I'd never do that again

The idea was alright - looking at producing some episodic TV series that we could publish online to establish a following for.  It seemed straight forward at the time.  Actually I have to admit this was first attempted by myself in the form of a TV studio program back in 2007.  It failed miserably because I completed the first episode which was showed to great enjoyment by the students at the time, and then had all the release time that I was using to film the episode cut, rendering it impossible to complete.  I kept the music file which I downloaded on a memory stick for years always thinking at some point I'd run with it.  With a dual AP/DP role at school this year I did find myself with time on my hands.  The time frame that I came up with to complete it was complete rubbish.  I decided that if I did it for ten weeks then it would be realistic.  Realistic my arse.  I struggled hugely in building up an audience for a number of reasons - I was loosely calling it a homage but in fact there was a direct rip, the atmospheric music at the start was the biggest.  I felt that I couldn't necessarily promote something that was in essence a steal, and I tried it without the music and it completly lost the impact - of course if I had wanted to involve more students then I could have had music created, but then it would still have lacked something.

Anyway the idea was for the first episode, we had four cameras rolling during that episode (to put it in perspective we had the entire video camera collection of school operating at that time, that was one video camera that we use to record everything, one with a broken view finder, one digital camera set to movie mode and then my personal i-pod touch.  And it stank.  It was terrible when I viewed it all back - I'd tried to get too ambitious, it was me driving it, rather than the kids... four cameras made a mess, cutting out the other camera people, it was rather ordinary.   So following that we started scaling things back and that worked better.  It still wasn't great, I think we were hitting our stride in the episodes in the middle.  Then I  ended up otherwise engaged when we should have been drawing it to a conclusion - we filmed five episodes back to back over five days, and then proceeded to eek them out over five weeks.   Only problem was the weather went South and we had to cancel the last two planned activities, bring them inside and then have them really a shadow of what they had been.   If you have ever bothered to watch the series, you'll see the presenter dissappears for the final two episodes and has to be replaced by the stand in.   I would like to same one thing, the production crew was nothing if extremely resilient.   The main presenter did the whole script from start to finish ad lib in every episode in one take (I abhor those sanctioned programs that are re-shot to take the energy out of them) and we effectivley after episode one ran off one camera).

The idea was to run it on the school network with the class emphasis building up a regular audience - well that never happened.  The school network, and this is a very contentious personal viewpoint, isn't suitable for showing material in a reliable way, we put it online of course, and the response was okay, it wasn't great the kids themselves who were involved while they liked the concept, didn't even watch it all themselves and it just kind of dropped out...  so it was a good idea, one that I think with refining could work well - I haven't seen it elsewhere, but the music would be a huge, huge part of any attempt to mass promote it.  The music would have to be created elsewhere and then become part of the signature of it.  And I'd work with a much more realistic time frame, so I'm not saying we'd never do something like that again... but it would be unlikely...