I’d love to make the best next web series. I’m a big fan and I’ve watched a lot (read: excessive amount) of content online. And I’m always curious about what works and what doesn’t and the more you watch the more you know. Today we watched a few episodes of each of the following web series’ Starting From Now, High Maintenance, and The Guild. Here are my 50 word review of each:

SFN – Queer content is niche but people dig it and get caught up in it, particularly with a bunch of Sydney babes. I don’t hate this show but I think it’s a bit daggy, there are better versions of it’s kind (Feminin/Feminin is a French-Canadian lesbian web series that is top notch) it’s a good avenue for storytelling but wish it was developed more, could be stronger ⅗

HM – Class A web series content. This is what I imagine a really good online program to look like. It’s an unusual format with the protagonist being a character we don’t really get to know but I think it’s extraordinarily effective and I couldn’t enjoy it more. The eps we watched weren’t my personal fave but I have a great time watching it 5/5
TG – I am definitely not the target market for this show, but that aside, I really respected it’s use of the PhotoBooth/Skype as bookendings. It’s a pretty great idea for an extremely low-budget and seems well suited to the audience it targets. But overall probs wouldn’t watch again but respect it exists 2/5

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is not something I knew much about. Sandy, Alex and I made a very complicated diagram of the connections between all the content, mostly from Sandy’s brain.

This gigantic universe was born out of the post-credits scene in Iron Man in 2008 and since then has been growing exponentially. I was fascinated how the release of a film could alter the world for a TV show in the next week but not the other way around. And that the more recent films, without any knowledge of the previous films would seem garbled and foreign to a new audience member. So not all the films are entry points. It’s like you are privy, as an audience member, to a secret world that not everyone else is. I can imagine how that’s compelling but I also imagine that it’s very complicated to create.

We watched Captain America yesterday and it was bizarre, a hyper cheesy movie about a super soldier (in my opinion, as I’m sure many disagree with this statement). All I kept thinking was ‘Why do people love superheroes?’ There’s something so Greek about it all, Grecian gods. 

‘Project e-Volution’ follows the story of an online cult who’s goal is to reject their mortal physical bodies and ascend to the digital realm. Hypnotic trance videos are the means they intend to use to ascend. Their plans are put in jeopardy when an ex-cult member claims the cults’ intentions are much darker and bands a group of defectors together to take down the cult. But do the anti-cult just want to save the day or are they secretly intending to use the same tools of hypnosis for something bad? Maybe to make consumers buy more products they don’t want? Is the anti-cult secretly just a capitalist corporation seeking any means to make their buyers more docile and subservient? You’ll find out the answers to these questions and much more when you play!

Over the past few weeks, Alex, Sandy & I, have been collaboratively developing the narrative and building the cults’ world together. We originally started with just the word ‘cult’ and discussed what we are mutually found to be fascinating within those spaces – the language they use, the initiation process and the fabulously dated graphic design, my personal favourite. The 2000’s were rife with occult HTML times new roman websites and word art, we want to create an homage to these pages. I have found myself trawling through this aesthetic time and again because it’s achievable, simple and yet somehow also really incredibly effective. Our main platform will be PowerPoint, which all three of us remember as a tool of invention in primary school with feels apt for this project. I am fascinated by these groups and how they attract their followers and often, what happens when you want to escape and what if you do?

Not long ago I watched a video of David Lynch claiming that he attributes all of his creative work to the power of Transcendental Meditation. Apparently so does Seinfeld and a number of other celebrities which got me swept up in a Google frenzy, this mantra meditation had taken over the world and seemed INCREDIBLE. But you couldn’t just do this meditation in the comfort of your own home, you must be given a mantra by a trained professional and they will carry you through your meditation. So going to a professional cost money, and hang on, so do all these other steps. And suddenly I found myself on these dodgey websites of people who had come out the other side of this process and believed it to be a scam. Their websites were anonymous because they didn’t want to be caught but through the lens of anonymity they would describe the whole experience – word for word. This is roughly how I would like someone to feel moving through this story – bound up in unravelling a twisted ball of yarn, trying to piece together the world and ultimately trying to decide whether anyone is right. Creating this sensation is complicated, the steps are plenty and arduous but I am excited for the challenge.

