It was our 6 year web video anniversary yesterday. With that, we present, a bit of Fine Brothers history:
By September 21st, 2004 we were a year into development and production of our 3 ½ hour long trilogy of feature films “GI JOE THE EPIC SAGA”, and on that day we re-launched our website to house videos we had previously created as well as two trailers for the trilogy. “GI JOE” is a series that does show our youthful passion for the “womb state” that was web video in its crassness and vulgarity, but we were young, passionate and ready to use the internet as our discovery platform, seeing it as truly the wave of the future. Little did we know the business that would build around us, and despite our success are now “typecast” as only digital creators and are always fighting for legitimacy in traditional media’s eyes, but that’s for another blog post.
Web video at the time consisted of largely interactive fare which influenced us a great deal. The biggest influence was “Homestar Runner” which brought us our passions that remain with us to this day, which is to create full worlds and immersive experiences to surround web video content. To us, this always was the future of entertainment, where especially if you are making content specific to the web, you should be giving your audience more than just the stagnant TV like experience by just watching a video, but give them so much more. This was done in spades by Homestar Runner, while “Channel 101” accomplished this by live voting of which series continued, etc. It’s interesting to see how this early thought of ous and the way of web video back then has seemingly gone to the wayside over the years by the emerging web series community where any experience beyond the video is few and far between, and now seeing the conversation recently spark back up around the community about creating full immersive experiences, we’re happy to see that our initial feelings towards what will make web video unique was on the money even before there was the term “web series.”
We created an experience that still holds up 6 years later as unique, fun, and innovative. Sadly, as some of you know, ‘The Saga’ was ceased and desisted by Hasbro after only 12 of 17 episodes had aired, but the fans we did have got a whole lot of bells and whistles to go along with the videos. We created extra content throughout the month to keep them entertained while waiting for the next episode which took us some time since they were 10-15 minutes long each (long form content had a place back then, and it’s making a comeback now in some ways). This marked the beginning of the marketing side of our creativity, as we were releasing trailers and short form clips that we would seed to anywhere that featured content around the web in order to drive people back to the full episodes, and we also created live action sketches that drove back to the site proper. This is what brought hundreds of thousands of people to our website each month, and continues to be a huge part of our, and should be in our opinion, everyone’s skill set; true marketing that is getting your content seen and engaged by real people. Back when Alexa rankings mattered, we were a top 100,000 web site in the world, and views on the long form episodes were in the hundred thousands, with certain clips in the millions.
To celebrate our official 6th birthday, we dusted off the moth balls of the old flash built “GI JOE” office by our amazing Webmaster Wood (who can see terrorizing us in our popular “Dog Bleeper” series), to give you all a glimpse of what used to be. Keep in mind this was long ago, when there was no YouTube or any site to embed content from, so sadly, the viewing system is not operating, but when you clicked on the new episode folder on the desk, a movie projector would come down by the window, and it would zoom in to the screen as if you were watching the video in the General’s room being briefed. We would love for you all to click around on everything. We had a newspaper that updated every month with references to the show and hints to what was to come, files with bios and pictures of the major characters and were one of the first to use social networking to bring them to life (they all had MySpace pages once MySpace launched). We would have characters interact with one another on MySpace, reply to fans in character, had multiple blogs running, a way to e-mail the General, and you even at one time could use your mouse to draw on a notepad to leave notes for him on his desk. The final addition was the full of in-jokes answering machine. There is so much to explore. The last thing to remember is we were shut down, so certain images and references have to be censored for it to be active. Click here to check out the old Office.
Our sensibilities for interactivity did not stop when we were shut down. Old fans of ours will remember our show that was a weekly “Survivor” parody where the audience got to choose each week who got voted “out of the garage” and then sold on Ebay the very same week. More people would probably remember the more recent pilot that we created for Comedy Central’s Atom.com that took web series interactivity to a whole new level that in our opinion almost no one else has come close to achieving. For those of you not familiar, the series took place entirely on a college student’s fictional social network page which was designed to be a mash of Facebook and MySpace, where herself and her “top friends” all “came to life” whenever she would log off of her page and discuss her life, and have adventures. The show’s engagement came from the that we built that let you not only explore the page just as it appeared in the video, but allow you to become part of that world where every character had a profile, a blog, e-mail, comments, etc. you could even become their “buddy” and upload your own picture and link to your own social network profile. This was done so detailed that we had hundreds of e-mails telling us the site was broken because the “sign up” button took them to an “about” page, which was the idea, it wasn’t real, but people wanted it to be and thought it was and hence we had to remove that button.
We went to painstaking detail to make almost everything clickable and full of in jokes. To break down just how well it did, people spent an average of 9 minutes on the microsite, nearly double the amount of time of the video itself. In the end, despite a big view count, and over 30,000 comments on the video at Atom.com, the series was not picked up for a season, again showing at the time, continued disconnect of the value of engagement. The series is now something we’ve adapted into a television format to try to bring that level of web immersion to a larger audience and help usher in new ways ancillary content of TV series are delivered, but time will tell if we get fortunate enough to get that opportunity.
To create these worlds and experiences is tough, time consuming, and costs. With both The Saga and My Profile Story it was just the 2 of us and our webmaster doing everything for free to keep the web components running, and as you can imagine, it was rough writing all of these blogs, responding to comments and e-mails every single day, but we strongly feel this is the future of how to make things work online. YouTube’s success is for a multitude of reasons, but the massive success stories is a form of interactivity in itself with how personal everyone is with their audience, same kind of thing, but more personal than creative at times- and we strive to accomplish both (like Homestar and Channel101).
All of this led us to yesterday, on our anniversary, as we released our biggest and most ambitious interactive experience within YouTube to date in our American Idol Interactive Experience in which the viewer chooses one at a time which 3 judges out of 6 they want to see in a parody sketch, and then like magic (YouTube annotation magic!), their custom video is presented to them, and they can go back and mix and match over and over and enjoy it all. This is 21 full sketches within one interactive environment. To make it work, we had to create 36 additional graphic heavy videos to link it all together and bring it to life. This continues our work from our ‘Lindsay Lohan Courtroom Game’ and “8Bit Twilight” projects as we continue to try to raise the bar with interactive content online, and will not be the last time we try to push the tools to the limit to create new and immersive experiences within something we can manage easier than something ongoing like our previous work when we don’t have the funding to pull it off.
We’re passionate about interactivity and immersion, and hope you enjoyed this look at our past, and our latest project. The landscape of web video these past six years have changed more than we could have possibly imagined, and continues to evolves every day, and hence we continue to adapt every day.
We thank those of you who have been with us for the ride over the years, and are excited to continue to push the envelope with the hopes to take everything we have learned from being in the dirt of the early stages of this new platform and bring it all to traditional media if and when we get the chance to do so. We hope to do this not just for ourselves, but to bring attention and excitement to the possibilities the internet provides to take even TV and Film to new places that will change the landscape of entertainment and media moving forward. It truly is an exciting time.
Thanks for reading, keep in touch, and we’ve provided all the links mentioned in this blog here at the bottom for quick navigation.
Benny & Rafi Fine
Click here for the all new American Idol Interactive Experience
Click here to play with the Old “GI JOE” Office
Click here to watch My Profile Story
Click here to play on the My Profile Story web site
Click here for the Lindsay Lohan Courtooom game
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