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Writer and creator John Cabrera…
Do you feel that you’re exploring new territory with H+ ?
I think anybody that’s working in digital media right now can sense that there is a big rumbling happening in Hollywood in general, as a result of all of these new platforms for distribution and for storytelling. So I think it’s hard for anybody working in digital media to not feel like, “Wow, we’re treading new ground.” And that’s both exciting and scary, because if we’re one of the first telling a story like this, it’s a lot of pressure. We want to try to get it right.
The episodes aren’t designed to be viewed in a specific order. Was that challenging from a writing point of view?
We’ve always been really excited and keen on this idea that audiences themselves can be a part of the storytelling, in that they themselves can rearrange the episodes and watch them in different orders and that it wouldn’t effect the enjoyment of the story. And that in some cases, you could actually get some insight into the story that you couldn’t quite get before, because two episodes that were so far from one another, we could bump them up against each other and suddenly we understand how they’re related to one another. Our hope is that since this is going to be on YouTube, our users might actually take it one step further and start to curate the content on their own channels. If you have a YouTube account, you essentially have your own channel, and anybody who subscribes, or any of your friends on YouTube, they’re your audience. You can create playlists of these episodes. Or you could bump them together and make a 45-minute long episode that’s about the length of a network episodic television show.
I mean, is it a web series? I don’t know. It’s hard to really define. It sort of looks like a TV show, it has the length of a TV show, but it was created by somebody else, it wasn’t even created by me! It was edited by some user, who felt like that order was relevant and meant something to them.
There’s some production value there too, isn’t there? H+ doesn’t have the traditional look of a web series…
The term “web-series” has a stigma attached to it, because it was created at a time when the only web-series that were being created were being created by people who would have loved to have a television show, but they couldn’t. So they created a web-series instead, on their own dime. And those series look cheap because of it. The truth of the matter is it’s just a series. It’s a series that is told in a different way.
I think that the instinct that people have when they see a beautifully produced web series is that they think it must have been made for television and they just chopped it up and put it online. That’s not what happened, and we’re not going to be the only ones doing this. You’re going to see a lot more of it. The more money that gets poured on to the internet for ads, the higher these budgets are gonna get. And with the cost of making these things going down, as filmmaking tools get cheaper and cheaper and we’re able to create Hollywood-grade effects and picture-looks with cheaper tools, we’re going to start to see this levelling out. We’ll be seeing product that looks exactly like what you would see if you went to a $100 million film.
Turn over for star Sean Gunn