‘Mirror-reflection implies the vanquishing of separateness. Its inherent movement is towards fusion. The self and its reflected image are of course literally separate. But the agency of reflection is a mode of appropriation, of illusionistically erasing the difference between subject and object.’

My mum died when I was young. Sometimes I read her horoscope, she was a water sign, Pisces, and it’s my rising sign too. March is the month of Pisces and I just moved house. My tarot told me that physically pulling up my roots would draw me closer to familial relationships. Tarot talks of uniting the internal and external selves but in this digital age I think there is a third self – the digital self. It’s not just how we present ourselves to ourselves or in the real world but also online too.

What if I died and all my friends could go through my computer? I have a disorganised desktop and haven’t curated any of the folders – they could read/see anything, in any order, no beginning, middle, or end. The Database as memory and legacy.

I’m a video artist and I’m the centre of my own work – the video camera is a mirror, reflecting me in motion on the monitor. Manovich mentions Rosalind Krauss’ essay Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism when discussing how film privileges narrative but video art doesn’t. (Manovich 2001, p.234) Krauss discusses the artist ‘as a body entered between the parenthesis of camera and monitor.’ (Krauss 1976, p.61) I can relate to that feeling of ‘self-encapsulation’ (Kraus 1976, p53) through the process of my computer artworks. (Instagram/ video art/ digital collage)

Beyond that, when I look at myself (reflected in mirror or video), it’s not just me who I see. If I had a dollar for every time someone said I looked like my mum, I would be a very rich woman.

Krauss, R 1976, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,’ in John Hanhardt, ed. Video Culture. Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop

Manovich, L 2001, ‘The database.’ In The language of new media. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, pp. 218-243.

Sherlock: The Network is an application, available on iOS or Android, that allows the user to participate in a case much like one depicted in the TV series. Is it a game? Not quite. I’d call it more of a digital marketing tool. It extends the world of the story but does not directly contribute to it, if we were to watch the show exclusively we would not be missing elements by not using this application.

We’re allowed to click through as we please but the story is intended to unravel in the same way not subject to what the audience members do. (Murray 1997, p.127) We don’t have agency in this space and normally we do not expect agency in narrative (Murray 1997, p.126) but in this case, I think we do anticipate that sense, that we might get to play around the world as Sherlock does, at our own free will. Instead it’s a list of clues found by Sherlock and Dr Watson and we play arcade games to ride the train to the locations they’ve suggested.

Sherlock: The Network is not a ‘digital labyrinth,’ (Murray 1997, p.132) it takes from traditional modes of story – linearity, single solution, obstacles and goals. It’s a money-making low-brow regurgitation of the show itself. I don’t think Deleuze would’ve digged it.

Murray, J (1997), ‘Chapter 5: Agency’ in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press

The short story has been a medium of little interest to me. In our classroom we talk of the complications creatives face when engaging with structure, that the parameters hinder their ability to truly express themselves. My belief is that that this approach is somewhat naive, I consider story structure to be important in developing ideas from their nascent beginnings to a polished piece of craftsmanship.

The Matthews reading is over a hundred years old and he is very specific about his concept of the short story – it must consist of ‘one action, in one place, on one day’ (1901, p.16) and that this story medium is not one to explore love (1901, p.18) Our philosophies do not align about these notions – in the case of the short story I don’t believe that ‘the medium is the message.’ (McLuhan 1964, p.7)

The short story is made up of elements discussed in ‘The Substance of Story’ by McKee – simply put, the protagonist with a conscious desire puts their life at risk (2007, p.138). For we as storytellers ‘not only create stories as metaphors for life, we create them as metaphors for a meaningful life – and to live meaningfully is to be at perpetual risk’ (2007, p. 149) But who the protagonist is, what their desire is and how much they’re willing to risk their lives is all up to the storyteller! (YOU!)

McKee, R 2007, ‘The Substance of Story’ in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York, USA: Harper Collins, pp. 135-154.

Matthews, B 1901, The Philosophy of the Short-story, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.