Exploring the parameters of story in a web series: “The 3 Bits” Case Study Pt 1
by The 3 Bits on February 28, 2013 in Writing
It’s not like when we were kids we dreamed we’d grow-up some day and have our very own web series. Margaret wanted to be Mowgli. Max wanted to be a majorette. (No, really.) But here we are, and you know what? We really like making The 3 Bits.
We met in Boston a few years ago. Margaret was a young photographer; Max was working on a PhD in literature at Harvard. Before long, Max dropped out of his program and we opened a photo studio together. Our intention was to start a career in film on the side. Like you do. We took a month off and wrote a feature-length movie, sure that someone would want to make it. Because it is bad-ass.
That screenplay has been stuffed under a mattress for two years now. It took us almost that long to realize that, having zero formal training and even less in the way of connections, we were not going to sell the script. We could either go to film school or start making movies ourselves. We chose the latter. We read as much Christine Vachon as we could get our hands on and drank from the fountain of Ted Hope. And then we had an idea for a film that we thought was simple and executable: a story about two young gay guys who try to get their friends to join them for an orgy.
As we started to move our little script (30 pages) toward production, we decided not to make a short film intended for festivals. Why? Everyone seemed to know that:
- Festivals are size-queens: they only want films about 8 minutes long;
- Taking a short to a festival involves all sorts of prohibitive costs;
- The chances of a short film finding its way from a festival to a large audience, well, they aren’t good.
The last point was the real kicker. We came to understand that making a show for the web would allow us to tell the stories we wanted to tell for as long as we had the resources to tell them, to distribute them at very little cost, and to find an audience for them anywhere in the world.
Once we decided to make our short film script into a web series, we had a little hiccup that turned us on to something really unique. Max likes jokes. Margaret is serious. Well, that’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea. It’s one thing to write a funny short film. It’s quite another to write an entire season, or multiple seasons, of snappy, punched-up comedy. Margaret got nervous. She was like, “I DON’T WANT TO WRITE AN ENDLESS SITCOM.” And Max was like, “WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME.”
So we decided to give our main character, Henry, two siblings, Roman and Madison. And instead of writing them all into his story, we gave them their own shows. One is a fast-paced, raunchy gay comedy. Another is a sexy, knife-fighting, lesbian drama. The other is a mommy blog on crack. And this is where we realized that we’d stumbled onto something special.
Way back in the 90s, you could only watch a TV show when it was on the air. Now people can watch shows in whatever order they like. But TV shows still unroll from pilot to finale. We did something unusual: we made a world out of three shows that unroll side by side. Viewers can choose how to experience this world. If someone wants to watch Henry’s episodes and not Madison’s, that’s cool. But if they want a panoramic view of the Bits family, they can watch all three. That freedom is part of the fun, and it’s something the internet does better than TV.
Episode 1 of Henry Bits is available at the3bits.com. A trailer for Roman Bits is on its way next week. Expect more on this blog about the making, funding, and marketing of the show in coming weeks.