TV Angel

In part two of our discussion, Afterworld co-creator Brent Friedman talks about Gemini Division, partnering with NBC, and what’s unique about digital storytelling.

TVA: You’ve referred to the internet as a type of farm system. Do you think that, for all the talk of the independence that the internet allows, you’re always going to need the major studios for this type of production?

BF: I think, certainly in the near term, yes. I think that just even from a marketing standpoint alone, there are things that the big studios do and do well that there’s no way to do on your own. And I think that it also helps legitimize you for brand sponsorship. When you say to a company like Cisco or Intel we’re going to do this show and we’re going to do it in connection with NBC and Sony, it legitimizes the property.

As well as, in Gemini Division, we have Rosario Dawson starring in it. So for her and for big corporations there’s a comfort. We’re doing new, cutting edge, pioneering digital media, but there’s some names associated with it that give everyone a certain level of comfort.

I think the farm system idea is still very valid. The thing to think of is, when we made Afterworld, and we are now making Gemini Division, we imagined them and designed them to be big movies, big television shows, video games, graphic novels. We designed them to be franchises. But what we’re doing is, use the internet, use the digital medium, to create the animatics (a typed of storyboard) of the franchise, to develop it with a window out to the world.

We’re not saying that this version of Afterworld is the final iteration. We want it to be the animatic or the storyboard of what it could be. And if it works and people like the content, it motivates the bigger companies to turn around and say, ‘This is a great franchise, let’s turn it into a movie. Let’s turn it into a game. Let’s turn it into a TV series.’ So in that way, we’re doing a very low cost interactive development of our franchise.

What I’ve always said is, we’re incubating our intellectual property online. If it works, it will get grown up the food chain to more conventional forms of media, more expensive forms of media. If it doesn’t work, we think we have a business model in place where it’s not just spending money to incubate your intellectual property. We actually can make money incubating it, versus a studio system which says hey, ‘We’ve got a great idea. We’re going to develop a screenplay.’ And they do that in-house with a bunch of writers over a period of three years and they spend millions of dollars and nothing happens with it.

We’re doing that. We’re just attaching low-fi or low-cost visuals to our screenplay and disseminating it all over the world. If it works it’ll get greenlit and turned into something more substantial. If it doesn’t, well, we’ve had a good time doing it, we haven’t done it behind closed doors and we’ve actually made money doing it.

TVA: Let’s talk a little about your new project, Gemini Division. That’s going to be live action but it’s going to incorporate a lot of animated elements. How did you make that choice?

BF: A couple of things. One was, once we realized we have Rosario Dawson, we thought, well, yes, great that we can use her voice, but she was actually willing to use…herself – her likeness, her face. It seemed like, well, hold on a second. If we have her, we should be using her. She becomes our greatest production value. We had a very ambitious show in mind so we couldn’t do the whole thing live action. So we wanted to figure out a way to tell a story that would feel organic to have both live action and animation.

What you’ll see is it’s a very unique, stylized hybrid of live action and animation that owes a lot to something like Sin City. It’s kind of like something you’ve never seen before. Again, it goes back to: What would television not do? They would never do a show like this! So that’s what we’re leading into. It’s hard to describe because anything I described would be confusing. Everyone that has seen what we’re doing basically says, ‘This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

It was that and it was also the amount of effort and energy it took to animate Afterworld. We realized shooting some component of the show in live action is easier, especially if you do it in a very focused way. So a lot of the spine of every episode in Gemini Division is just Rosario talking to the camera because the whole show is told through her PDA. That’s not the whole episode by any means. But knowing that 25% of every episode is Rosario Dawson, in some form or other, talking to a camera, well that makes the show 25% easier to shoot, or to produce, I should say. (laughs)

TVA: Gemini Division is going to be 50 four minute episodes. How did you decide how much to cut back from the 130 episodes [of Afterworld]?

BF: It’s funny, on one hand I just looked at: At what point did I run out of gas on Afterworld? About 50 episodes! (laughs)

But one of the things that’s happening with Afterworld, and I think will happen with the rest of our content is, some of the episodes get compiled into larger chunks. So with Afterworld, for instance, they were able to take five episodes, cut out the intros and outros and make twelve or thirteen minutes of content. Then you throw on an ad or two and you can make a fifteen minute programming block in certain territories for broadcast television. And you can do the same thing with ten episodes and with some ads get 30 minutes. In some territories the show ran as 30-minute episodes. And out of 130 [episodes] you’re able to get 13 [30-minute episodes], which is a basic programming number. I think the way the formula works is, you can probably get with Gemini Division seven half hours of television.

