Web series: do they have a future?

They recently wrote about the fact that they almost never make films about IT-shnik and do not write books. Well, "BOFH", well, "notes of the bride programmer." And the movies? And it turned out that they exist, just few people know about them. They are not shown in the cinema, and they do not advertise on TV, they are not translated into Russian, but they exist.

It all started with the "scene". The story described in How to make a fascinating cyber series ... had a very unexpected continuation, which I will tell you now. During the translation of this series, I discovered a lot of unusual, rare and interesting works of art. I will briefly dwell only on those that are related to IT-topics, and only on TV shows.

Under the cut - a story about how I learned about them, links and screenshots.

Amateur work

The previous story ended with the fact that I addressed the moderator of the series with the question of why it cannot be placed in the series section. He replied that the point here is that this is an amateur job.
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I must say that I myself then thought what his fans did. After all, what company, especially the American one, will decide to make a film about those who pirate films? However, for the sake of interest, I decided to google what kind of people they were. And he was very surprised when he discovered that the director and half of the actors have profiles on IMDB, and some had more than 10 films.

But most importantly, it turned out that the independent producers of the series tried to implement a new economic model. Now they are talking a lot about how authors could earn money without copyright, in conditions of free copying of everything that can be copied. That was what they thought about then, in 2004, when they started shooting the “scene”. And it was far from the only experiment of this director. The idea was this: find a sponsor, insert contextual advertising into the film, and distribute it for free. They posted it on all the networks popular at the time: Bittorrent, E-Donkey, Gnutella. The idea of ​​advertising is certainly not new, but here they considered it as the only source of funding, since they were not going to make money from selling copies of the film itself. It was, if not the first, then one of the first films, which was completely legally distributed through the p2p network. Now you won't surprise anyone with a kickstarter, and 8 years ago it was very unusual.

What came of it? In the case of the scene, the sponsor was a company selling skateboards. In episode 1, the protagonist “as if by chance” visited their website. In another mini-web series “Marcus Hates His Job,” the sponsor was Sprite. I admit honestly, I myself, fascinated by the plot, did not notice at first how significant they were to drink it. However, this was immediately apparent to many, and if you pay attention, it looks pretty ridiculous.


The film itself is a comedy. Light, vivid pictures of the lives of people in a large corporation, where, of course, there are computer scientists who know what they do all day. I will not give here screenshots of the best moments, so as not to spoil the impression from viewing. A sort of a short mix of “IT-crowd” and “Office Space”, in general, I liked the series, although there are only 3 episodes in it.

Web series?

And so, I came back and told all this to the moderator. He replied that this was certainly good, but the main thing was that the “scene” was, in general, a web series, and the series were all the same what was shown on TV. Well, what can you do, the rules are the rules, I thought.

However, I decided for the sake of interest to find out what else in the world were web series. It turned out that at least 200 of them had already been filmed for 2012. A far from complete list is available on Wikipedia, and much of it has any relation to computers, in particular games. The most famous web series "Red vs. Blue ”(2003-2012) is also the longest. 10 seasons have already been shot, it continues to this day.

Web series are very different, usually low-budget or generally amateur works, most of them have never been translated into Russian. Looking through their list, I came across a TV series based on the Fallout: Nuclear smoke break game. It turned out he was translated into Russian. I watched episode 1 on YouTube, the usual guys, apparently fans of the series, decided to make a film, at first glance an unsightly amateur show.

Taking into account what the moderator said to me, I thought: “well, there can be no such thing on the rutracker”. And yet decided to check. What was my surprise when it turned out that he was there, and in the "serials" section! Then I decided to study the issue in more detail. Little by little, 4 more web series were discovered on the rutracker. Each of them was unique in its own way, and I did not cease to be surprised, discovering all the new works. In a week, there were already 10 positions on this list. Then, considering how difficult it was to find them, I decided to create a theme where I listed all the available web series translated into Russian. It currently has 34 points. There you can watch all the TV series mentioned here:

rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4081042

I will dwell only on two of them. One of the early cult works in this area was Computermen (2003).



As a result of an accident in the house of a simple web programmer, a hybrid of a computer and a person appeared. A man in shorts, with a monitor on his head. Can you imagine something more ridiculous? However, this touching story with ultra-cheap special effects is made so distinctively that it is simply impossible to pass by it. Unfortunately, over time, the authors ended fantasy, but the first 2-3 series will be interesting to see anyone who is familiar with computers, especially old ones.

The complete business opposite of "computer" is the upcoming H + series , with the support of not just anyone, but Warner Brothers.



In the near future, a way was invented to embed social networks directly into the spinal cord. And at the same time the ability to directly control all the systems of your body, like a computer. Episodes of the series are short scenes from the life of the characters, torn from different times and different places around the globe. The idea as a whole is so unusual that part of the audience is scolded by the authors for not understanding anything, too many riddles and understatements, and the other part indignant that the plot is too trivial and the dialogues too banal. The authors conceived the series as an interactive puzzle game: every week they throw several episodes to the audience, as well as additional photo, video and text materials that add interest to the view.

Screencast

And again I returned to the moderator and told him about it. He repeated that his opinion had not changed. This time the reason was that in this unusual film we see for the most part a computer screen. And although I was almost certain that no one in the world had done anything like this, he nevertheless tried to search. And then my eyes appeared very outlandish specimens.

Donnie and his “ You Suck at Photoshop ” were first discovered.



No one has ever seen Donny, we see only the screen of his computer, where he shows how to actually use Photoshop. Periodically, he otbrykivaetsya from his wife, and on Skype to him sticks friend, with whom they play all day in WoW. Donnie's unspeakable intonations are combined with non-childish jokes and peculiarities of national folklore.

Another example: Web Therapy . A woman who calls herself a psychologist conducts Skype therapy sessions. We see her desktop, with two windows of video chat, where she talks with her patients, occasionally something Google about Freud.



Finally, I was prompted by another series, “the Website is down” .



How to brighten up a hard working day? Laying out icons on the screen, playing sapper, where 93% of the field is occupied by mines (maximum settings), and of course, breeding viruses in the organization's local network. I managed to find a Russian translation of only the 1 and 3 episodes, in case someone else did not hear about it, here is the post of 2008.

So in the end it turned out that neither is done, then for the better. It was because the series was forbidden that I began to dig, and incredible things were found. And it’s even more incredible that it happened three times, and each time the discoveries were more unusual. I have no doubt that there are many more surprises in this direction. Internet cinema will obviously grow rapidly, on the one hand, because more and more often it is difficult for a person to concentrate on watching for longer than 5-10 minutes (and this is the average length of one web episode or web movie), on the other hand , because of the opportunities offered to anyone who wants to make their own film, and most importantly, to show it to everyone. And we will see what happens. Enjoy watching.