My good friend and fellow indie director/producer Jen Thym shot a web series on a Red in Hong Kong last winter and is in post-production editing now. Jen’s an ex-banker, ex-lawyer, comic book artist, gamer, writer and all-around Renaissance woman. Her hot new self-edited trailer went live tonight:
In addition to YouTube, Jen’s building friends, fans and followers for Lumina on Facebook and the influential local fan site, AliveNotDead. I did an email interview with Jen last week, where she gets into the details of how she’s executing on the same urge I have: produce excellent content with high production values, cut out the middlemen/friction/delays, and distribute straight to the “long tail” of my audience, thinly distributed across the globe. Go, Jen go!
1. DC: Tell us about Lumina. What’s it about and what format is it?
JT: LUMINA is a fantasy web series written and directed by me, and starring JuJu and Michael Chan. It’s about a young Hong Kong woman who meets and falls in love with a mysterious man that she sees in her mirror. And like any good fairy tale, he is not what he seems. Although the story is ostensibly about a parallel fantasy realm, it’s also an allegory for the murky field of online relationships.
The first season of LUMINA will be 8 to 10 webisodes, each being about 5 minutes. The webisodes will be free to view on YouTube, and will feature a great soundtrack including music from the indie collective, the Enigmatic Army. If fans like it (and we’re hoping they will, everyone has poured so much love into this project), then we will have a higher resolution format with extras on DVD for sale at the conclusion of the series.
2. DC: Tell us about the production? How did you cast and shoot it?
JT: I met model and actress JuJu when I first started looking into the filming world in July of 2008. She was a friend of a gaming friend, and we clicked from the start. I pitched the LUMINA project to her at our first meeting, and she stayed attached to the project through its various incarnations and extreme story revisions. I have never met someone so cheerful and hardworking as JuJu, and I’m really honored to have her on the series.
To find the rest of our cast, we held open auditions in Hong Kong and we met a lot of lovely people during that process. Sometimes an actor would walk in and he or she would just be the character, like Michael Chan was Ryder Lee – he just had something magical about him, like he walked off the pages of a manga. Vince Matthew Chung, winner of the Amazing Race Asia 3 and all around funny CB Fresh guy, made an instantly likeable, sweet and adorable Teddy. Other times, we liked an actor so much that we modified the character to fit the actor. Emilie Guillot was a great example of that – she just walked in and blew us away. I originally envisioned Laetitia as an older Asian woman, but after meeting Emilie, that changed. And I’m glad it did.
As for crew, most were friends or friends of friends, and we formed a tight knit group. I met my producer Sommer Nguyen at an HK networking event called SpeakUp! a few weeks before we started preproduction. If you’re going to spend 18 hours a day with someone, it better be with someone you get along with!
We then had about six weeks of preproduction, and at the end of November 2008, we went headfirst into two weeks of almost nonstop filming. Shortly before the shoot started, our fantastic DP team, XiaoSu Han and Andreas Thalhammer, bought a RED One camera and that got the whole cast and crew excited because it brought the production up to a whole new level. I loved what Xax and Andy could do with an HVX with an adaptor & lenses, so it was going to be just awesome what they could do with a RED! And everyone needed that excitement to get them through the gruelling schedule, but it was worth every minute of it. We shot all over Hong Kong, and we also looked for the stranger corners, the bits of Hong Kong that you don’t always see in Hollywood films.
It’s also amazing how many reflections there are once you start looking for them.
3. DC: Why did you choose a web series for your directorial debut, rather than a short or a feature?
JT: When I got serious about making films, I researched the typical entry process for new filmmakers. Most sites recommended making a short film and entering it into a variety of film festivals. I started meeting people who had done that, and some had even gotten awards for their short films, but almost no one had anything readily available for me to see. A few had demoreels online, but those were usually poorly compressed or such tiny snippets that you couldn’t really get a feel for what the actual film was about. It made me think about this process and whether there were any good alternatives available.
I felt that a web series would be a good and more modern foray into the entertainment industry. It’s still about connecting with an audience, and about getting your name out there to the public; on top of that, the end product is tailormade for web viewing and will be there as long as the site is up. I am also a long time fan of a gamer web series called The Guild and I thought, why not try something along those lines?
4. DC: As you wrote it (and as you edit it now) what do you see as differences in how you make a feature versus a web series?
JT: The main difference for me is the relative complexity of the storytelling that is available to you. In a typical 90 minute feature film intended for the cinema, you only have once chance to tell the story, and if the audience didn’t understand a critical scene that occurs early on, you’ve lost them for the rest of the time they’re sitting there. Now, compare that to a comic: you can get wilder and more complicated stories, because the reader can go, “hey, what just happened?” and reread the page or even flip back a few pages, to reread something that happened earlier. A TV series is somewhere in between the two mediums; I think very complex shows like 24 and Lost are, however, best viewed on DVD, because you get the episodes back to back and you can pause and rewind at will. Web series also fall into that in-between category, but we’ve upped the ante a bit – each 5 minute webisode has to be captivating on its own as well as help tell the overall story!
5. DC: When do we get to see it?
JT: The trailer for LUMINA will be out by the end of the month. I’m hoping to have the series ready by summer 2009.
6. DC: What’s your business/distribution model?
JT: The magic question! With the internet, it’s a bit chicken and egg. People are used to finding free entertainment on the web, so it’s hard to charge for an internet view unless you are already very well known; and even then, you’re still likely to find pirated versions of you out there competing with you.
On LUMINA, we’re going with the fan supported business model, which basically goes like this: Viewing is free. If you like us and want to support us, please spread the word about us and, if you’re feeling really generous, buy our mechandise. Webcomics have succeeded on this model with varying degrees of success – Penny Arcade probably being the most famous of these – and they even have a themed convention called PAX now, next year I’m sure they’re going to host a panel on the moon or something! On the music side, Nine Inch Nails did something similar by giving away Ghosts for free, and then selling limited editions of the CD, concert tickets, and so forth.
7. DC: How would define success for this project?
JT: If people enjoy watching LUMINA, then it’s already a success in my eyes. If people like us enough to help us get a season two of LUMINA made, then that’s even better! Everyone involved in the project really loves filmmaking, and being able to make a living from doing what you love would be the best outcome any of us could ask for.
8. DC: What were your inspirations, both for the content (story/style) and form (web series)?
JT: I loved the humor and geeky charm of the web series The Guild, as well as the snarky gamer humor in webcomics like Applegeeks, Megatokyo and Penny Arcade. I like the complex and layered story arcs in 24, Lost, Heroes and Prison Break.
I am a huge cyberpunk fan as well, starting with, of course, Bladerunner, and moving into writers such as William Gibson, Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shiner. Alternate realities, parallel universes, the near and dark future – cross that with a strong gaming streak (Final Fantasy XI, old school MUDs like Dark and Shattered Lands) and love for comics (Elfquest, Sandman) and manga (Angel Sanctuary, Love Hina), and I guess you get me.
Form wise, we were venturing into new territory, a dramatic fantasy web series on an indie budget – we have to make that part up as we go.
9. DC: Where can be people find out more about Lumina? and sign up to get the latest news?
JT: We have a dedicated website – www.luminaseries.com, and the series, as well as many of the actors in the series, have individual pages on a great entertainment site called AlivenotDead: www.alivenotdead.com/luminaseries. Or you can click here for our RSS feed.
10. DC: Next project?
JT: I’ve got an action film in the works! And I’m very excited by the idea of 3D films – though it would be even more awesome to have the accompanying holodecks to play them of course.
Also, check out Jen’s own blog, Manimanimas.
