I’ve been wanting to write a series of how-to tips based on our experience of making, B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye, so we started reminiscing about what we wish we’d known before we’d started making our website. Having had the pleasure of connecting with many other web series producers online, I was curious, and asked them the same question, “What do you wish you’d known before you started making your web series?”
Below are the answers, along with a sampling of the work of the quoted web-creators, but don't forget to read the full article which offers some great info.
1. “Sometimes, angry people are just hungry.”
Rosemary Rowe and Renee Olbert, Co-Creators of Seeking Simone
2. “Don’t be afraid to ask for advice, send emails, support other’s projects; you’d be surprised how many others out there are in the same boat as you and appreciate any advice or support you can give in return.”
Regan Latimer, Creator of B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye
3. “I would have prepared by taking vitamins, going to the gym, getting an MBA and learning how to talk in PR.”
Susan Miller, Executive Producer and Writer of Anyone But Me
4. “I now know… to line-up back-ups for my back-ups.”
David Nett, Creator and Executive Producer of GOLD
5. “I wish I would’ve known how to PROMOTE the show before we started making it.”
Robb Padgett, Creator of Life From The Inside
6. “[I] thought I’d have a finished product ready in two months. Oh, was this the underestimate of a lifetime.”
Justin Marchert, Creator of Big Bother
This is the second part of my interview with Mouthwash writer and all around web creator Muffin MacGuffin. You can find the first part here.
Q.
What are your goals? Do you plan a writing career? In Hollywood? For the web? Film? TV?
A.
a. I don’t want to do anything but write television. I love movies, and I’d love to write them, but I want to make a career of TV. It would be great to get to write on any television show, I’m actually really getting excited about a lot of webseries, especially the ones on The WB site(Ed's note: The WB is a geoblocked site). I spoke to someone who writes a webseries and is working on a network series now, and she told me how pleasurable the amount of creative control one gets on the web can be. There are just a lot of cool opportunities right now for long-form serial writers, and I plan on taking advantage of whatever’s available to me.
Q.
What do you like to watch and read? What kinds of entertainment do you consume on the web?
A.
a. I watch a lot of TV. In the average week, I may watch as much as eighteen hours of first-run television, and a lot more old series I’m trying to catch up on. TV shows I watch include 30 Rock, The New Adventures Old Christine, Brothers & Sisters and Sons of Anarchy.
b. Recently, I’ve been reading pretty much nothing but books about How to Write for Television – there are quite a few good ones. I also read a lot of books about Hollywood history, especially the history of screenwriters. I’ll get past this soon and start expanding my literary interests some day, probably.
c. Online, I watch a few webseries, but I’m always a little behind the curve on those shows. Whenever possible, I subscribe to them on iTunes and watch them on my iPod. Some of them are The Guild, Break a Leg, and Joni & Susanna. I also read a lot of blogs (mostly screenwriting ones), and the Onion and the AV Club. IMDb also links every day to interesting articles and blogs.
Q.
Do you have any prediction for the future of screen based entertainment? How is the web drama series going to change film and TV? Where do you think we’re going to end up?
A.
a. Hoo boy. I’m almost definitely wrong here, but I think we’re going to keep getting better at making smaller-screen entertainments more small-screen specific. Stuff like lonelygirl and Quarterlife did a great job of establishing that web content should be web-specific, not just TV or movies cut into pieces. A lot of people have been trying to make television and film smaller in order to compete with web content, but that strikes me as the wrong way to go. It’s like the early days in film, when movies (especially early talkies) more closely resembled filmed plays (and often were). As the medium got more sophisticated, we learned how to do things on stage that just couldn’t be accomplished with film, and did things on film that couldn’t be done onstage. Movie in theaters may not make the kind of money they make today, or made a decade ago, but it would be worthwhile to make them bigger, maybe even longer – establish them as things you just couldn’t watch on your computer screen and get the same experience. Series on television can establish themselves as being somewhere where we can tell longer stories than film and in larger chunks than on the web. They should all stop trying to imitate each other, and experiment more with the unique challenges of the respective media.
b. I’m also fascinated by cross-platform material, something Lost does really well, and is getting picked up more. It gives creative people the opportunity to find out where their characters and stories can go when put into different media. This is something you’re doing some pretty cool stuff with in Story2.OH. We can see how these characters would behave on facebook, which is very cool. I get into character blogs on The Office and How I Met Your Mother. It’s a little bit of a safer way to see what can be done with, say, some sitcom characters. Scrubs and The Office are two shows that tell web stories with their characters originally created for television. They do a great job, actually, of developing some characters that don’t see enough airtime otherwise.
