Yesterday, we did the first promotional shoot for my new web series project, 2 Girls Kissing.

I have to admit that I was slightly stressed about it all.  The location that I chose was the riverside area around the Southbank Centre.  For those of you that are unfamiliar with my fair city, the Southbank Centre is a huge complex housing 21 spaces of creativity, including Royal Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery.  The riverside area often has street performers entertaining swarms of families and groups of people enjoying the vibe and the views.  And, despite the morning’s torrential downpour, yesterday afternoon was no exception.  Add to this two people that I’ve never worked with and that have never done a shoot of this nature before and, well, let’s just say that I left it to fate to play a much bigger part than usual.

I have to say that my fears all amounted to naught – we had a great shoot, it all ran relatively smoothly and everyone was very easy to work with (the pics below are from my Blackberry).

So, on the offchance that any of you have to undertake a similar endeavour of photographing two girls kissing in one of the busiest parts of the metropolis with the ever present threat of rain, here’s what you need for a successful shoot.

A photographer that knows what she’s doing

2GK is blessed with the creative talents of Gerry Alexis.  Gerry’s day job involves playing with cameras for Sky.  She is also one of the best graphic/illustrator talents that I know – her artwork first graced my schoolbooks when we were eleven years old.  I’ve been wanting to work with Gerry for years and until now has only done my promo headshots, so I’m very grateful that she has jumped on board.



Research

I had originally conceived a photo shoot at night, but then I read about the experience of the Seeking Simone team who photographed two of their girls kissing and decided to can that idea. One afternoon, Gerry and I walked down to the Southbank, which is one of my favourite spots in London, and took some photos around monuments and spots that might work for us.

A cute, comfortable couple

I first met Susan and Jasmin at a gig that Greymatter was playing in London last year, and again at an event for Eurout in January.  I asked them if they were up for being photographed in the name of furthering lesbian visibility efforts, and the rest, as they say…

They are a very cute couple – I thought it was a good omen that they were, ahem, ‘getting some practice in’ whilst Gerry and I were setting up the first shot – and so comfortable and quite oblivious to us that it was a very easy shoot indeed.  I gave them very little direction, save some poses I really needed to get, and Gerry just shot them having conversations and making each other laugh.



An idea of what you need to get

I am developing the look for our website at the moment, so I knew what shots I had to get out of this in order to fit with my concept.  But there were a lot of shots that we got out of this that will probably work much better, especially with some of the print materials that I’ll be developing to support our promotional activities.

A flexible plan

We had planned to do the entire shoot around a circular stone sculpture outside the National Theatre.  However, when we rocked up, there was a group of free runners practicing backflips off the rocks.  Our photographer was running late so we took refuge in the espresso bar at the front of the theatre.  Whilst we were sitting there, I noticed that the wall of the National Film Theatre next door was full of circular vents and thought that that would make a great background image.  It had the added advantage of being away from the main path of traffic, so we did the bulk of our shoot there and moved back to the stone sculpture later in the afternoon.



A disregard of the weather report

It doesn’t matter if the weather report tells you it’s supposed to rain or shine in the afternoon; it’s sod’s law that the worst will happen (this is London, baby!).  We were blessed with no rain and, at around 8 degrees, a positively tropical temperature.  But bring a big umbrella, and plastic bags containing towels for your models to sit on, even if you think it’s going to shine all day.

A sense of awareness

Nothing draws more attention to ‘something going on’ than setting up a long shot. There’s no getting away from it – two girls kissing (or even looking like they might kiss) will cause people to slow down and stare or stop and wolfwhistle, both of which we got.  In between checking shots, I spent a good portion of the afternoon circling our models and photographer whilst they got on with it, watching for people’s reactions as they walked past for anyone that might kick off, quietly telling everyone to hang on, first when groups of the stag party variety bounded past and then when small children were hanging off the stone sculpture, curious to see what we were photographing beneath it (but that was more because I didn’t want to have to deal with an injured toddler).



