Lauren Dobbins Webb is a Los Angeles-based actor, living the dream and coveting pugs. Raised mostly in Atlanta, GA, she went to Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and then traveled to 27 US states and three Canadian provinces with the Missoula Children’s Theatre before landing in LA. She was last seen on stage as Ann Deever in Wasatch Theatrical Ventures production of All My Sons, for which she was awarded an “Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actress in a Drama” award from StageSceneLA. Recent film credits include the short A Blue Uncertain Buzz, currently screening at festivals. Look for her in the soon-to-be-released webseries Secret Millionaires and in upcoming shows at Theatre of NOTE and Improv Olympic. You can keep up with her fairly frequent tweets by following @laurendwebb on Twitter, or read her fairly infrequent blog entries at www.laurendobbinswebb.com.
To follow up on my web distribution article, I wanted to interview a team who made it through the process – my friends (and newlyweds!) Shanna Micko and Steve Yager, creators and producers of the webseries Leaving Bliss. Leaving Bliss is an independent web series that follows the sometimes sad but frequently funny travails of Patience Owen, a Pollyanna-type who flees her sparsely populated hometown in favor of Hollywood to pursue her dream of making it big on the “tinsel screen.” Actor/writer Shanna Micko is a graduate of the USC Master of Professional Writing program and the I.O. West improv training program. Director Steve Yager, whose comedic shorts with Elders of the Dark Tower have been official selections at L.A. Comedy Shorts Film Festival, Sketchfest Seattle and Sketchfest NYC, is currently working on a degree in film production.
Shanna and Steve made Leaving Bliss well before everyone else hopped on the self-produced web series bandwagon, and I admire them for charting new territory and creating such a funny, well-written, and polished series on a budget. (For the sake of full disclosure, I appeared in an episode of Leaving Bliss.) Below is our interview about their experience creating and distributing Leaving Bliss.
How did you become YouTube Partners? [The YouTube Partners program offers revenue sharing to accepted applicants through ad revenue or rental streaming fees.]
Steve: Shanna sought out the web TV community. We started going to Tubefilter [the web television company behind the Streamy Awards] events, and through those events we hooked up with a guy who works for a management company and said that he could help with us getting partnership.
Shanna: I was in contact with him and letting him know what we were up to and everything, and he emailed me and asked if we needed help getting partnership. At the time we were also pursuing the comedy channel editor at YouTube. We were courting him but at the same time staying in contact with people we met in the web TV community, and this guy was just really really nice and extremely supportive. It’s usually really hard to get partnership, you have to have a lot of views already, and someone like us, we probably weren’t going to get a lot of views very easily. So that’s how we got partnership, we had a connection.
Did you know about the partners program before?
Shanna: We had applied and got denied.
Steve: I applied for partnership for Elders of the Dark Tower, when our werewolf video hit however many thousands of views, and I thought “Oh, I bet I could get partnership now,” but I never heard anything back. It’s hard to get partnership.
Shanna: We did apply, but they were just like “no, you don’t have enough views” so we were like oh…well let’s just keep trying to contact this comedy guy and try to get him to feature us at least.
Steve: Yeah, I think we thought that if we could get featured we could get the views, which could get us partnership.
Shanna: It all happened kind of at the same time, because the comedy channel editor responded and said he liked our stuff, wanted to feature us, and was going to put in a word to get us partnership because they only featured YouTube partners. That happened at the same time that the manager was helping us. It all kind of coalesced.
Steve: Back in the day before YouTube came out with its reorganization, you would go to YouTube and there would be one ginormous featured video and then there would be other smaller featured videos. We got the ginormous video one day, so everyone who went to YouTube that day saw episode one of Leaving Bliss as the featured video. So that helped us get some hits.
Did you retain the viewership from episode one?
Steve: Oh, no. Maybe 10%.
Shanna: It’s such a mixed bag of people that come on to YouTube, and then what transfers to our actual target audience is much smaller than that – I mean we got hundreds and hundreds of subscribers from that, but we got something like 120,000 hits in a day.
