How To Write A Web Series

How To Write A Web Series By Jacob Krueger   Jake: This week we are on with Karin Partin, and we are going to be talking about Web Series, which is something I haven't talked about yet on the podcast. Karin teaches our Web Series Writing Classes here at Jacob Krueger Studio and has a lot to say about Web Series writing and producing. We’re going to be looking at Web Series from a creative point of view, and also talking about how you can use a Web Series and very little money to actually launch your career and get noticed-- how a Web Series can become not only a calling card, but actually something that brings you money or something that builds your career. So, Karin thank you so much for joining us. Karin: Yeah, Hi! Thank you for having me. This is exciting to be sitting in on the podcast. I know so many of my students are just huge fans of the podcast and listening to the podcast, so it’s very exciting to be on the podcast. Jake: When you think about Web Series writing, why do a Web Series? Why start with a Web Series? Karin: You want to make a Web Series to break into the industry. If you write a script, you can pitch that script to managers and agents for six months or a year. And then, you get that one yes or five yeses and all five of those managers and producers and agents are putting that script on their desk, and may take six more months to read that script. Once they love your script, let’s say of course you have the perfect script ever, it is the best script ever anyone has ever written and they love it, then it is going to take those people championing for you to get it made. And it can take a very long time and the chances of its momentum falling off is high. That is why it takes a thousand no’s and one yes to break into this industry. So if you make your own Web Series, you can send it to anyone you’ve ever met in the industry, and all of a sudden your chances just skyrocket of someone actually seeing your writing because it got made. You can just send it out and say “hey, here is my five minutes”. And the chances are much higher that they are going to see your work. And you can do it! You can make it affordable. You can make your Web Series affordable. That is the whole point: getting your work out there. it is a very short form content that lets you highlight your skills. So, if you can pull off character development and an A to B of storytelling so your character goes from point A to point B, they change in a very, very short amount of time. So, if you can change your characters in five minutes or less, people are going to be impressed. So it is a way to impress managers and agents and producers that you can do short form of storytelling, and that translates to long form storytelling very easy. If you can pull off a Web Series they will believe that you can write anything, because it is the most difficult thing to do: to tell a well-crafted, beautiful, impeccable story in five minutes or less. Jake: So, you feel it is a way of demonstrating a higher level of craft or a level of compression? Karin: Yes, making a Web Series that costs very little money with minimal characters in very few locations is constraint. And so, you want to be able to let these constraints work for you as a writer. And with all those constraints on your back as a writer, and you still pull off great storytelling, people are going to be excited about your writing. It used to be it cost you $50,000 to make a television pilot. Now, you can get a camera, you can shoot it with your iPhone and spend $500 or $50 if you have actor friends and you know somebody willing to cook for you for the day or the weekend. Then you can make your own Web Series. Jake: The other really beautiful thing about being a Web Series writer is that you are your own producer. So you don’t have the limitations of someone telling you, “hey I don’t really like this character,” or “I don’t like the way this character is going.” You can push the envelope and you can write whatever you want. As everyone knows, when you are a writer, you have 50 people that give you notes. You have your producers, and you have the other producers and you have financial people and the actors come in and they give you notes. If you are the Web Series writer, you are going to be able to just make it yourself. So you have a better chance that your vision is going to get down and out to the world exactly as you thought. Jake: One of the other things that I think is exciting about Web Series Writing is that the way media is consumed is changing. Web Series is so darn clickable, you can send them an email and have it clicked in a link and they can decide if they like it or not. Would you say that is a benefit? And how are executives and agents and managers responding to Web Series now? Karin: Oh they are excited about it; everyone I talk to says, “please send me your work, please send me the actual work you’ve made.” It is really, getting much, much harder to get noticed as an unproduced writer because there are so many people making things already. So, how do we break in as people who are unknown? Well, you make your own work and you send it out and you show who you are, you show that your voice is special by making it. Clickable content. I mean, would you rather read a 30 page script to a 90 page script or would you rather watch just a five minute film? If you can send someone your story and it takes them five minutes to watch and you blow them away, you are going to get a phone call. Jake: Do you think that there is a prime length that Web Series writers should be targeting? Is it three minutes, is it five minutes, is it ten minutes, is it half an hour? Where should they be focusing? Karin: I would go shorter the better. The shorter it is the more likely someone is going to watch it. If you send a 60 minute digital pilot, if you can get them to watch it, amazing, great. But if you can send them a five minute one, they are going to click on it. And if you hook them in the first minute with characters, they are going to watch the other five minutes, which then you can continue and make episodes 2-8 or 2-12 and they are going to watch the additional episodes. I don’t know if it really matters whether it is five minutes or twelve minutes. Web Series are all over the place. But it is really about how fast can you tell a story and still keep character development? That is the real key in the craft of writing: can you tell a short story and keep character development? So, if you think of something like True Detective, you know how much time they have to develop those characters. Can you do that in a short amount of time? That is what people are looking for. So, if you look at one of the very first Web Series, The Guild and it is one episode now you can watch it-- Netflix took the entire first season and made it the first episode. So, if you want to know how it was originally broken down you want to watch the episodes on YouTube, because those are actually broken down as the original five minute episodes. And in The Guild, the very first episode is all about character; it is a vignette of who these people are. You’ve got the main character who is talking to her therapist on the phone about how she doesn’t play too much of this video game that she is addicted to. And while she is talking to her therapist, she is on the phone playing the game, also crossing out on a posted note how many hours she has played that week and just it is getting higher and higher and higher in how many hours she played. So her dominant trait is represented by the action of talking to her therapist about how she is going to quit playing while playing. And the other people are also very quick vignettes, you’ve got one who is the dad, you’ve got one who is a teenage boy and he is totally in love with women and he is talking about boobs. You’ve got a mom who plays so much she is ignoring her children, and then you’ve got another character who is missing and he has never not been online in this long. You have a group of people who are kind of like a family who are always on this game and you have one who is missing and they are worried about him. So, it is an online group of people who’ve never met and at the end of the episode the guy who is missing shows up at her house-- the main character’s house-- to tell her he loves her and so it goes from a group of people who’ve never met to real life. And that is your A to B in a very short amount of time, while doing character. And that is the goal for any kind of storytelling, whether it is Web Series or TV or features or you know everything, podcast, everything storytelling. So, if you can pull that off, you are gold. People will notice that you can write. That is the point of writing: can you show them you can write in something that is short enough that you can get them to watch? Jake: So what if you are an emerging writer, and you’ve never done any production before? For a lot of writers that is scary-- the thought of, “Oh my god I am going to have to do this myself!” So, how do you start? If one of my students says, “Okay today I want to write a Web Series. I’ve been writing feature films, or I’ve been writing TV Series, maybe I’ve been in one of The Writer’s Room Classes at the studio, I’ve learned how to work in a writer’s room.” When you think about, “Now I am going to make something that I can create myself,” how is that different, or how is that attainable? How do you boil that down for someone who has no production experience into something that they feel like they can do right now? Karin: To create a Web Series that is attainable and that is affordable, you need minimal actors and one or two locations.