For all the planning, the meetings, the concepts, the pow wows that happen when preparing a web series, there’s nothing quite like going out and actually doing something or making something to re-inject your excitement for a project again.  

Thanks to Jasmin, Susan and Gerry for chalking up the first ‘making of’ experience of 2 Girls Kissing – here’s to many more!

A few weeks ago, I was putting together a post intended for the Life On Fletcher blog.  It was going to be a bit of a how-to based on our experiences of making the show.  As we’d just announced our development deal, we were feeling a little reminiscent, so the angle changed to ‘what we wish we’d known before making our show’.

I opened out the question to a number of web series producers whose shows I’d discovered via connecting with them on Twitter. Within a couple of weeks I had accumulated six great responses that needed to be shared with an audience wider than our blog.  The resulting article, Confessions of Indie Web Series Creators: Things They Wish They Knew, ended up on Tubefilter.tv (thanks to Tubefilter’s Marc Hustvedt for having us!).

That was last Tuesday; today is Sunday, and a lot of the emails and messages I’ve received since then have been requests to see, in full, what everyone sent in.  Their contributions were very different from each other.  I have to say that it was quite overwhelming in the first instance to receive it all, but then to read it all…

Susan Miller, Executive Producer & Writer of Anyone But Me

“Here’s what I wish I’d known:

“How freakingly awesomely totally cool this would be, dudes!  Could have saved me hours of sitting on my shrink’s well worn couch crying over the terrible state of the world and where to relocate my lost place in it and how ever would I make my voice heard again.

“But, then, if I had known then what I know now I might have been just a little too happy. And, after all, it was my discontent with the confines and dictates of the mainstream that moved me to venture into this great unknown. To say yes to this web series madness.  To say yes to Anyone But Me.

“Of course, there are things I wish I’d known, only because I would have prepared by taking vitamins, going to the gym, getting an MBA and learning how to talk in P.R:  

“That you have to ask. A lot of people for a lot of things. Favors. And how to’s. And please watch and please, please, please.

“That you have to scour web sites and blogs to find other web sites and blogs to make connections. You have to get your schmooze on and walk into rooms and hand out cards and be able to describe your show in one sexy killer sentence.

“That you have to reach out. To CEO’s and store owners and people walking down the street and sell them your wares and not be daunted. Even though you used to sit alone in a room or café and just write or think all day and talk to no one. You do it all for the show. And the show becomes all that you do.

“That there are remarkably generous people out there. That the fans make you. That we are a community. That we have to keep the faith.

“Whatever I didn’t know, I’m learning.  Which makes me feel forever young. And part of something. Something uncharted.  Something without rules. Something we’ll define for ourselves. Something big. And something freakingly, awesomely, totally cool.”

David Nett, Executive Producer, Writer, Actor, Director, Boom Operator on GOLD

“The thing that I knew, but didn't really comprehend fully was, since Season 1 of GOLD was a deferred pay gig (basically, everyone was a volunteer), we'd have a lot of drop-outs and last-minute replacements, and a lot of scrambling to fill gaps. I knew it would be rough, but wasn't really prepared for the sheer amount of wrangling I'd have to do, during both production and post. I now know, if I can't scrape together strong pay packages, to line-up back-ups for my back-ups.

“But I guess the biggest thing I wish I'd known (and better prepared for) was the long-term commitment to the project after shooting was complete. I come from the world of theater -- however rough the production is, once a play closes and all the bills have been paid, it is all over, save the fond (or not so fond) memories. Not so with web series, I found.

“I came into GOLD with a pretty decent shooting plan and a rough post production plan, but no real understanding of the massive amount of ongoing promotion, paperwork, decision-making and just plain grunt work that would continue not only after shooting was done but even after our Season 1 finale dropped last month. It is certainly not all bad, and I have a deep commitment to my series and doing everything I can to keep it going into Season 2, but it is a little more than I bargained for. Had I known those things ahead of time, I'm not certain what I'd have done differently, but at least I wouldn't have kept saying to my wife, "we'll have our life back soon, I promise." I didn't mean to lie to you, sweetheart. I swear.”

