(Since I am currently focused on producing non-fiction work, this post won’t concentrate on narrative series, but there are a few takeaways at the end of the post that could be helpful for scripted web series producers.)

We are still in the very beginning stages of this medium and we haven’t established a terminology that we can all agree on yet. So let’s work with what we’ve got. For the sake of this post we’ll use “the internet” to describe the network that can deliver any kind of content imaginable and “Web Series” as a series of videos designed with web browsers (desktop or mobile) as their primary viewing destination. Some of these web series will go on to be viewed through actual televisions via something like Apple TV or Roku but that’s not the environment they’re designed for.

A Web Series is not a Television Series

Over the past couple of years – particularly since YouTube started funding content – there have been a lot of big production companies entering the ecosystem with new web series. Most of these companies have a solid track record producing content for television and it’s easy to see how they landed YouTube backing.

I kept a close eye on these new channels and series and at first I was convinced they were going to change the YouTube ecosystem forever. This new content was slick and looked better than most of what you see on television. Honestly, I felt pretty outgunned. As a one-man crew with no-budget, there was simply no way I was going to be able to reach that level of quality on a weekly basis.

But them something interesting happened. Most of these channels and series flopped. Big Time.

Despite being super-slick and beautifully crafted, these new series just didn’t engage the audience. Even though the episodes were heavily promoted, they stalled out at a few thousand views. A few thousand views won’t cut it when you are getting millions from YouTube.

Some of these channels have faded out and a lot of them have taken a break and come back with new series and slightly different approaches. The videos are still very pretty, but they are much more focused on on-screen personalities. I think this is probably a good move. We’ll see if it works.

The big takeaway from this experiment is: Traditional television style production values don’t necessarily translate to the web series medium.

The Connection

When they’re done right, web series can create a sense of real connection and relationship between the on-camera personality and the audience. This connection works on an entirely different level than the connection between a television host and their audience.

One of the primary jobs of a web series director is to find ways to facilitate the audience/personality connection while at the same time communicating information in an entertaining way.

90% of Directing is Casting.

This is such an old saying that I can’t even find where it originally came from, but it’s pretty accurate. There’s only so much you can do if you’re not working with the right talent. Performers who are great in movies and television don’t necessarily have “the thing” that works so well for web series. I wish I could clearly define what “the thing” is, but I can’t.

It definitely includes a willingness to be painfully open and unguarded at times. It also involves extending the work beyond just videos and into things like engaging with the audience through responses to comments, blog posts and social media.

Finding the Format and Tone

Once the right talent in place, it’s time to create a format and tone for the series that feels like an extension of the hosts personality.

With Hilah Cooking, we figured out how to do this in front of the audience. If you take a look at the first few episodes, they are quite a bit different than what we do know. We have upgraded the technical side of things, but the biggest difference is in Hilah’s on-camera presence. We had worked together quite a bit on various short films and comedy sketches and in the early episodes Hilah is much more of a “character.” As we continued to produce episodes, we toned down certain elements and emphasized others. Also, as Hilah started to interact with the audience via comments and social media, she got much more comfortable being herself on camera.

Ultimately, the loyal viewers are not watching on a regular basis because of the jokes or the recipes. They’re watching to see Hilah. There is a connection there.

From a technical standpoint I wanted to keep things as simple as possible. We figured out 3 simple shots that we could re-use over and over and those were the only places we put the camera for the first two years.

I wanted it to feel like Hilah could potentially be setting up the camera and making the show herself.

Break the Fourth Wall and Keep it Broken

“Breaking the fourth wall” is a term used in the entertainment industry to describe when a performer breaks the illusion of the performance by acknowledging that they are fictional and that the audience is watching a play or movie. It can be as simple as a glance or wink directly to the camera or as blatant as the character addressing the audience directly Ferris Bueller style. Here’s a great video that shows what I’m talking about. (Also, pay attention to the effect of a character making eye contact directly with the audience!)