Q.
Of all the things you’ve created for the web, what’s your favourite. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A.
a. I love that you spell “favorite” that way. I forget how many important differences there are between your culture and mine.
b. My first series, Six Months, is still very close to my heart. There was so much about it that was just stupid beginner mistakes, but it was thrilling to have this thing on my hands and say “I did this. I cowrote it and codirected it and here it is.” But yeah, it’s pretty bad. My most lasting internet thingy, though, is my blog, which I started as a fictionalized telling of the making of Six Months, but has since become just an accounting of the stuff I’m working on, and occasionally long fictional arcs about my life. It’s nice to get to write something and not have to worry about what I’ll need to change for collaboration’s sake.
Q.
By the way, what’s with the name? How long have you been using Muffin MacGuffin? Would you care to share another handle with us?
A.
a. “Muffin” is a nickname I got at summer camp that I stuck with through college, and what is more euphonious (and cinematic) than Muffin MacGuffin?
b. I was born “Guffinowitz,” but changed it to come across less Jewish. No, honestly, my name’s Harry Genty Waksberg. Two relatives are mentioned on wikipedia, but none of us has our own page yet. I’d consider this a race.
c. Thanks so much for this. I don’t know if you’d be comfortable putting this in the interview, but getting interviewed by you is pretty exhilarating. Your work on the web has been pretty influential for me.
Muffin MacGuffin says that younger kids younger were way ahead of him when he first started creating stuff for the web. Muffin, writer of Mouthwash and a lot more online content, is currently a senior at Tufts University. So what does that make him? 20? 21? 22, if he's a dunce which he sure isn't. Yet he refers to younger siblings who get the web "in a way that people my age don't get." I like that. A lot. Because it puts Muffin and me on equal footing. As does the title he gave this interview.
I mentioned Mr MacGuffin once before in this space when I was first alerted to Mouthwash by my niece, the Tufts student. She loved Mouthwash and I immediately saw why. It's very funny; a pretty impressive piece of work -- more so when you realize that it's being turned out by university students.
Thanks to a little online stalking action, I discovered that Mouthwash isn't even Muffin's first web series. He wrote Six Months along with Miles Donovan. And there are a bunch of other videos by MacGuffin on the Six Month's YouTube channel (many featuring Miles and Muffin). Rounding out his online oeuvre are his blog, his other blog, the very weird Fictionalized Memoir site and Twitter feed Oh yeah, he's also writing a movie called Morgan Taylor's Suicide.
I wanted to know a little more about Muffin MacGuffin so I shot him over a bunch of questions. Here's the first half of our interview. Part Two is here.
Q.
You are a university student I believe, but also very prolific when it comes to creating web content. You’ve been writing Mouthwash, a web series for Tufts TV, and I also noticed that you have a YouTube channel called Six Months and I believe that you are working on a film. How are your grades? What are you studying? What year are you in? How does the university feel about what you’re doing?
A.
a. My grades are cool. I don’t have a very active social life.
b. I’m a women’s studies major and a film studies minor, and I’m writing scripts for my senior theses for both, which I hope is okay by my school because I am really getting into them right now.
Q.
Women's studies? Seriously?
A.
Yeah. I took a women's studies course freshman year and it changed the way I was thinking. I definitely was not a misogynist or anything, but it shifted my thinking into a completely different paradigm that colored (you might say: coloured) the way I was learning in all my other classes. What else could I ask of a major, you know? I'm carrying this with me into my writing. Honestly, I think plenty of screenwriters could stand to take a few women's studies courses.
Q.
How did Mouthwash come about?
A.
Mouthwash wasn't my idea, actually. I was at a meeting of TUTV (Tufts University Television), and Eric Nichols pitched the series. I passed him a note, like in middle school, asking "Could I write your show?" And that's how it started. With me, anyway. Eric had created the characters and I think had an idea of the direction he wanted to take the show. It was up to me to help bring his vision to the page, and also create work that was personal for me and I could be proud of.