Robb Padgett, Creator & Actor, Life From The Inside

“How do you get people to WATCH?!

“Not as if we've figured this one out exactly. But we sure know more now than we did. Of course, back when our show first hit the web in January of 2007, there weren't as many shows online. It was easier to get the attention of web show watchers (though there were fewer web show watchers back then too). But it still took us a while to figure out how to get noticed. In fact, I'm not sure we ever really DID figure it out. If it weren't for the help of people like the producers of Break a Leg mentioning our show in interviews and people like Sunny Gault noticing our show and profiling it on her old show Viral, we might not have ever gotten noticed.

“I guess what I should say is that I wish I would've known how to PROMOTE the show before we started making it. It took us WAY too long to do stuff like tell the good people at Blip.tv about our show. And they've been some of our biggest supporters of all (Blip is good to a lot of shows. I sure wish Felicia Williams was still at YouTube though, she was a true champion of independent content).

“We're still learning how to get our show out there. And we've discovered just how big a task promotion actually is. I'm not a huge fan of publicity, but I like having people watch our show so...

“Oh, one other thing I would've liked to have known is that it's much easier to shoot your entire season ALL AT ONCE than to shoot it as you go. Though our current show with it's full-length episodes might have been hard to do that way.”

Justin Marchert, Creator of Big Bother

“The most helpful piece of knowledge that I could have used before making Big Bother is that everything takes longer than you think it will. I had the initial idea for my web series in May 2007. I was an actor-turned-filmmaker who thought I'd have a finished product ready in two months. Oh, was this the underestimate of a lifetime. I spent nearly a year writing the script and doing preproduction. Then, the two weekends I'd initially allotted for principal shooting somehow stretched into several months. Next, I thought I was ready to go to the editor and put it all together. But, you then learn that there is a whole phase called "capturing." This means spending months digitizing, logging and filing all of the footage. Your editor won't even speak to you before this is complete. Alas, we come to editing. We average 15 hours of editing for each 3-minute episode of Big Bother.

“Consequently, most episodes are finished the night before they're released (feel free to read the chronicles of creating Big Bother on our Bblog).

“In hindsight, I'm actually glad no-one told me it would be a two-year process.  Otherwise, I don't think I'd ever have begun.”

Renée Olbert, Actor & Co-Creator, and Rosemary Rowe, Writer & Co-Creator of Seeking Simone

Renée and Rosemary pointed me to this article that they had written on their blog entitled Things We Learned About Making a Web Series – no sense in reinventing your wheel, right!?

This is my favourite tip from their list:

“7. You will not have time to knit. You just won't. So give it up.”

Regan Latimer, Creator, Executive Producer, Director, Writer, Editor of B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye

“If you had asked me a year and half ago if I'd ever considered making a web series or producing web content, I probably would have responded with something very close to, "the what?". My knowledge of web series, or producing any kind of content for the web was in it's absolute infancy. That said, I believe that my ignorance on the subject probably worked in my favour. Having no idea just how absolutely all encompassing and life absorbing it would become is probably one of the main reasons Fletcher came into being. Not to say that if I had known then what I know now I wouldn't have done it, more that I certainly would have adjusted my expectations and game plan accordingly…”

You can read the rest of Regan’s contribution on the Life On Fletcher blog.

And in case you were wondering…

Rochelle Dancel, Associate Producer, B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye

“I’m actually glad that I didn’t know what I know now because I would have said a resounding, “No!” - not only to the sleep deprivation that comes with being ahead in the five hour time difference, the elevated stress levels and having to be the go-to person on subjects that I know fuck-all about, but also to the education I received, to the opportunity to push myself beyond what I thought were my limitations and the richness of my new community, the people I have met, and the new opportunities in my life that this show has brought.”


Artwork is copyright of their respective shows.