MAKING A WEB SERIES

Making a web series has presented some challenges and has been an interesting process, so far. ‘Mother’ started off as ‘The Last Reward’ and was developed into ‘Mother’. The development had the added addition of Maori culture and art works as well as story developments changing the main storyline.

"Mother' is a series about a world where magic exists that is used by women but men can not use it. There are also different regions in this world that have conflict with each other. A woman called Aasha has an orphan child, Mikah, from a conflicting region and is bringing her up as her own. Aasha holds onto a secret that could potentially harm her relationship with the child. This season tells the story of how Aasha and Mikah came to be together and slowly unfolds the secret that Aasha has held close to herself.

‘Mother’ has actually been in the making for approximately a year and a half. Jade has been building the assets needed to make the web series. Over the past year and a half, she has designed all the characters and drawn orthographics for them. From these orthographics, she has modelled, textured and rigged all the characters that appear in the animation, as well as making some generic characters to be used as background characters. Jade has also modelled and created props and the environments (world) that will be used in the animation. Now that Jade has sorted all of that, she has started to animate the first episode which is labour intensive and time consuming. Ideally, Jade and I would like to have the first episode ready to accompany a funding proposal that we are also working on.

A friend of ours, Sarah Dewbery, has come on board as the VFX Supervisor. Sarah will be in charge of anything to do with visual effects in the project. She is a talented and conscientious animator and is great at what she does. Sarah has already started to sort out some of the visual effects and is making Jade’s animation look even more amazing!

As the producer, I have sourced voice artists for the project, posted on forums to advertise for voice artists, collected auditions, sent a glorious amount of e-mails, written contracts, set up Skype rehearsals, written proposals, sorted budgets and tried to organise social media sites to promote the project. I have listened to so many show reels for potential voice artists that by the end of it, all of them started to sound the same as all the ones I had listened to previously. Also, some people did not read the information that I had provided in the forum advertisements and also in the e-mails that I would accompany the scripts that I had sent. Listening to numerous show reels and people not reading things properly were two of the biggest frustrations that I had with the process of trying to find voice artists. On the bright side of things, the voice artists that could potentially fill the role that I was looking for, stood out like sore thumbs and made all of that frustration change into excitement.

Thankfully, we have finalised four of our voice artists and they are great. We have three from America and one from the UK, so rehearsals with them have been very interesting. Jade and I are in New Zealand, so there are a few different time zones to accommodate in a rehearsal. This usually results in Jade and I having to Skype call our voice artists at around 2 or 3am our time but given that it is our project, it is the sacrifice that we are willing to make. We are thankful to have the voice artists that we have because without them, we may not have a project.

We are currently writing a proposal to apply for funding from NZ on Air through their digital media web series fund. There is tough competition for this funding and we actually applied for the fund last year but were unsuccessful. Since then, we have developed the ideas and the proposal significantly and researched a lot of information to bulk up what we had previously. To help with funding we plan on launching a crowd funding campaign through Pledge Me. Approximately a year ago, we ran a Kickstarter crowd funding campaign and while we were not officially funded through Kickstarter, we were given the money that we were asking for through one sponsor, who gave us the full amount because they wanted us to succeed with this project. Our Pledge Me campaign will be to raise funds, so that we are able to pay a composer to compose the music for the series. Our target is to have the campaign up and running within the next two weeks. I will share the link on this blog when it is finally up and running.

So, everything is all go at the moment and as the deadline for the funding application gets closer, I  can only imagine that we will be met with more challenges. Fingers crossed that our Pledge Me campaign goes well and we get the money that we are asking for and hopefully that first episode will be able to accompany our funding proposal. Watch this space! Amazing things to come!