Randy
Thomas and I were joking one day about the potentially amusing situations that
could arise at a Las Vegas wedding chapel and that turned into an idea for a
live action situation comedy called "A-1 Wedding Chapel." We wrote
several episodes and approached our first choice for the series star but he
wouldn't even look at a script without going through the "proper
channels" which means the hoops of fire you're supposed to jump through to
play the game in Hollywood.
We put that idea on the back burner
and came up with another sitcom concept about a struggling sound effects
company and the wacky people who worked there. That was written with an old
friend of mine in mind for the star, someone who had movie, TV and Broadway
credits that might make a network take interest but we hadn't been in touch for
quite a few years and I found it difficult to communicate with her again so
that project also got put on the shelf.
The traditional TV "pilot"
pitch is an incredibly difficult process and a crowded field where even Emmy
award winners have a tough time getting an appointment. With no television
track record and no professional representation our chances were less than
zero. That's when we thought of the idea to produce a pilot episode as a
cartoon. That we could afford to do and it would demonstrate our concept more
effectively than just submitting a script and trying to explain what the show
would be like. Unfortunately neither of our concepts seemed to be terribly
appropriate in an animated form. They were meant to be live action situation
comedies and felt odd when I tried to turn them into something else.
That's when the idea to create a
series specifically designed to be animated came to be. We wanted something
that would take advantage of the fact that it was being animated, something
that worked better as an animated show so "Drake Thornton: Monster
Hunter" was born.
Our brilliant idea was to produce
the whole first season ourselves and then offer it to a television network as a
completed package. Unfortunately we still had no foot in the door and no
contacts in the business so pitching a completed series was going to be no
easier than pitching a script. It started to become obvious that what we needed
was exposure, even if that meant "giving away" the whole first season
for nothing.
It was honestly a difficult and
painful decision to turn "Drake Thornton: Monster Hunter" into a free
web series. That amount of time, effort and money that goes into creating a
single 20-minute episode is staggering. Yet being well into production of the
first season with no clear commercial distribution channel in sight made the web
the only logical place to go. As painful as the thought of never getting paid
anything for all that hard work is the thought of no one ever seeing the show
was even more painful.
The bright side of the equation is
that the show is created with no outside interference. Each episode is exactly
what we want it to be. That kind of artistic freedom is hard to put a price on.
It is quite possible for a web
series to become "discovered" by Hollywood and future seasons picked
up for distribution. It hasn't happened a lot yet but it has happened. That's
ultimately what we hope will happen with this show but it's a long way from
uploading a few episodes of a funky cartoon to landing a deal with a network.
One way or the other it's bound to be an interesting experience.
Scott
Freiheit
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