Short Tales- format and names

I'm going to make production of Spinneyhead's next project as interactive as possible. Until I set up forums and stuff the interactivity will be handled through this blog. I'm going to set up an overall label for Short Tales and secondary labels for character sketches, writing, production issues and any other areas that crop up. Please leave suggestions and start conversations in the comments of the relevant post. There will still be a fair amount of work done by email and by getting together. Please don't leave your emails in the comment thread, but get in touch with me and I'll add you in to messages.

This first production post is to raise two important issues- format of episodes and the little matter of a name.

For internet episodes the big constraint is file size. Based upon the experience of compressing for Memory, I think I could produce ten minute episodes and still have them at a suitable quality whilst staying small enough to fit under Revver's maximum size limit (100mb). However, I also remember reading that the average length of a YouTube video is in the region of two and a half minutes, suggesting that aiming at shorter attention spans works better.

Another, offline, factor I've been considering is the lengths of tv shows. I'm not looking at producing half hour episodes, but fifteen minutes would slot easily into many stations schedules. I'm thinking of marketing the first episode as a pilot, showing a local station like Channel M what we can do with nothing and seeing if they'll fund us to give them something for the late evening.

So I'm writing a fifteen minute script. The first draft is a mere nine pages, which roughly equates to nine minutes, but I wrote it before I started thinking of fifteen minute episodes. However, fifteen minutes is a bit long to compress well for the internet. So I'm thinking of splitting one fifteen minute episode into three five minute acts which each serve as webisodes.

Naming is a big deal. This project is currently called "Short Tales About Love and Sex". It's a working title and really, really needs changing before broadcast. Single word titles are popular- Coupling, Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld (though the last two were named for their central character and we can't do that with this project as it's going to involve an ever changing group of characters). I don't think anything longer than three words is going to work, and if we do go for a phrase rather than a word, it has to sum up some key theme of the series- Men Behaving Badly is the best example I can think of for this.

Of course, it'll be hard to name the series until you know a bit more about it. At the moment I know the most about what I want to do with it and the themes I want to explore, and I can't think of a name. So I'm not expecting miracles from you. I'll post the first draft script and some character sketches and you might begin to get some ideas.

Here's to working together.

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