TVA: There was an article at Hollywood Reporter that quoted one of your business partners, Stan Rogow. One of the things he mentioned is that Gemini Division would never jump straight from the internet to television, but what NBC can do is develop an original television series based on the story, if they choose that option. Is that a lesson learned from quarterlife, about internet series not really being able to make that transition so readily?

BF: Well, yeah, there was a cautionary tale to what happened with quarterlife. But it also goes back to what I had mentioned earlier. We’re not making something that is designed to be ready for primetime. Again, we’re making stuff that’s not what television would do. It allows us to be more experimental with how we present our stories. That’s a more practical approach for the micro budgets that we’re working with.

If we had to produce something that would hold up and stand up and work on television, we couldn’t. We couldn’t tell the type of stories that we’re telling. So rather than trying to do that, let’s just make content that is uniquely created for and suited to the digital medium. And if in some territories it gets recompiled and aired on broadcast television, OK.

But the idea is, and certainly in regards to NBC, they want to see if the franchise works, if it gains traction, if people like it. They want to see if the intellectual property that has any value to it that would then prompt them to turn around and say, hey, people really like Gemini Division.. They really like the characters, they like the story, they like the world. Let’s turn it into a live action TV show and shoot it like a live action TV show and go back and take the world that’s been created and some of the storylines and adapt it into a more conventional medium.

And Rosario was very smart because she made a deal where she has the option to stay with the show as it moves into other media. So if she wants to be the star of the Gemini Division TV show she has the first right to decide that. If she wants to be the star of a movie she has the first right to decide that. If she opts out of either of those choices, she stays on as a producer because she has invested into the franchise itself.

TVA: You mentioned not wanting to tell the same type of story that you can tell on the internet. What do you think is inherently different about the type of story you can tell on the internet, as opposed to one that you tell on television or in a feature film?

BF: Afterworld is told from one person’s point of view. If you look at most TV shows, they tend to become more ensemble things. To sustain people’s interest for an hour you have to cut around to other characters and other points of view. Whereas, in the course of 2 to 3 or 4 minutes, you can tell a story from one person’s point of view and you can intimately get to know that character and they form a relationship with the audience. But you don’t really see that in television.

Another thing is to create compelling stories in that short amount of time frame they have to be completely compressed. So we do a lot of stuff where not only are there, if there’s just one point of view and there’s a lot of single character narration, or in the case of Gemini one character talking to the camera, we end up using a lot of elliptical storytelling where we jump around. Time gets very compressed and we end up cutting out the bread and butter of television, which is talking scenes, talking head scenes.

We felt that, and having worked in television a lot I can genuinely say, we felt that five episodes of Afterworld told as much plot as a traditional hour of television. There were the exact same number of plot beats, if not more, in our five episodes, which was the equivalent of not even fifteen minutes, as there were in the forty-plus minutes of a one hour drama. And we didn’t even have the ads.

So we felt that we were a much more distilled and compressed form of narrative that is unique to this medium. It’s something that’s more conducive to daily viewing. You know, you wait a week to see a new episode of 24 or Lost, possibly weeks, depending on preemption and all the other stuff. We wanted this to be a daily experience, where you go and get your dose of Afterworld or Gemini any way that you want, whenever you want, and where you want.

TVA: Do you think the internet is uniquely suited to the creation of a franchise because of the global distribution and the multi-platform digital technologies that are available? Do you think that’s what the internet has really brought to storytelling?

BF: I think for us, absolutely. That is one of the key reasons we’re doing what we’re doing, is the promise of that, of using the internet and its various extensions into mobile and even how it’s now starting to creep into television. There are a lot of new devices coming out that are all about how to take your hi-def screen and hook your computer up to it and be able to watch your digital downloads on it. The internet is becoming the nexus of everything. Our feeling is great, let’s just run everything through that.

That, I think, is why you’re seeing a lot of the big media companies forming digital divisions and figuring out how to get into this sandbox, because I think everyone knows that’s where it’s all heading. If you want to make a movie or you want to make some piece of content, if it’s good, you can probably make money off of it and you can probably get it out to the world and not have to go through what used to be the traditional routes of the movie studios and the television networks. We’re not there yet but I think we’re heading there. And I think the more people start doing what we’re doing, the more it’s going to force the issue. And once people see that there’s money here, the more [research and development] funds will be spent to upgrade and create new technologies that will enable this even further.