Comedy Web Series about the Holidays and Bad Customer Service
December 3, 2010NOTE: this post is 593 words long and contains two videos, each of which are around six minutes. Doing some math, I would say, this one's gonna take you a good 15 - 17 minutes. You got that? But again, 12 of those minutes are slack-jawed video watching.
As as followup to my last post; the web series I have been working on with Scotty Iseri premiered this past Wednesday. It is a Christmas Carol spoof about bad customer service. I am very proud of what we did here and while I am bummed that it's kept me from putting out the next Not About Wine episode, I sincerely hope I can continue doing this kind of work.
There's a lot to be said here about doing creative work that mostly uses the web for its distribution. In some ways, what we are doing here is a very traditional video project - episodic, no audience interaction, linear - and in this way, it may not be that successful. There's a lot of episodic, non-interactive, linear video out there - on the web and otherwise - and ours is no better than what's already out there. In fact, in many ways, it is much worse. You have to watch it here, on the web, for one.
Unless of course you are super-fancy and have an Apple TV
But what was so exciting about working on this project with Scotty in the coffee and beer heaven that is Portland, OR is that even while making something fairly traditional, we were doing it in extremely untraditional ways --
- All of it was shot on prosumer XSLR cameras - cameras you can reasonably buy.
- Our budget was very low for what our product looks like.
- We relied on a network of people from the net to help write, promote, and act in the movie; not people from the film and television industry.
- The project was funded entirely by Zendesk, the help desk software company that I work for. No production company, just the advertiser. This is either awesome or horrible depending on your point of view. I think it is in between.
-- and it was these ways that made me feel like we will be making more web-native projects soon. Since we aren't relying on traditional processes, we don't need to make a traditional product.
A Holiday Special
But for now we are tackling the most traditional of structures: the holiday special. We wrote this story to be funny and to satisfy two themes:
- Customer Service - this was the "brand message" that Zendesk wanted the entertainment to carry.
- Holiday stories - we were releasing it in December. Seemed to make sense to take advantage of that.
We are spoofing both of them. The basic idea is that there is this Scrooge like character who has created all the bad customer service experiences we all hate -- hold music, phone trees, hipsters who work at coffee shops. In this story, he is forced to experience at an absurd level all the bad customer service he spawned. This drives him to drink heavily.
I play this character. DO NOT WORRY - I went to one year of acting school so everything will be FINE.
Below are episode one and two of the series. WATCH THEM. And then go to the Merry Holidays, Please Hold page to sign up for further episode notifications. That way you won't miss the part where I grab somebody's boob and get punched in the face.
OH AND ALSO: we have a thing where you can win an xbox 360 with Kinect as well as some Threadless t-shirts.
Episode 1: The Fred Talks
Episode 2: The Evil Three
Reader Comments (5)
I really like this so far - it has wit and humor above and beyond run-of-the-mill webbery. And you are a commanding, persuasive actor with impeccable timing. Congrats to you and your writing team for making something wikkid schmaht. As the kids say, "I LOL'd! for reallz."
(Disclaimer: I don't know what "LOL" means, but I am assuming of course that it is an acronym for "lots of lesbians.")
Did that guy say "Choke on a dick and die, Matt"?
You bet he did. BUT: at least I get a dick before I die.
BTW: That music is totally derivative of Throw Me The Statue's "Lolita"
What can I say: we steal from the Best. The songwriter is from Portland. Not that far from ol' Baskerville hill records...