In Julie Keck and Jessica King’s article, Give the people what they want: Niche web series as sustainable filmmaking, they talk about how important audience is in filmmaking. They were producing good content however ‘as we built our stack of projects, we looked around and realized…we were lacking an audience’.
They also talk about trying to accommodate for everyone, to make their show have millions of viewers. ‘You need more if you’re going to have a real go at this job. (…) But how many do you really need for your film life to survive?’ It is difficult to access audiences, ‘though you’re looking for them, they’re not looking for you.’ There is no guarantee your content is going to become popular no matter how much promotion, and transmedia elements you use. Keck and King found success in embracing their niche audience, ‘it may not be the whole million we saw when we first started dreaming of our filmmaking life, but it’s a sizable group’.
In the workshop, we watched some web series’, Starting from Now, High Maintenance and the Guild. The main differences I noticed between the ‘niche’ transmedia tactics used in these shows compared to high budget shows, are the use of the actors performances, and camera techniques. For example, in Starting from Now, the actors overtly used lingering gazes or quickly diverting eyes and overt expressions to quickly and easily show what is happening and narrative possibilities. All the web series we watched also had simple plots, nothing to extravagant which were easy to follow.
We spoke about using transmedia elements, where it is easy to lose focus on what you’re end goal is – everything should feel true to whatever you’re creating, for example, your choice of platform has to be true to the narrative and the tone and style of the narrative.
In my group we thought of transmedia ideas for High Maintenance. We came up with the idea of an interactive website. This would have clips from before and after each episode, giving the characters more dimension. For example, one before bit could focus on the homeless girl, following her around and seeing her everyday life, and how she finds guys to mooch off. There could be a blog for the weed guy, following his perspective and his opinions on the people he deals to. You could also click on each episode and look more in depth at the things in that episode, such as the cult webpage, or the artwork the guy made in episode two.