I recently co-created and shot the second season of my webseries and I wanted to share about this experience with all of you out there! I think that making your own content is one of the most important things you can do for yourself as an actor and an artist. Walking away from this experience, I am taking away so much about production, filming, sets, and the entire process of filmmaking that I don’t think I would ever be getting any other way. So, without further ado, here is the first installation of my new series of blogs: WEBSERIES WINS AND WOES.

      To introduce you to the creativity and bravery needed to film your own projects you need to know that season one of this series was filmed by a friend of mine with an iPhone. We had a microphone we clipped to the end of a broomstick and called it a “boom,” and we spent as much money as our extremely tiny bank accounts would allow, which pretty much consisted of lunch for the actors and crew every day we shot (we shot eight episodes in eight days). We used every last favor, connection, and friend we had in order to make our dream of having a series come true. It took a lot of hard work.

      The biggest lesson I took away from Season One, which took about nine months to edit together, was that we needed a real director with a real camera. The old adage of “kids these days are so lucky they can grab their iPhone and shoot anything!” is cool, but it’s exhausting. Our friend shooting season one on his iPhone was not a director, we were directing ourselves. The iPhone’s video storage needed to be dumped onto a computer multiple times each time we shot. It added stress, time, and is not something I would necessarily recommend, but do know that if you can make it through shooting an entire season of something on an iPhone, you can probably make it through anything.

      I found a director on Facebook in a comedy group I am a part of. FYI, if you are in a big city looking to get more intertwined with smaller scale productions, I would highly suggest joining groups on Facebook and helping people. I posted about the series, heard from a couple dozen directors who were interested, and went from there. We ended up only meeting with one person because after speaking with him and seeing his work, I was sure I wanted to work with him. After having shot season two, I can say that having a real director on set makes all the difference in the world. The director we worked with was absolutely incredible. Finding him? That was the first big WIN in filming season two.