Q.
How long have you been creating stuff for the web? Did you do it before getting to Tufts? Will the movie you’re currently working on be released on the web? Will there be more Mouthwash after the film is finished?
A.
a. I’ve been creating stuff that makes its way online for a few years now, but I’ve only been making web-specific content for the past couple years. In high school, my friends and I all had siblings two years younger than we, and they were up on web content long before I ever was. I think it was just ingrained in them in a way that people my age don’t get. I had to work on it. Originally, I produced an eighteen minute show that I had to splice up into pieces to put onto youtube. Who wants to watch that? You know?
b. I actually don’t know what the plan is for this movie. At this point, it’s kind of a monumental undertaking; we’re just trying to get it all shot and edited before we can really plan on any distribution method. We’re going to be making some web-only content about the movie, though. More on that soon?
c. I think that we’re considering Mouthwash put to bed right now. We shot a little more material that could be considered canonical, and maybe we’ll release it some day, but for now I wouldn’t expect us to reunite the cast and also get Robert Deniro for a Christmas special. Okay, that would actually be awesome.
Q.
Talk about the process from concept to the web. Do you write outlines for the episodes? How many script drafts? Who else reads the scripts? Is there any approval process, anyone giving notes? What’s the shooting schedule like -- how long do you shoot/episode? How long does the edit take and are you involved in that process? How many people are on the crew? Is your team entirely made up of students?
A.
a. We had a few arc ideas for the season (I’m referring here to the second season; the first one was pretty slapdash) that we toyed with, and then I went ahead and started scripting. I was also informed that one of the actors would have access to a house on Cape Cod with a boat, so I should write an episode that included these things (the boat never materialized, and I hear everyone had a great time shooting out there). I started writing the episodes in chronological order one at a time, and then I’d shoot them to the directors, who would circulate them among actors. The actors would give the directors notes, the directors would decide what to change, and send me those details, and then I’d rewrite. In general, I didn’t do more than two drafts per episode, but a couple of times we’d end up scrapping an entire storyline (Jess almost ran for class president) and I’d have to combine episodes or rewrite bits or so on. I was done with writing the whole season by about the end of October, which meant I could get started on the movie.
b. We shot a bunch of bits at once, so I don’t know that I could figure out how long an individual episode would take. Depending on how far ahead of shooting we were scripted, we would shoot all the scenes that took place in a single location in the same afternoon. The actors would just mostly change shirts between episodes. I’m sure diligent viewers notice that hair lengths don’t make sense at all, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
c. I’m not involved in editing, but it usually takes a couple of days at most. We did so much of it while we were also shooting, we mostly had things edited while we were shooting the episode after next.
d. Our crew usually had about a half-dozen people at most. One person would operate camera (this was often also Eric, who was directing), one person would be boom operator (this was sometimes me), and someone to help Eric set up lights (this was often Eric, too). So it could be as few as three people, and we were all students. Our school’s TV station, TUTV, did a great job of training people, and we would often let our show be practice for students who wanted to someday shoot their own.
Q.
How many people have been watching Mouthwash? Do you get an audience outside the university community? You must see members of your audience on campus every day, do they offer up story and character ideas and how do you respond? Has viewer response effected your process in anyway?
A.
a. According to youtube, we have almost a thousand viewers, though it varies pretty wildly from one episode to the next, I don’t know how many people are actually watching the whole thing. I haven’t heard of people outside of the university community watching it other than my parents, and they came to it pretty late. I think to some degree the show appeals directly to students in a way that it might not to people outside of the school. I’d like to say we captured the zeitgeist, but I’m not sure how to spell it.
b. I have occasionally gotten feedback from people around campus, and it’s largely positive. I don’t make a lot of appearances around school or on the show, so I don’t get many chances to interact with our viewers. I didn’t get a lot of ideas from audience members, which is a shame, but we didn’t have a very long production schedule. If we were running the show for longer, I’d love to include people’s stories on it. The college hook-up culture has created some really funny situations. I used a few of my own for the characters.
c. We got some negative comments on youtube which affected my creative process in the sense of writing the show required a lot more ice cream. You can see this in the show actually. Whenever a character mentions ice cream, it is because I was drowning my sorrows with some chocolate chip cookie dough.
