Twisted Showcase Part 1

In this blog post I'm going to discuss what it felt like unleashing the web series Twisted Showcase onto the world through the internets.
It's not a blog about how to make a web series, which by the way is lots of hard work but quite straight forward: script, cast, film, upload, promote. This blog, which will be in two or three parts, is about the month of March from my perspective.
Twisted Showcase launched on March 1st, St Davids Day, and it's last episode of Series 1 was launched 29th March. It was a hectic month, and theres more to come before the end of the year!
But I'm getting way ahead of myself because this all kicked off a week before the launch as we inflicted the trailer onto our website and all over the internet including
Ok I'll admit I didn't expect any of that to happen, I knew the involvement of Gareth David Lloyd would bring us some attention but was still blown away by it all. There seemed to be anticipation for Episode 1.

Peter & Paul
Nerves. Bloody fear. Most of all excitement. These were all buzzing around as we launched episode 1. We knew we had a great central performance from Gareth David Lloyd (for more on how Gareth came to star in our web series check out the Peter & Paul commentary on the Twisted Showcase website, it's not as interesting as you hope though) but feared how we'd be judged, this was a no budget series and maybe the promotion we recieved made us look bigger than we were. The episode launched as the clock turned midnight to take us into the new month. Here's where we discovered one of my favourite things about the series, the instant feedback we recieved over Twitter. Mostly positive. I still want to thank everyone who watched and commented, still can't believe it really. But, I also came across negative feedback. which do you think I focused on most? Hours and hours stweing over it, analysing what they said, watching the episode again to see if i could see it from their point of view. I couldn't. I learnt that week to let people have their opinions and not to let them affect me. not everyone is going to like what you're doing. Can't please everyone and all that.

Eyeball
Episode 2 was even more stress. this week we didn't have a star name to hide behind. This week was a more experimental film, our star was someone's Eyeball for fucks sake, oh and an egg we'd painted a face onto. It was a three minute film rather than a more conventional ten minute that our first episode was. There's plenty more reasons we were worried, we thought there may be a backlash from people expecting a continuation of the first story not realising it was an anthology show, how would this one go down? Bloody well as it turned out. People even stcuk with us and reviewed us, thanks Gores Truly and Blazing Minds. We felt this episode summed up Twisted showcase, it was a truly weird tale. So were glad it went down well, but we ralso realised the downside of the anthology series, it's really hard to keep an audience who have no reason to return. They've seen a complete story so why come back. We thought Gareth would bring some people back, but why, he's only in our first episode. Oh shit! Maybe TV executives are right not to go for anthology shows, it's a whole new sell every week. No they're wrong. Fuck them, it's a challenge but the anthology show needs to come back. Our thinking is once people get a feel for what Twisted Showcase is they'll come back for that Twisted feeling, which is happening and will hopefully build.

NEXT TIME: We launch episode 3, Fear of Living, I may go into some depth here as it's a film I have a lot to say about. Bob Dracula and Devil Inside Her may be part of Part 3, we'll see