How To Make a Web Series (An Experiment)

How To Make A Web Series

I’m excited to announce that tomorrow I start production on my second web series.

It’s been in the works for awhile, but the timing hasn’t been right until now. I’m going to keep the details fairly low-key, but I will say that it’s another unscripted/non-fiction series.

My goal is to use all the stuff I learned from over two years of Hilah Cooking to see if I can ramp this one up fast. It might be a colossal and embarrassing FAILURE, but I have a feeling it’s going quickly find its audience.

I won’t be writing about the project here on the site until it actually launches. I like to keep the content here focused on that I’ve extensively tested – things I know definitely work.

But if you’re interested in following along behind-the-scenes as we create a web show from scratch, I’m going to write about the whole experience in a series of free weekly e-mails. I’ll be writing everything I’m doing to build the show as it’s happening.

The reason I’m doing the How To Make a Web Series project via e-mail is that I probably won’t want it to exist in a permanent archive. This is an experiment. You’ll get to read about all the failures as well as the successes.

The series will go into into excruciating details about nerdy things like: production, post-production, branding, search engine optimization, niche selection, distribution, monetization, partnerships and a bunch of other stuff. I’ll try to make it as interesting as possible.

If you’re interested in following along as we create a web series from scratch, sign up using the form below. The email series starts next week!

Click Here to Subscribe!

YouTube Next – The Gear

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One of the highlights of 2011 was being selected as one of the winners of the YouTube Next Chef program.

The Next Chef program evolved out of YouTube’s NextUp Program. Basically, the idea is to cultivate the next wave of up and coming talent on YouTube. The original program was not focused on a specific content niche. The second wave focused on cooking and fitness. The goal of the program is to help content creators take things to the “next” level and ultimately make a full-time living via YouTube.

As part of the program, winners received $5,000 worth of gear, training sessions conducted via Google Hangout and $10,000 in YouTube advertising.

The eagerly awaited box of gear from YouTube

Since I am a geek, I was most excited about the new gear. We shot for a year and a half on very low-end gear. It was an intentional decision to work with what we had and it worked for us for almost 100 episodes.

But, I was starting to get a little restless. After hanging out with some shooters for the Food Network (and ogling their gear), I really wanted to make the transition to shooting with DSLRs. When we heard that we would be getting $5,000 of gear from YouTube, I decided to just wait and see. The gear was selected by YouTube and we didn’t know what we would be getting until the boxes from B&H Photo arrived. My fingers were crossed that a DLSR would be in the mix.

Here’s an overview of what was in the first box to give you an idea of what YouTube apparently thinks is a good starter kit.

Some of their choices were kind of interesting.

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The End of Phase One

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We recently hit two important milestones with Hilah Cooking.

#1. We released Learn to Cook – our first digital book.

#2. We released our 100th episode. We’ve produced a new episode pretty much every Tuesday (except during our summer vacation).

With these two milestones, we’ve completed Phase one of our initial plan.

The Halloween episode in post-production.

Yes, there has actually been a plan all along.

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Leveling Up – Building an Audience Is Kind of Like Playing a Video Game

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We launched Hilah Cooking about a year and a half ago and we’re still going strong. In fact, we’re going stronger than ever. I thought this seemed like as good a time as any to update everybody on our progress and share a few more audience building tips that we’ve learned along the way.

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Taking a Web Show Into The Real World

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This post is about 2 months late, but the launch of Season 2 of Hilah Cooking has completely overwhelmed my world. Things are going really well with the show and as we approach our one-year anniversary we have managed to hit all the milestones I put into the original crazy “business plan.” From the very beginning, I wanted to do some kind of “live” event.

The Mouth Party Bar: sponsored by Tito's Vodka, Deep Eddy Sweet Tea and El Gran Jubileo Tequila

There were a few reasons for this:

  • We wanted to thank our viewers. We have a seriously awesome audience and we thought a cool party with free food and drink would be a great way to say thanks for supporting what we’re doing. But even more than that, we wanted to meet some of the people we’ve been corresponding with via email and blog comments.
  • Real world event = added legitimacy. When everything is on a computer screen, it’s easy to forget that a web project is something real. We saw the event as a way of publicly telling everybody that we are serious about what we do and we’re only getting started.
  • An opportunity to give back to the community. This was a not-for-profit event designed to raise money for the Sustainable Food Center. The SFC is a great organization with a mission to strengthen the local food system and provide access to nutritious affordable food.

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