Yet Moar Takeaways from VWF2016.
Passion for a project is the storyteller’s greatest gift. Assemble a team that feels the same way you do about it. It’s not about the meal ticket, that has nothing to do with what you deserve for how hard you’ve worked. It’s about what you learn and who you work with on the way to “Project complete, Project launched” which immediately turns into “Quoi de neuf?” “Et aprs?” Other people sigh and dream. YOU MAKE.
The webseries community is generous and open and hardworking and collaborative and very quick on the uptake.
Once you have a product, you can have merch. Merch extends the reach of the series and provides a revenue stream. When Bernie Su talked about the merch sales for Lizzie Bennet Diaries you could hear all the oxygen leave the room as everybody looked at the numbers, and then the cumulative, adorable plop plop plop noise as many jaws cascaded down into laps.
There are metric crapstacks of tiny, cumulative and potentially career-stalling IP issues around what you’re doing so don’t make a project without legal advice. In Canada, there ARE NO FAIR USE LAWS and assuming that you can do what American webartistes do – that is a road strewn with take down notices and having all your carefully selected music go up the flue. This includes getting proper releases from all the friends who supplied music at no charge, since if they die their estate can sue. As a part time anarchist and full time irritated person I feel the amount of legal crap you have to put up to make webcontent in Canada is flat out unconscionable.
I have ideas for two webseries, Doing Poly Badly and Permaculture in Vancouver. Other ideas have occurred but those two I think have the tight niche appeal that is relatively easy to research. I also want to produce Allegra’s Rant of the Week, which is basically me sitting down after two beers and going all splodey on the week’s worth of news, local, national and international. At least the music will be mine so one less hurdle in the race toward respectability.
My brain is still spinning, but I have never been so pumped for my own writing project, which I hope, once it makes it onto the page, will be realized in screen media format.