Machinimania

As brand new shows found audiences online, established web series had already proved the viability of the medium as a career launchpad: Broad City, a New York-based comedy about best friends Ilana and Abbi, was picked up by Comedy Central; Children’s Hospital, a kind of nightmarish Scrubs, is now shown on Adult Swim; and Burning Love, a Ben Stiller spoof of The Bachelor, won an Emmy. They all began as online series, in the wild west web, where anything goes.

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If television is the brash younger sibling of cinema, then online web series are its screaming newborn grandchildren. As it's a medium still very much in its infancy, a whole host of questions remain unanswered. How long should an episode be? How do you keep fickle viewers coming back for more? Will they ever make any money? Until those answers are found, online filmmakers will continue to explore the possibilities of the nascent form, occasionally with wonderful results. Here are the best examples from 2013.

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Victoria wanted to try to translate the experience of her favourite video games to film – where players don’t just have one pathway to follow, but can go out and explore a vast world.  She came up with the idea of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  The idea of the protagonist being a panda started as a rhyming joke – Wastelander Panda! – and became more serious over time

I just love the way these guys are thinking :

“It’s such a wild, wooly world out there in online video,” says Hullum. “We don’t really think of competition in that capacity.” He describes an employee of the company they found through videos he’d made that were similar to the ones Rooster Teeth makes. “We could have been, like, Oh, this guy’s trying to do what we’re doing,” he says in a mock-disappointed voice. “Instead, we said, Oh, this guy’s doing cool stuff like we do! Let’s talk to him! And he’s a great guy to have on the team.”

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From the comments: 

"A great lay of the land. And in doing so, this points out in bright neon letters what is wrong with the vast majority of web series today" -

Very inspiring reading -