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WEB SERIES: THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
08/09/2011
Organised by Cento Autori and presented by screenwriter and director Giacomo Durzi at the Venice Days venue of the Pagoda, the event entitled “New narratives and the web: the phenomenon of the web-series” takes stock of this new and little known area of audiovisual production, which is gaining ever more ground, especially among the young.
New media: this is the term used during the meeting; observing the almost definitive overtaking of traditional platforms such as television, the speakers reasserted the importance of assuming as a point of departure the acknowledgement that we live in a new transmedial context, dominated by the internet, social networks and smartphones.
This change is having important repercussions on the film market: successful films of new Italian comedy, such as Night Before Exams, for example, were promoted over 70% thorugh the internet, while multimedial resources such as the iPad, iPhone and the tablet offer a new ground for audiovisual fruition.
Screenwriter Nicola Lusuardi talks of an “extraordinary opening up of opportunities” which, apart from representing an almost unexplored and thus fruitful niche, could revolutionise audiovisual expression. “New media – Lusuardi explains - challenge a fundamental category of television: format. And, with their ubiquity, they create the category of space. We could be facing a momentous change, like the one of the TV series in the eighties, which made the public understand their ontologically different nature to cinema”.
It is against the background of this technological change that the first web series experiments have been emerging over the last two years, brief episodes filmed with low budgets, linked by narrative continuity and published on YouTube.
Among these the most famous is without a doubt Freaks!, a series of which the first episode was placed online on April 8, 2011. Created by very young youtubers, whose videos get thousands of viewings, the series had 8 million visits in the first two months. “We didn’t introduce any new ways of telling the story”, says Matteo Bruno, twenty-year-old director of Freaks!, “but rather we worked on original ways of interacting with the public. The difference between short film and web series is that while the first tries to tell a story in five minutes, the second has to make the user fall in love with five episodes”. “They wanted to do something serious, to create a product that they would have wanted to watch”, explains the head of Showreel, new business agency which produces the series; “we haven’t interfered at all in their activities. These young people are part of a generation which is tired of TV, which aims at contents capable of speaking directly the language of their own interlocutors”.
Several other similar experiments have been conducted recently: from Duemondi, by Frank Monopoli, a science-fiction series created by editing material from the public domain, to Faccialibro, a sitcom recently shown on msn.it, as well as L’altra, a social film in episodes which saw featured on Facebook fictional character Martina Diego, trapped in a library on Christmas day.
Each one of these projects has in its own way explored a space in the new area of multimedia, chancing upon new ways of telling stories and interacting with the audience. The web series hitherto produced have already shown, while still to a limited extent, what the aesthetic potentials for this infant expression are. It becomes important therefore to overcome the barriers which are clipping the wings of its full maturation, like mob limitations, and to convince authors that the internet can be “a space which meets their aesthetic expectations”, as Lusuardi, affirms, adding: “we are still waiting for an entrepreneurial world which is aware of a reality which has already been dicovered and exploited abroad.” The future of the audiovisual is already here, and is only waiting to be exploited and declined in its multiple possibilitites.
Francesco Bonerba
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