Once we decided what the aesthetic of the show was, I focused everything on reinforcing that. If the aesthetic was a girl in a kitchen making a cooking show and engaging directly with her audience – then the fourth wall was broken and needed to stay broken. There are lots of little things in the show that reinforce this, but probably the biggest one is that we made a conscious decision to always show the lavalier microphone. This is a tiny thing and probably not noticed by many people, but it’s a way of communicating that this is not a TV show and we’re not going to hide the wires or the mistakes.

If a mistake happens, chances are we will leave it in or tack it on at the end as a blooper. Hilah is not reading a script and there is a sense of unpredictability that is not present in a hosted television show. Anything could potentially happen and that’s one of the reasons people continue to watch.

For Hilah Cooking and Yoga With Adriene, the real work for me has been in creating a format that showcases and reinforces the talents personality and gives them room, freedom and comfort to do their thing on a consistent basis. Over time – based on audience feedback and our own aesthetic preferences – we’ve tweaked these formats and made subtle changes.

Now as we’re beginning to spin off new shows and create new formats, the idea of building and reinforcing a connection between the talent and the audience is a guiding factor in all our decisions. In fact, our first attempts at episodes of the travel show were way too “television.” We ended up scrapping a couple of them entirely and reworking the format of the show entirely.

Bonus Takeaway for Narrative Creators:

Even for narrative series, there are many ways to build a connection between the creators and talent and the audience. Rooster Teeth is a great example of this. They’ve used their flagship series (Red Vs. Blue) to build a passionate audience that is engaged with the people who work at Rooster Teeth. In addition to social media and podcasts, they create lots of content that basically consists of Rooster Teeth employees goofing around. Another great example is Kevin Smith, who used his fame as a director to launch a hugely successful podcast company.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on producing and directing for Web Series. Leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!

The post Thoughts on Directing For Web Series appeared first on Christopher Sharpe.

Since starting up Hilah Cooking, we’ve been very careful about keeping our production costs low. I am a firm believer in low-overhead and zero debt, so we try to keep our gear as minimal as possible.

We started out with a camcorder we had laying around and our only real upgrade was gear we won from YouTube. But when we lined up the deal to do Hilah’s Texas Kitchen, I knew it was time to (hopefully wisely) invest in a little more gear. This is still a micro-budget project, but we needed a little more firepower. I would be a one-person crew, and we would be shooting in awkward situations with very tight time frames.

My goal was to put together a run-and-gun travel video kit that would be easy to transport and allow me to shoot really fast whenever the opportunities presented themselves. This is the package I put together and it’s worked really well for me so far.

LowePro X200 Rolling Camera Bag

I wanted something that could hold safely transport all of our gear and was easy to use in the field. This bag has been incredible. I’ve always been devoted to Pelican cases in the past, but I ended up with a bunch of cases holding individual pieces of gear. This case let me jam everything I needed into one bag with wheels. It even has a kickstand so if you’re on location you can set it up at a tilt and easily access whatever you need. Even though I’ve only had it since the beginning of the year, it’s seen some serious miles and been in some rough situations. It’s still in great shape and has done an awesome job of protecting the gear inside.

Canon XF100 Camcorder

Buying a small sensor camcorder in this new age of DSLR video seems very old fashioned, but I needed something for run-and-gun shooting. The XF100 has been great. It’s small, has XLR inputs and shoots great images (once you take the time to figure out the picture profiles). I use this primarily for the interviews where we are following people around kitchens or other locations. The real unexpected joy of this camera has been the 4:2:2 50Mbps Codec. In post this footage feels very thick (in a good way). You can do a lot of color correction without the image ever breaking down. My only real complaint with this camera is that it doesn’t have dedicated focus and zoom rings. Instead, they’re combined into one ring and there is a switch to toggle it back and forth.

Rotolight LED Light

This is a little round light that you can mount via hot shoe or directly onto a shotgun mic. The design is kind of weird and clunky but it’s really come in handy in a couple of dark locations. It’s not very powerful, but it’s enough to add a little light to your subjects. (TIP: If you’re shooting in a smoky BBQ pit, this is not going to be enough light.)

