Webseries

[punee]

I've approached a local Studio for a webseries production.



I thought of some thing related to gene mutation and have come up with the following characterisation.

Manipal University,2011.Freshers just came in.Among them are a brother and sister.They have been waiting for this time for all their life.The time when they can finally leave their home and have a proper college life.Their father is a crazy , mad scientist(Atleast they think so!) who while researching on mutation created some accidentally made some mutogens get into his kids and they have now developed special abilites.


The guy is Clairvoyant, i.e he can actually read through people's mind and their instincts.His sister is retrocognant, i.e she can get information about a person/place/event's past instantly.They hate their father for two reasons
1)He killed their mom
2)responsible for their mutation.

They never had friends in life because no body wanted to be mates with a mad scientists' kids.


There's a third main character.He has ability of Astral projection.He can move from a place while his body actually being at same place.Now even he's a mutant but more on that later.

Now,there mutants can identify each other with help of Aura. Aura is a paranormal phenomenon which helps a fully developed mutant identify another mutant.It is though Aura that the third guy identifies these not so fully developed bro-sister mutants.


So, this is what I thought of.The episodes revolve around these charecters in and around Manipal.

But the issue now is the Studio wants to do webseries of episodes not more than 7 minutes.My plan was for 15 minutes.Is it possible to go with my plan? Or should I scrap it and think of another?In that case can someone suggest some concepts to work on?

Thanks.

 

[FantasySciFi]

Congratulations on finding a studio interested in helping you make your webseries. Unless you want to make the series yourself, you will need to work with them to meet their demands. That's true for any screenwriting project.

Seven minutes is approximately 10 pages of script. Fifteen minutes is about 18 pages. The longer the script, the closer it becomes to one page equaling one minute. So the question is can you write stories for your episodes that are 7-10 pages in length?

There are many excellent short webseries on youtube under 10 minutes. And once the studio feels confident about your ability and the series, they may be open to longer episodes. The reality is, it costs money to do a production.

Seven minutes of screen time can take a several hours to shoot if they need to set up in a location, with lighting, get permissions, do make-up on the actors, etc. Then there is time to put in any special effects. Writers who have never worked on a production set tend to not think about all the work that must be done to make their story come to life.

If they are willing to give you the chance, I would work with them. What I have done in the past is write my pilot and then broken it up into pieces. With television, the structure is fairly rigid with six acts. Each act ends with a hook to pull the audience back after the commercial. Write your script but make the action end at the 5-6 minutes and include a 1-2 minute hook for the next episode (the "teaser"). By writing it as a full script, you can create a satisfying story arc. There are slight difference in writing for TV versus writing for movies and shorts. In a short, you can't get away without resolving the conflict. In TV, it's a cliffhanger and is used to encourage the audience to come back.

You have your characters, now you just need to write your script. Good luck!

 

[Skreamings]

From what I've heard and seen the sweetspot for webseries length is even shorter. Usually around 4mins. I personally thing 15mins is way too long. I think a lot of people are trying to watch stuff when they have a tiny slot in their day to fill their time. At least that's how it is for me. I tend to watch stuff that is shorter because I don't have 15mins to burn in the middle of the day.

I was recently listening to a guy pitch his idea for a webseries and it sounded like it had promise, but then he said he wanted to 22 15mins episode. At that point I just shut off, because he had no real chance of achieving his goal.

So IMO shorter is better for webseries.