration” from its Web site, effectively saying that the writers may not be listening to viewers’ ideas, after all.
Easy to Assemble follows Illeana Douglas as she quits her Hollywood career and goes to work at IKEA Burbank in an attempt at a ‘normal life.’ However your past is often more difficult to leave behind than you think. Especially when Hollywood craziness with its gossip columnists, stalkers and celebrity friends follows you. Can Illeana assimilate in "civilian" life and prove that "art is where you make it?"
Episode 1 of Easy To Assemble. Illeana Douglas's first day on the job. Can she survive?
Easy To Assemble costars Jeff Goldblum, Tom Arnold, Justine Bateman, Jane Lynch, Craig Bierko, Kevin Pollack, Robert Patrick, Ed Begley jr. and others.
IKEA is promoting the line, “Easy to Assemble” with an online video series starring director Illeana Douglas and co-starring Jeff Goldblum, Tom Arnold, Justine Bateman, Jane Lynch, Craig Bierko, Kevin Pollack, Ed Begley Jr. and Robert Patrick. Twenty co-worker training videos, initially rolled out online on the SVX channels at YouTube and Metacafe, feature playful if slightly embarrassing moments for staff and guests at an IKEA store in Burbank, California. The campaign is supplemented by a specially designed site, www.easytoassemble.tv.
Los Angeles Actress Illeana Douglas has moved from starring in big productions such as Cape Fear, Seinfeld and Ugly Betty to try her hand at writing and directing. Most recently, she is the creator of an original web series called Easy To Assemble, sponsored by Swedish furniture giant IKEA...
...It has now been picked up by CBS's online component TV.com. In this interview, she talks about why she thinks that branded content is the way of the future, her vision for Easy To Assemble and the quirky band Sparhusen as well as what it means to be an artist in a digital age. Interview by Jay Baage.
The winner of IKEA's coveted 'Co-Worker of the Year' is revealed, but that's only the beginning. Illeana, Justine and their fellow IKEAns are on a plane bound for Sweden, where new co-workers, new relationships and 'bitter' rivalries combine to re-define 'in-flight entertainment.'
The special Flying Solo miniseries concludes with what else? A groovy disco dance number. Shake your groove plane and boogie down to Sparhusen's new single: 'Mile High Club' (available for download at http://www.cdfreedom.com/sparhusen)
*****STORYGAS INTERACTIVE RATING***** EASY TO ASSEMBLE Can you embed? YES Can you comment? YES Also on youtube? YES Forums? not found Blog? YES ************************************
What do you think? In 3 words? Or score out of 10? See COMMENTS below
Kirill stars Gladiators and Pirates of the Caribbean actor David Schofield as a besieged blogger locked in a bleak, futuristic and sinister world and involved in a plot to save the planet.
The storyline is woven into MSN's interactive tools, including the social networking site Spaces, its instant messenger tool Live Search, and features developed using the development platform Silverlight. Visitors to MSN's site need to download Silverlight to watch the drama. MORE HERE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/30/digitalmedia-television
Social networking website Bebo has made its first foray into comedy with the launch of an interactive show for teens, Chelsey: OMG!.
Bebo's new online show follows American Chelsey Pucks - played by Kelly Anne Lyons - as she moves from a cosseted background in the US to a job in London's fashion scene.
Chelsey: OMG! has been created for the social network by comedian Nat Coombs and Channel X, the UK independent production company that has previous worked with Ricky Gervais, Vic Reeves, Jonny Vegas, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, Peter Kay, Jonathan Ross and Jo Brand.
Two three-minute episodes of Chelsey: OMG! will be screened on Bebo.com each week, along with a host of additional footage featuring Chelsey and other characters.
The Guild is a independent sitcom web series about a group of online gamers. The show started in the late summer of 2007, and for the first season was financed solely by Paypal donations from LOYAL FANS. Since season 2, The Guild has been distributed by Xbox Live and Microsoft and sponsored by Sprint.
Episodes vary from 3-8 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.
Click here for the story behind The Guild. Seems like a bunch of writers and actors got together... and just made it, and uploaded it themselves...
"The guild was inspired and written by Felicia Day, an avid gamer, who until 2006 had been playing World of Warcraft.
After a 2 year gaming addiction Day decided to make something productive from her experiences and wrote the series as a sitcom pilot. Day hoped to show that the stereotype of a man living in his parent's basement is not the only kind of gamer.
Due to concerns that a wider (television) audience would not be receptive to the comparatively niche setting, she decided to follow through with it online with Jane Selle Morgan and Kim Evey. Day already knew Sandeep Parikh and Jeff Lewis from the Empty Stage, a Los Angeles based comedy theatre, and their roles were written for them. The rest of the cast was filled through auditions. After filming the first 3 episodes in just two and a half days they faced the problem of funding. After putting a donation link to Paypal the 4th and 5th episode were almost solely financed by donations"
"The story unfolds depending on the choices made by the viewer along the way, and we're very excited about it's launch."
Something is shifting in the city of London. thisunrealcity is a webseries, a game, a multimedia adventure told online. A conspiracy thriller where you must find the fragments, and put together the truth... Because the truth will set you free. Maybe.
Unreal City, Chapter One "There's A Crack In Everything".
In Chapter One, Ella Ford discovers that her best friend has been murdered. She comes into possession of some stolen data, and she needs your help to put the fragments back together-- and find out who murdered her friend, and why.
A place on the web for people who work in, and fans who watch, web series...
...online drama from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and beyond...
...web drama, online comedy, online narrative, interactive drama, internet television series, web tv, webisodes, or interactive narrative... whatever you call it, we're watching.
The links below help sort what you're looking for.
HAVE A LOOK THROUGH THE COMPLETE LISTS OF WEB SERIES BELOW!
Leave us a comment... send us a question... or link... or show... or anything else! (Easiest way is to click on "COMMENTS" under each post - Feel free to say hi!)
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