Sennheiser Wireless Lav System

For almost three years, I very proudly used only a $20 wired lavalier mic. We upgraded to this Sennheiser wireless kit a few months ago. It was the first time we actually bought new gear. This is pretty expensive, so it was a big deal. Thankfully, switching to this wireless kit has been absolutely life changing. I can’t recommend it highly enough. In fact, when we were commissioned to produce a series of kids cooking videos, I bought a second kit so I could mic both people. For most of our travel shoots, we just leave Hilah miked up and start rolling when a good situation presents itself.

Rode NTG1 Shotgun Mic

I use this to record a second channel when I’m shooting with the XF100. I just turn it on and try to make sure the levels don’t go too hot. For our first batch of shoots we only had one wireless mic so I relied on this to get the vocals for whoever Hilah was talking to. I’ve been happy with it so far but haven’t had time to mix the sound on these videos yet.

Canon 60D

This is the same camera we’ve been using for quite awhile. I wasn’t crazy about shooting video on it at first, but I realized on our first trip that I’ve really fallen in love with this camera. I thought I would primarily use the XF100 but if it was a shot that didn’t require tricky focus pulls, I kept coming back to the 60D.

There are some other odds and ends packed into the case – including a MacBook Air – so this really gave me a complete production kit in a rolling case. Not pictured here are a couple of Manfrotto tripods, but other than that all the gear we used to make the travel show is in the photo above and it’s worked out great. The only things I’ll definitely be adding before our next trip are some ND and Polarizing filters.

Now that I’ve geeked out about all of this gear, I’m excited to get back on the road and back to shooting!

NOTE: I want to thank Mark Shea at Overlander.tv for his helpful posts on lightweight travel gear.

I’d love to hear what YOU are using to make your videos. Also, am I missing out on anything obvious pieces of gear that would increase my either production quality or overall quality of life? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Travel Video Gear: Putting Together a Run-and-Gun Travel Video Kit appeared first on Christopher Sharpe.

I don’t have a big dramatic “Take This Job and Shove It” story to tell. I’m one of the lucky few who actually liked their day job. I had great supervisors, awesome people to work with, plenty of freedom to experiment, a decent salary and killer benefits. To top it all off, this was a state job which means I would have had to really screw up to ever get fired.

nce you get a job like this, you tend to stick around until retirement… if you’re smart anyway.

But I am a restless entrepreneurial spirit. As soon as I landed solid full-time employment, I immediately began working on side projects. Some of them brought in some decent money. Some of them were total failures. All of them were valuable learning experiences.

Hilah Cooking was the most fun of these projects to work on, even though it lost a significant amount of money for the first three years. There is no way I could estimate the amount of hours we invested. We have produced so much content that you could watch the Hilah Cooking YouTube channel for 24 hours straight and never see the same episode twice. I’m currently applying all that I’ve learned to Yoga With Adriene which is growing at more than double the rate that Hilah Cooking did.

Now that we’ve built an audience and established ourselves as creators who produce content on a reliable basis, we’ve been offered the opportunity to produce work for other companies. In the past we always turned down these offers because we intentionally wanted to grow the brand slowly. But late last year, we started to say yes to a few opportunities that seemed financially solid and creatively interesting. One of those is the upcoming travel show.

We went into production in January. By February, I had used up all my accrued vacation and personal time traveling around Texas shooting the project.

As we got back and started to edit it was clear that we were falling behind schedule and for the first time I was the bottleneck in the production flow.

Between the internet video projects and my day job, I was exhausted. It felt like I was living two separate lives but not giving either one of them 100% of what I had to offer. So… even though we’re currently walking a financial tight rope, I decided to bite the bullet and go all-in.

Two weeks ago I turned in my resignation. Yesterday I walked out the door.

It felt like jumping off a cliff, even though I have no doubt that it was the right decision. Nothing has captured my imagination like internet video. I’ve only scratched the surface. There are so many things I want to try in this medium and I really feel like this NOW the time to do it.

