Monday 4th January Show Project Meeting

Today our class had the first session on our show unit projects. We were showed a series of internet viral 'micro-series' and asked to take down notes of the characteristics of these short episodes. The notes I made are shown below. The programmes we were shown were called 'Living with the Infidels', ' We Need Girlfriends', 'The Guild', 'Chad Vader' and others. Almost all of the mico-series' contained logos and/or title sequences introducing the characters, most prominently on Living with the Infidels and The Guild. Both of these have elaborate title sequences involving knowledge of animation, cutting to music and camera work. These are very important when making a micro-series, the professional look helps keep the audience interested up until the story-line gets underway.

Other types of micro-series videos include that of 'Pure Pwnage', also shown in class. This relies upon the basis that it is intentionally looking amatuerly filmed. It is based around the video diary of a professional gamer and his friend. The script contains the main character mentioning to the camera man about the positioning of the camera etc. This adds to the overall feel of unprofessionalism they have ben striving to achieve in the program.

Here is an episode of the series Chad Vader:



This series gives many examples of the techniques used in micro-series. For example, the entire thing is set in one location, that of the supermarket. There are not too many characters and they are always based around interacting with the main character, they are never seen interacting with eachother without his presence.

The video series is also comedic, as are most micro-series that have a large form of success. As the trends in these series' go, they follow a better construction when they are comedy pieces. This is helped along by the fact that comedy doesn't always have to make sense, and can often be strange and erratic in its time frames, where as any program that follows a serious story-line almost always has to follow an immaculate structure so the audience can keep up.

The separate scenes are often divided by small snippets of simple music. I have noticed that this is a commonly used technique in these small internet viral sketch shows. The show also jumps into the story-line very quickly, another aspect common of these shows.

The humour in the show is assuming the audience has a relatively basic understanding of the original Star Wars trilogy. Without this the series would be far less amusing to anyone watching it. A lot of these internet viral series' use a form of 'nerdy' humour, that only really appeals to people from a background of internet gaming. Two examples of shows that do this (despite being very different from each other) are The Guild and Pure Pwnage.

Here are episodes from both of these series:

These two shows revolve around this gaming culture and require the viewer to have some (if not a lot) of prior knowledge about it. The Guild is quite professionally filmed, using good saturated colours to create a feeling of immersion. Where as Pure Pwnage is far lower budget and makes up for it by trying intentionally to give the whole thing a feel of a 'video diary'.

Another very popular internet series that does this is the series 'Arby and the Chief'. A very popular machinima (video game/machine incorporated cinema) director decided that he would put live action footage into a comedic show about the very cool character in the game being an irritating action figure in real life.

This takes music from other more famous shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm to create an establishing atmosphere and uses a simple introductory sequence, much like Chad Vader.