Comedy series to blaze trail of interactivity
Colleen Nystedt, president and CEO of website www.movieset.com, has some digital ideas to help the audience get involved in the production process.
Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
The shifting entertainment-media landscape will tilt again April 1 when the Canada Media Fund becomes the new gatekeeper of federal funds for Canadian television producers.
Anyone looking for federal government money for their projects will need to think digital and make their products for at least two platforms.
No one knows what the guidelines are, and won’t until shortly before the April 1 CMF launch, but Vancouver producer J.B. Sugar and funding body BC Film are ahead of the game. Sugar, using a small package of seed money from BC Film’s new convergent media development fund, has joined Vancouver-based online company Movieset.com, and with Kids in the Hall alumni Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald, to develop a pilot for what they hope will be a half-hour comedy series.
Big in the ’80s, written by and starring Foley and McDonald, is a comedy about the reluctant reunion of a 25-year-old synth-pop glam band. Sugar’s company No Equal Entertainment hopes to produce the pilot and series, and Movieset.com will provide all the online elements in the preproduction and production stages. Behind-the-scenes videos will show Foley and McDonald brainstorming during writing sessions. There will be social media networking, and offbeat contests to involve viewers.
According to Colleen Nystedt, founder and CEO of Movieset.com,audience involvement schemes include inviting viewers to write songs that suit the fictitious band on the show, and holding a big-hair contest in which viewers can make themselves up to look like a 1980s glam-band member.
This is Movieset.com’s first venture into TV. Since it was launched in late 2008, the website has been involved exclusively with feature films. The two areas are very different, and television requires a new strategy.
Traditional studio marketing for a feature film is usually concentrated into a short period, the few weeks before a film’s theatrical release and its first week in theatres. Working with a movie producer, Movieset.com begins that process earlier with social networking and behind-the-scenes videos of the filmmaking process.
With TV, which is episodic, the audience needs to be engaged as each episode goes to air.
“With feature films, you have distinct stages: development, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution,” said Nystedt. “With TV, it’s prep, shoot, prep, shoot. What we’re doing is innovating the system we already have in place for motion pictures. It will give the audience the opportunity to watch the TV program while it’s being made, and to have a level of dialogue and interactivity with that project while it’s going through production.”
CMF president and CEO Valerie Creighton declined to comment for this article because the CMF is still working out its guidelines. Nystedt believes the dual-platform demand of the CMF has less to do with producers making shows to simply show on both television and the Internet, and more to do with “new opportunities for engagement, audience-building and new content creation.”
Before now, Movieset.comhas been a site where people can view material from electronic press kits for big studio movies like Avatar, and see behind-the-scenes material from independent division to help film producers straddle the digital gap the way J.B. Sugar has done with Big in the ’80s.
“We’re looking for them to manage all the online content,” says Sugar. “That will include talking-head interviews with Dave and Kevin and myself.”
Sugar describes Big in the ’80s as a “modern-day Odd Couple,” with Foley and McDonald playing estranged members of a moderately successful 1980s band called Y-Y-Knot. One band member has done well for himself, living in a mansion and collecting all the band’s royalties, while the other has scuffled since the breakup. Their reunion is a comically tense.
Like Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean of the mock documentaries This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, both Foley and McDonald are musicians, making their characters believable.
No Equal Entertainment has a development deal for Big in the ’80s with Canwest’s Showcase channel, and was able to tap into BC Film’s new convergent media development fund, created last fall to help B.C. producers in the transition period before this spring’s launch of the Canada Media Fund.
The convergent media development fund provides up to $15,000 extra for projects already using BC Film’s slate development funds to develop convergent components.
“It was a little bit of seed money for strategizing and getting those social networking sites active, and get awareness and engage the audience in an early stage,” says Sugar, adding that if all goes well, the pilot would go into production by late spring.
mandrews@vancouversun.com