I want to sincerely thank everybody who has supported me during this journey and thanks to everybody who watches Hilah Cooking and Yoga With Adriene. This would all be impossible without you.

Let’s put the pedal to the floor and see what happens.

The post Quitting Time appeared first on Christopher Sharpe.

Some of the most popular episodes of Hilah Cooking have been our field trip episodes where we go meet up with local farmers, BBQ experts and other interesting characters. Last year we started pitching the idea of a travel show to some of the new YouTube networks. Nothing came of it until our recent trip to the Tastemade Studios. Now, I’m happy to report that we are moving full-speed ahead on Hilah’s Texas Kitchen: a new travel/eating/cooking show that will launch next month. This is an exciting opportunity to not only build on the Hilah Cooking brand but to stretch ourselves creatively.

When we brainstormed the project, I thought it would be easier than it has turned out to be. However, the obstacles that we’ve run into have actually shaped the direction and format of the show in a way that is going to make the finished project even stronger.

We are still in the middle of this project, but I want to share a few things I learned when we were out on our first travel shoot in Port Aransas, Texas.

Have Back-Up Plans for Your Back Up Plans

I really underestimated how tough it would be to line up interviews with restaurants and chefs. Even though we have a fairly popular YouTube channel and our videos are watched over 25,000 times a day, it’s still an internet show. That means your phone calls do not get returned as often as they do if you’re a TV show. We started our trip in Port Aransas on the Texas coast. Despite countless phone calls and emails, all of our interviews were falling through. Port Aransas is a beach town and we were there during off season. By lunchtime on the first day, we had nothing and it felt like the trip was going to be an absolute failure. We could have just packed it up and went home but instead we just started going to restaurants and coffee shops and talking to anybody who would talk to us. By the third day we had shot in several restaurants and conducted some really great interviews. We got the really killer interview about two hours before we had to leave town to make it to our next destination.

You Can Never Have Enough B-Roll

In case you’re wondering, B-Roll is all the alternate footage: scenic shots, exteriors of buildings, close-ups, basically all of the footage without your main talent on camera. Since we were a two-person operation this meant I quickly realized I had to be shooting pretty much all the time. I shot everything and I still wish I had more. If you’re making a travel show and your interviews are falling through, just shoot some intros and outros with your talent, get a ton of B-Roll and have them do a voice over later. Most of the big television travel shows have a whole team that goes to each location ahead of time and does a full shoot without the talent, then the talent comes in later with the main crew. Think about this the next time you watch No Reservations.

Be Prepared to Roll With The Punches

We arrived in Port Aransas just in time for a cold snap. We’d visited at the same time last year and we wore shorts and drank beer on the beach. However, this year it was freezing and windy. The sky was pure white, which is nightmarish when you’re trying to get good shots of your talent. I had a very clear vision for this episode and it did not involve freezing weather.Our only choice was to make the cold, deserted setting part of the show. We had to re-think the whole thing and it made the episode better and funnier.

Don’t Try To Operate Two Cameras at Once

I don’t claim to be an awesome shooter. When we have the budget I hire somebody, but for this project we were a crew of 2. I was behind the camera(s) and Hilah was of course in front of them. I had the brilliant idea of trying to run two cameras myself, but in hindsight, I think it was a mistake. I ended up with two decent shots of everything instead of one awesome shot of everything. Concentrate on the interviews separately and make sure you get great audio. Then get all the B-roll humanly possible.

All of this may sound like the project has been a bummer, but it’s actually been one of the most exciting things I’ve worked on since we started Hilah Cooking. The obstacles we ran into have actually helped shape the show into something much better than when we first started out. I’m excited to get this show online for everybody to see. It’s fun, funny and you’ll learn a lot of things you probably didn’t know about Texas food.

Stay tuned for Hilah’s Texas Kitchen – coming next month!

One of the many perks of making a Travel Show about food:

The post Making a Travel Show is Harder Than It Looks appeared first on Christopher Sharpe.

