The New Hit Web Series: Simon and Davefunkel

Tuesday October 2, 2012

In between other projects, friend and frequent collaborator Dave Lee and I recently started a Youtube series.

I'm not going to lie; it's unlikely to be the next million-viewer smash hit.

However, it's proving to be a fun creative outlet for a bunch of ideas, in-jokes, and video concepts we've been playing with for a while. I'm also hoping it will be a good low-pressure place to experiment with videography, and improve our skills with scripting, lighting, sound design, and all the other things that go into making good quality video.

In the same way that writing for this website once per week for over a year now has improved my ability to, well, write stuff, cranking out a video each week can only be beneficial in terms of video production skills.

For the moment, we've set ourselves a few ground rules. Specifically:

One video upload per week. No more, no less. A regular schedule is one of the most important things for building a following, and forcing yourself to actually get stuff done.
Keep them short and sharp. If any video is longer than three minutes, there had better be a damn good reason for it.
Only one take per video, unless there is a truly catastrophic error. We want to make sure all reactions, laughs, etc, are natural and genuine.
Script them at the bullet-point level. Know where each episode is going (to avoid rambling), but keep it loose enough to allow genuine banter to develop.
And finally, each video should stand alone. The viewer shouldn't need to know who we are, or have been following the series in order to enjoy it.

So far we're three episodes in and still learning. I suspect it will be a quite a while before we're consistently producing good quality output (unless the series goes the way of my first blog), but see what you think so far: