A Web Series Journey - part 2.5

A Web Series Journey — part 2.5

This thing all things devours; Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats mountain down.

This was one of the riddles that Gollum spoke to Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. It struck a chord with me even at the age of eleven when I first read the book. It’s power and finality impressed me even though I didn’t quite understand how relevant it is to everything.

Did you notice anything about the publish dates between parts 1 and 2 of this series? Quite a lot of time went by between them. When you’re not on a regular production schedule there are other priorities. This web series is a personal project. I didn’t have a real deadline and didn’t want to give myself one. When you can’t pay your actors and crew their regular rates you are at the mercy of availability. And sometimes not only theirs but yours as well.

Family should always take priority. Second might be a regular paying job, because you have to help provide for said family. House work and laundry, that usually gets bumped. So in that time you can scrape by, you want to use that time well. Scheduling becomes key. Where you are in your life is an issue. Whether you are out of school scraping by and have lots of time but no money, or an older professional that’s paid well but have no time. It’s still all about scheduling.

After going into preproduction quite quickly I broke out the shooting over several weekends. And on that weekend I used one day for prep and one day for shooting. This is not always cost effective. It was for me as I was able to get everything I needed and in order before filming.

The service that I found really helpful for scheduling that I relied on as a mini production studio was Studio Binder. It’s an online program that I used for scheduling dates, script breakdowns, creating call sheets, organizing contacts and a few others. It helped tremendously. You do pay monthly and you have to be sure it’s useful to you as there are other options.

The one thing I haven’t touched on is Insurance. I capitalized that because it really should be capitalized. Film Emporium based in New York is one of the industry leaders for small indie films and productions. They have also been around for a while as they were the insurance company I used for my short film. That was quite a while ago. Oh say twenty five years. They have a policy that lasts for about 60 days. If you can fit all of your production days in this window then it’s a good deal.

Film Permits is another capitalized film asset. You may or may not need a permit depending on where you are filming. In LA, you always need a permit. It depends on whether you’re going to get caught without one. I had some exterior shots that required police detectives with fake guns so a permit was absolutely required. Film LA is the permit office and that is a whole other article but I’ll provide a link below.

After production wrapped over the summer I gave all the dailies over to my editor Emily Streetz. She was able to get started right away but she too had a day job and so had to balance work with a passion project. Not to mention she became a mom this October, so preparing for a new family was her priority.

My current show that I’m the visual effects supervisor on, also took off with a crazy tsunami episode that took most of my focus. And I was okay with all of that. I was able to let my editor work at her own pace and be able to focus on it and revise as necessary. It’s not the ideal situation but something that I was willing to accept and take my time with it. Hollywood is littered with projects that have taken many years to complete. The Irishmen came out of development in 2014 with principle photography starting in 2017. And it was just released.

So I’m in the final throws of post production and getting ready for a release of the first two episodes. After the first two episodes and some behind the scenes, the journey will start all over again. This time with a crowd funding push to get the next six going.

And Bilbo’s answer to the riddle, Time.