final reflection

"Using your experiences on this project and relating your programmes to other webisodes you have researched, discuss how taking account of the online audience affects the process of showing creative work"


for our show project, we were asked to make and distribute a micro-series online. unlike micro-series on television and radio, online distribution has a lot of advantages. for example, as soon as you publish work online, anybody with access to the internet can view your work, instantly giving you an audience for free. before the days of the internet, everyday people couldn't have published their work because it wouldn't have been able to have been distributed and nobody would have taken it seriously. well, times have changed. these days anybody can publish their work. if it's a photo they've taken, you can upload it to flickr or upload it to social networking sites such as myspace and facebook. if it's a video you can upload it to public broadcasting websites such as youtube and vimeo, these were the two sites i used to publish my webseries. anybody can publish their work, and these days, anybody can have access to their work. that's why the internet is such a good way of publishing work. before the internet their were limitations when it came to screening and publishing work. because of the internet, the word limitation doesn't exist anymore.

after me and my group were given the project we decided early on that facebook should be the centre site for all the other sites to work round. our fan site if you like. we came to this decision simply because facebook is where everyone is these days. the target audience for the series were people between the ages of 16-21. everybody i know has facebook. when somebody has a little spare time, facebook is the site they will log on to because that's where their friends are. communication over the internet is almost controlled by facebook. when i get home and check my emails, most of them will be from facebook telling me i have messages on facebook. seems bizarre to me sometimes that i even check my emails anymore. another good thing about facebook, pesides the fact that there are a lot of users, is that you can post videos on the page and people can leave comments. the comments that our fans left us helped motivate us into making the episodes better and trying out new techniques and ideas. the audience affected our work considerably. if all we got was negative feedback all the time, our episodes would have been a lot different. because of the support our fans gave us, we were able to take on board any criticism and work with the audience.

one webseries we looked at was called 'the guild'. the guild also had a facebook fanpage, with similar information on. the guild has been going for a lot longer and has elstablished promotional finance from microsoft due to the guild now being available on the xbox 360. why then did the guild not just stick with a website of their choice. they could have paid for a completely customized webpage but instead they chose to advertise on facebook as well. the reason being, that everyone uses it. it's a good, free way of advertising work and getting audience response as well. not everybody will click onto a webpage and leave a message because some people just don't think they'll be heard. everybody leaves messages on facebook, whether you know the person well enough or not. we got some very unlikely people commenting on our fanpage.

because it was a class project, we had restrictions and certain things we couldn't include. after we finished our first episode we were told we couldn't have swearing for example. in fact, we had to cut out all offensive material in the episode. before the episode was aired online, we censored the swearing. we got feedback instantly saying people thought the censoring was bad and that we missed some which was comical. for the next episodes we just didn't include swearing. we used non-offensive language that the audience responded well to. this restriction worked in our favour in the end but the good thing about the internet is that there arent any restrictions. you can publish and upload anything you want because it's in your right. it removed the boundries also compared to say if our series was shown on the television. we wouldn't have been able to miss deadlines by a fraction or include offensive material. that's a good thing about the internet.

not only did the audience affect our show in terms of removing swearing, it also helped me write it. early on i wrote up the character profiles on the facebook page and we posted the scripts on the blog that we have. we got postly positive feedback but due to what people said about the episodes since their release. i was able to take that on board and then the third episode was easier to write. the only thing that i wasn't able to include was valories character. people said that they wanted to see valories character more. the reason why she isn't in the third one was because she couldn't shoot. we managed it with out her and it still worked and got good responses from people who viewed it.