Steve: It didn’t make us take off like we thought. We thought “Oh, we’ll hook all these people on the webseries,” but then episode two came out and maybe 7 or 8 thousand people watched it, as opposed to the 100 and some odd thousand that watched episode one. So getting featured and getting a bunch of hits on that featured video is not going to do you much.
Shanna: Well, it depends on what kind of video it is. Ours was a serial thing where the video alone wasn’t amazing. If they liked it they had to keep watching in order to get the real payoff, and so that’s an investment on their part that’s hard to do.
Steve: Coming at it from the angle of “that’s not sketch and it’s not a cat riding a roomba,” narrative storytelling videos will never be at the forefront of YouTube. So getting featured isn’t going to get you that many subscribers, because I don’t even go to YouTube to watch narrative. I go to YouTube to watch Failblog videos and puppies doing stuff.
With the data that was provided to you from YouTube, was there a way that you could have drawn in more of the viewership from the first episode?
Steve: They don’t give you groupings like “here’s all the people that watched your video, here’s all the people that are 14-24 female, and here’s how to bulk email them.” You can’t do that. They don’t even give you a list of the people who viewed your video. You just get “here is how many views you had and these are all your comments,” and then you can go into your analytics and it will show you what your viewership looks like – it will break it down by age and country and stuff like that, but they’ll never give you a list of users.
The best way to target people is to get a bot and to spam people. We were targeting makeup tutorials, because who watches makeup tutorials, younger females mostly, and that was what we wanted our target audience to be. We used something called Tube Toolbox, and we used that to grab all the people who commented, or all the subscribers on these videos, and then we could craft a message specifically for them that said, “Hey I saw you were watching this makeup tutorial. We thought because of that you may want to watch our web series.” There was one other web series that we were targeting subscribers on, so we would take a web series that had either a similar tone or what we thought would be a similar viewership, and say “Hey we saw that you liked blah-de-blah. We like that show too, and we think you might actually like our show, if you have second check it out, because we’re independent web TV makers and we’re not sponsored so this is how we’re trying to find our audience.”
And 90% of the people would message us back saying “Thank you so much for telling me, I never would have found you otherwise,” and 10% of the people were like “f— you spammers!” A lot of people ignored us. I’d say 1% said “f— you,” 50% said “thank you very much,” and then 49% never replied. But it was a pretty good percentage. I was pretty happy with how many people personally messaged us back and said “I watched your show, I like it a lot, please make more.” So bots are the way to go.
You used YouTube to embed on the Leaving Bliss site. Do you get YouTube Analytics data from that too?
Shanna: Yes, anywhere that your video is embedded, the hits and viewership are counted.
Steve: I don’t know if ultimately it was a good decision, but we decided that we wanted to keep our views concentrated. We chose to only distribute through YouTube so we’d have a good idea of what our overall views are, and so that people would be funneled down to one place. If they wanted to watch Leaving Bliss, they had to watch it through our YouTube channel. With YouTube it’s really easy to track your viewership. When you go into a meeting, they want to know how many subscribers you have and how many views you have. We felt like if we diversified by all the available free uploading sites, we would get so many scattered numbers that it would be hard to say. This way you can go to this one place and say see we have 100,000 hits. But if it’s only on YouTube, and we use that to embed on our website, then it’s so easy to pull up that data right away, and it concentrates to one stream.
Shanna: I think this was before TubeMogul started. They’re an aggregate, and they take all the views but they put it out to lots of different sites. It came out after we had released some episodes; we were 5 or 6 episodes deep already.
At what point during the process did you start thinking about distribution?
Shanna: Probably not until our first chunk was done. We shot five episodes at one time and edited them. We didn’t really have a plan. We didn’t know if we were just going to put it right on the website, or if we were going to do Vimeo…
Steve: Was it even a thought of “Oh, we should make money at this maybe?” Or was it just a labor of love, let’s just put this out there, whatever happens happens?
Shanna: I think that’s mostly what it was.
Steve: I think it was mostly just a creative exercise more than anything. At first we weren’t trying to get meetings anywhere, we weren’t trying to get representation, we weren’t trying to get paid for it or anything like that
Shanna: We just wanted to be seen and see how it was received, see if people liked it.
When did you put a PayPal button up?
Shanna: Pretty soon after the first couple of episodes.
Were most of the people who donated people you knew?
Steve: It was interesting because some of them were family members and friends, and then some of them were complete strangers, that was nice. People around the country, people in other countries, and I have no idea who they are.
How much out-of-pocket would you say you spent on the series?
Steve: We actually ended up breaking even through subscriber donations.
Shanna: We spent not very much – a little over a thousand bucks for the whole thing.
Steve: But for people to think that they can do a ten episode series for a thousand bucks, unless they own their own equipment, and are skilled doing what they do –
Shanna: That’s why it was so cheap, because of him.
Steve: If you’re a couple actors and you have what you think are great scripts, and then you have to hire people, triple or quadruple that budget amount at least. What you need to do is talk to your filmmaker friend and see what kind of series they want to make, and then try to combine ideas, so that way you’re not asking someone to shoot something they don’t want to shoot, because either a) they‘ll do a bad job because their hearts not in it, or b) they just won’t want to do it for you, or c) they’ll charge you.
Shanna: or d) they will do a good job because they love you and they’re your friend.
Steve: Yeah, if it’s something they want to do.
Did you choose locations that you had and didn’t have to pay for?
Shanna: We paid for ones that we needed that were specific. We paid for a theatre, because our opening scene she’s supposed to be doing a play. We paid for the workshop space at the Actor’s Network. Everything else was our apartment, or the park, guerilla style – are we allowed to say that? – or other people’s apartments, other people’s houses, on the street.
Steve: The general rule is that if you’re not using a tripod and you have a crew of less than three people, then you can pretty much get away with shooting anywhere…almost. You can get away with shooting at the park, or shooting on the street. We used all lav mics, so we didn’t have a boom op. A boom operator causes more attention than a camera. Everybody has a camera nowadays.
Shanna: Our scene at the park was pretty big though. It had 15-20 people.
Steve: It did, but it looked like a picnic when you drive by, because everybody is lav’d up, all the microphones are hidden.
So you were running camera and you had a sound person…
Steve: No, we had me running camera and that’s it. And then the lavs were going into the camera on auto.
Shanna: Low. Budget.
Steve: Crew of one, son. It worked out as well as it could have.
How did you get your high-profile actors?
Shanna: David H. Lawrence XVII was a very good friend of [Leaving Bliss cast members] Jordan St. Jean and her mom, Debra Leigh, and Debra suggested we send him something because she thought he would be just awesome in the show, and that he might be up for it. I sent him some copies of the script and he liked it, so then I wrote a part for him and hoped that he would like it and want to do it, and then he did. So that was awesome. Sheree J. Wilson we got through another personal connection through a friend of ours, David Garber. We told him we were looking for someone to play my mom and he had a connection with her. She was awesome and she liked it and she wanted to do it. Connections, personal connections, man. That’s the way to do everything.
Steve: Yeah, it’s all about connections. And following up with something good, and having something that they have an interest in spending time doing.
Leaving Bliss was an official selection of the 2009 New York Television Festival. What was the process for submitting?
Steve: I think I was just cruising Withoutabox [an IMDb-certifying festival submission site] and I put in ‘web’ and ‘television.’ I don’t really remember, but we found the festival and we decided that we should make the five episodes that we shot a linear comedy pilot. We realized that if we did that we could submit to television festivals, so we submitted to that one as a linear TV show and got on, and then discovered that they had a web show category. But we’re more interested in working in TV than we are in working in webTV, so we put it together as a TV comedy pilot because we thought if we’re going to get any interest, we’d rather have it in linear TV than webTV.
How many other festivals did you submit for?
