This was useful. I had no idea Afterworld was so "big budget" - they have 25 people working on it! I had assumed they were using a game engine for their animation, but apparently not.
Brent Friedman, Creator-Writer: Afterworld.tv
There’s a concept of what I call the farm systems: any great new book, novel, comicbook – they’re bought before they even hit the market, if they’re good.
So I took an old idea that I always wanted to do as a TV series, but was always told it would be way too expensive. I wanted it to be an internet series, told for today’s attention-deficit audiences, in 2-3 min bites, but I didn’t want to sacrifice the scope or drama.
I wanted to do something that would work on NBC or Fox.
So we came up with this notion of an animated drama, told in bites, and our first season was going to be 130 episodes. We were told we were crazy and it would never work. So we put together an 8-min presentation, a faux trailer, we did it on a Mac at home. We showed it around town, and the reaction was overwhelming.
We had some of the biggest people in the biz saying, this is the future. We turned down a number of offers to turn it into a TV show or movie, everyone thought we were pitching and this was just a visual pitch, but this was what we wanted to do. I’d been down the development track in TV and film many times before, and someone dangling a deal .. well, it’s.. just isn’t that appealing.
We’re in beta launch now, we’ve done 60 of the 130 episodes, and the first ten are up on YouTube. This is our dial test, no marketing, no fanfare. To our great pleasure and surprise, within 2 weeks it had caught fire. We’ve had almost a million views of our first ten episodes and the response has been phenomenal.
Before that we made a deal with Sony TV to distribute Afterworld internationally. They bought it for multiplatform distribution; they were the only place in town that recognized the opportunity to delivery it region by region, depending on what the region wanted.
We realized that we’d created modular entertainment: it was designed to be a daily delivery, mon-fri, for 6 months. What we thought is... we can distribute on mobile overseas: Europe and Asia and South America have a much more developed mobile system than we do. We can distribute over the internet, in conjunction with network play: take 5 episodes and smush them together, and you have a 15m episode, which can be used as interstitials.
Take 2 weeks of episodes, and smush, you get a half hour show. Sony’s approach was, we love multiplatform capabilities, but we really love that we can sell this as half-hour television, and offer all sorts of other opportunities to each territory on a multiplatform basis. So we wrote the stories in 2-week episode arcs. Everything works just as a 3-min and as part of a bigger whole.
Our show will be launched in august with a huge global rollout, and they’ve bought the results to do a mobile game; we’re also talking about a console game and possibly an MMO.
So – the connection with games. We used some of the ideas behind an MMO – there’s a persistent universe online. Hard to do with broadcast TV, but we’ve built a website (it’s in beta) where the episodes are in a sense just marketing hooks to take you to the website.
At the site you can have a Myst-like experience, where you can dig deeper into the mythology; you can explore the world, and the characters, there’ll be fanfic opportunities, a casual game that allows you to play the episodes as a scavenger hunt; an online economy where clues can be bartered and traded; also the opportunity for fans to send in digital photos to be included as backplates in our show.
It’s not exactly a game, but it’s based on the primary concept of “building a universe worthy of devotion (I got that from EA)”.
He’s talking spoilers now, so I won’t post the details. Lots of interesting snippets about audience interaction; there’s a Journal on the site which is pretty Myst-like stuff. There are clues in there (squee) that you don’t see in the show itself.
“If you want to dig deeper, there’s a lot of stuff to find, but if you just want to watch the episodes, the story completely holds up”.
[trailer]
What we do is.. all our animation style owes a lot to anime. We use 2d backgrounds – hi def images in our case – 20,000 of ‘em – we augment that with public domain images from the internet, that’s our backlot. We have painters stylize the backgrounds and we drop 3D characters in it using [techniques from La Jetee] (12 Monkeys used it) – the power of that film is that it’s a series of slow pans, pushins, dissolves, over gorgeous b&w stills, and the narration carries you through it.
The most amazing thing has been – people say, I love the animation. But there’s barely any animation in it! But it allows people to fill in the gaps and use their imagination. Our practical shortcut – going after low-cost – has ended up making the story more resonant with lots of people.
We put this together, there was a study done in Europe by a consortium of advertisers and media buyers, and they were looking to find the optimum timelength in mobile ents for retaining attention for ad placement. This came from disgruntlement that $1m dollar ads in 24 were not being retained by the audience watching. They're texting, or on the internet when the ads are on, right?
So folks are looking to the digital medium and asking, how much will people remember? 2m 47s is the magic number: after that length, something shown in the intro, the preroll, would be retained 100% by the key demographic. 100%! So our episodes are 2m and 57s.
How will you extrapolate to console or MMO?
Well, we’d take the universe and the map of the way the world is becoming, and the social network around it, and using that as a foundation to build an MMO. There will be all sorts of cultures and tribes introduced in the course of season one, so we’ll have this whole world populated with new areas and societies and groups. That could be a lite MMO, more about exploring than fighting, like Second Life.Our viewpoint is from America, with the understanding that there are heroes all over the world experiencing the same thing [..] so the pieces can come together if the demand is there.
Composition of the team?
Yes, it’s all micro. We have 3 writers, plus 1 writer doing the journal and ancillaries. Then we have a team of 20 animators and editors, and some are matte-painters, some are 3D artists, 2D artists. We have a little animation studio in Santa Monica.
Can you talk about the learning curve going into this transition of doing something unique?
Hollywood in general likes to work off precedents, things they’ve done before. They’d hammer you with ‘that’s not the way we do it’.
We’re inventing a whole biz model here, and al lot of the studios didn’t like it – including Sony. But Sony is forward thinking, so they took up and did something, anyway. The key in all of this is that we’ve made deals where we own the property 100%. We license stuff. We own the dvd, the domestic rights, the merchandising.. if this works, it could turn into a home run for us in terms of owning all the possible revenue streams down the road.
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