In addition to cranking out episodes for my two web series, last year I found myself increasingly interested in how to use YouTube for small business marketing. I wanted to do a small scale experiment to see what might work. I immediately thought of my friend Laurel, a personal stylist here in Austin Texas. I’ve known Laurel for awhile, she’s made a few guest appearances on Hilah Cooking and we even did one of the Learn To Cook photo shoots in her kitchen. She was the perfect guinea pig for my YouTube marketing experiment.

Laurel’s personal styling business actually grew out of Trophy Boutique, her fashion blog. She’s awesome at what she does and has tons of very satisfied clients, so word of mouth was already working well for her. Her blog already did a great job of explaining her services and offering photographic proof that she knew what she was doing as far as fashion. I wanted to build on this with a small no-budget video campaign.

My goal with the videos was to:

1. Give potential customers a better sense of Laurel’s personality. Video is perfect for this. I wanted viewers to get a glimpse of Laurel’s kind, funny and cool personality and let them know that they could not only feel comfortable hiring her, but that they would have a good time working with her.
2. Clarify what her services are and what all is involved. Laurel offers several different styling services so we devoted one video specifically to what you can expect when you hire her.
3. Help her rank for the term “Austin Personal Stylist” in YouTube search. She already ranked well for this in Google, but why not rank well for it in YouTube as well.

We shot the videos in about 6 hours. It was a very simple, casual shoot. I used my Canon 60D and occasionally a tripod. We shot at a dress shop and at her house. It was a very fun and casual shoot. I edited the videos in Final Cut Pro X and used CrumplePop’s Carousel for some light leaks and Instagram-y color effects. Laurel is also very active on Instagram and I wanted the videos to convey some of the look that people were used to seeing in her photos.

The videos were released to very positive feedback. They’ve brought in quite a few new customers directly and work as a great tool for explaining her business to potential customers who might still be on the fence. She’s also now ranked #1 in Google and YouTube!

The initial plan was to do three videos, with the third comprised mostly of customer testimonials. But our schedules both got insanely busy and we haven’t been able to schedule that shoot. It’s still something I’d like to do and I think it would round out this video campaign nicely.

I recently checked in with Laurel to see how the videos were doing and this is what she had to say:

Interview With Laurel Kinney (Trophy Boutique)

It’s been a few months since we launched your videos. How do you feel about them now?

Laurel: I am 100% happy with these videos (if I don’t concentrate too hard on my verbal ticks:)). Not only have they improved my site’s SEO, but they have made my business marketing more well-rounded. I have more to offer my prospective clients as to what I do, and they can get a better sense of who I am and what my business is all about than they can from just reading my blog/site info. It adds a whole other dimension!

What kind of feedback have you gotten from friends and clients?

Laurel: Everyone loves them and say they feel like ME. They are the perfect length–no one stops them early out of boredom. I think people who didn’t really get what I do before understand it all better now.

Have you landed any clients as a direct result of the videos? How have they impacted your business? Any other cool results/benefits of having the videos out there?

Laurel: Well, aside from the SEO helping my business get seen more on google searches, when they first came out I got a lot of bites. People were like: Oh hey! That’s what she does! I totally need that! What I love about them long-term is that whenever I am approaching a business contact or anyone who I’m first introducing myself and my business to for the first time, I can send them the videos as an introduction – it’s much more engaging than just typing out what I do, and I think it gets the point across much better. They can hear about my business while also seeing what I do, and learning about who I am (which is how most people decide they want to work with me). The videos hit all angles!

What recommendations would you have for other small businesses thinking about adding internet videos to their marketing mix?

Laurel: I recommend going for it! I think it’s super helpful for so many reasons, and makes sense. It’s not overly difficult to tell your story to a camera, because you are just talking about what you’re already an expert in. I would recommend having someone who is a pro at production/editing help you with them, because it’s time-consuming to learn enough to make them look sharp if you don’t know how to do it, and you want them to look professional or else it might undermine your message.

The post YouTube for Small Business: Trophy Boutique Case Study appeared first on Christopher Sharpe.