Shanna: I think we submitted for four total and got in to two. I mean, there’s not a lot really to submit to for webtv, at least then. I mean, now there are all these little things cropping up, but I don’t know if I want to pay $35 to submit to these things, because there really aren’t eyes on those festivals anyway.
You were reviewed by Tubefilter and several other sites. How did the reviews come about?
Shanna: We met the people at Tubefilter and they were very nice. It was much smaller then than it is now, and we came and sat down at the same table as the guys who run it at an event. We exchanged info and I think that I asked Brady [Brim-DeForst, co-founder of Tubefilter] if I could have coffee with him and pick his brain about how to get views. He was really nice and he did and then I think when the show came out I just kept letting them know, you know updates updates updates.
Steve: Tilzy TV [an interview show with web content creators] reviewed it first, and then one of the guys at Tubefilter was like “why haven’t we reviewed this yet? We’re gonna send this guy out.” Reviews didn’t really drive our views up at all, though. I don’t think many people read that stuff. But I think it does – not to say it’s not valuable, cause it gives you some credibility and if you want to create an electronic press kit that’s something you can put in there – it’s very valuable as far as credibility and industry street-cred goes, you know, people who are making webTV read it, I’m sure, and new media agents read it. It won’t drive your views up, but it will give you street cred.
Shanna: And it won’t drive them down.
How much feedback did you get on the written episode before you guys shot?
Shanna: We had a table read with a bunch of writers and actors and got feedback, and I wrote them and then Steve took a look and helped rewrite and punch em up and stuff, so they definitely weren’t first drafts by any means.
Steve: And it helps to be a good writer. If you’ve never written a script before, don’t shoot it.
Shanna: I don’t know, that sounds pretty discouraging. I think sometimes people just need to scrap it out and try and have the experience.
Steve: If you have a buddy who just bought a camera and wants to learn filmmaking, and you just bought a laptop and want to learn how to write scripts, go for it. But don’t spend ten thousand bucks to make a piece of junk and then be disappointed when you don’t get a fifty thousand dollar deal from Crackle.
Shanna: Go for it, you know, that’s how you learn. Just have your expectations in order.
What are your plans for Leaving Bliss? What would you want to happen before you would make a second season?
Steve: Six figure deal.
Shanna: Not a six figure deal…although what is that, $100,000? No. I mean, I love it, I want to make more, I have tons of stuff written, I’d love to do it. Some money would be good, we don’t need much, I don’t know. What do you think, ten grand?
Steve: Per episode?
Would you do it again the same way if you were starting over?
Steve: [emphatic] No!
Shanna: Knowing what we know now, I think that we would have worked harder to find a better distributor, maybe a bigger network that has online content. We did try other things, and we passed on some of them and some of them passed on us because they weren’t right for us. But if we could have found something like Lifetime television, if they had an online type of thing.
Steve: Pitch the idea first and develop it with someone would have been better I think than to establish a set of online videos first and then try to take it to them, because then you already have something that is so set in their mind and there is no room for creative input on their part, and I’m sure they’d like to read the scripts and have a little bit of say. And then also we made no attempt to build an audience before we released the videos, and from what I’ve been reading, a lot of it says you have to build a little buzz and do some things before you put your videos out because no one is looking for your video, you need to find the people who are going to be watching your video first, and build buzz with them, and then put your videos out.
Shanna: We knew nothing about marketing. We’re creative people, and we just did this for fun, and then we were like “Oh, people like it, let’s see what we can do with it,” you know, if we market it, if we put it out there and make more. So I feel like we did everything backwards basically.
Steve: We learned from our experience though, that we would do everything the opposite way.
Anything else you’d like people to know?
Steve: I think people should use caution before they make a web series. People should not just through money at doing a passion project. Really take the time to find out if it’/s good, get a writers group together, and write more drafts. Get people’s opinions who will tell you the truth. There’s no sense in spending five thousand bucks on something that isn’t going to go anywhere. Even good projects don’t go anywhere, so make sure it’s really good before you do it.
