Posted by Executive Producer/Writer/Director, Regan Latimer

This week, our Associate Producer, Rochelle Dancel, had an article published on Tubefilter.tv called Confessions of Indie Web Series Creators: Things They Wish They Knew.  I contributed to the article, together with producers from five other web series’.

As we recently announced our development deal, it was a great time to reflect on everything that I’d learned making Fletcher in the past year and a half.

As our contributions were quite long and varied, it was impossible for everything we wrote to be included in that article, but you can read our complete contributions on Rochelle's blog.

You can read mine below.



“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.

“The one thing I was not prepared for was the amount of time, and constant flow of energy it takes to make this kind of content happen. To make your work stand out, to get it noticed, to create a product that is going to catch people's attention and keep them coming back. I don't think I'd be too remiss to say every waking moment it is somewhere in the forefront of my mind. Having no budget means you have to beg, borrow, and plead for every single aspect of the production - actors, crew, locations, equipment, understanding from those around you that it's worth all this time and effort even though there's no money coming from it!

"You are (with perhaps a precious one or two other dedicated people) the only driving force behind creating this content, getting it out there, trying to keep interest when you're between episodes or seasons, trying to find your niche in an absolutely flooded medium and market. From trying to juggle the schedules of your 'volunteer' cast and crew, to the hours upon hours upon all nighters of work it takes to get your work planned, shot, edited, and posted, whilst also trying to work around the day jobs that actually pay for you to live and eat, one might wonder - why do we do it?


"Ask any artist (that includes any actor, creator, writer, anyone trying to make a living through their art) what it means just to be able to do your art - to perform, to create, to express. It is worth all of the above and more to be able to do that.  There is so much freedom online in being able to produce the content you want to produce (without outside interference), and that is what is so attractive about it...and in turn worth the monumental struggle to get it done and out there. Finding an audience is the next major step. We were especially lucky to have won the contest with AfterEllen.com which provided us with our initial introduction on the web. That said, it has been a learning curve in networking and marketing in getting the show out there beyond that. Don't be afraid to ask for advice, send emails, support other's projects, you'd be surprised how many others out there are in the same boat as you and appreciate any advice or support you can give in return.

"Don't be afraid to ask for help. I spent all of season one trying to do everything the show required (a much bigger task than I'd first anticipated) which resulted in a certain amount of burn out by the end. Getting other people on board who have knowledge or skills you don't, though hard to give up the control, can really take some of the weight off and free up your time to focus on tasks and aspects that you were willing to forgo for lack of the time or energy to do them. Also, if you don't know how to do something, chances are there's a forum or how-to posting somewhere online that does.

"One saying that has become a bit of a catch phrase for the small team working on the Fletcher series has been "I'll figure it out, how hard can it be?". What this saying actually means is if it needs done, we'll find a way to do it, or teach ourselves how to make it happen. I've learned more about production, website building and digital formats in the past year and half creating this series than I ever learned in film school. Producing B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye has been a wicked learning curve, but absolutely invaluable experience in the ever changing online broadcast medium.



"Web series production is still in it's infancy in the overall grand scheme of media, and therefore lacks the infrastructure and support that can be found in traditional television, film and theatre production models. In a sense, every one of us currently out there making this content are (in so doing) designing and creating the standards and practices on which the future of this medium will be based. One of the most important things I wish I had known back when we first started on this journey was that online content producers are essentially an emerging community and for the most part we are all in this low-to no budget, DIY boat together. I truly believe that supporting each other in any way we can will be the most significant aspect to the realization and continuation of our own online achievements and success."

Posted by Associate Producer, Rochelle Dancel

One of the myths that we’ve happily dispelled with Fletcher is that you need to spend a ton of money putting up a web series website that reflects the brand of your show.  If you can navigate your way around the interweb, you’ll discover a wealth of tools at low or no cost – many of which you already use – that are invaluable for putting together your web series’ website while you’re waiting for your sponsorship money to come through.

I’ve put together a list of ten tools that we use to power the Fletcher website compiled from the many ‘how do we get a website for our show…?’ themed emails. Bear in mind that there are more complex and more expensive ways of going about achieving what each of these tools does for us. This list is neither exhaustive or original, but if you’re a novice in the world of putting up a website and you have no money, honey, then this is a not-too-shabby way to go.


1. Dreamweaver

Yes, our site was put up in Dreamweaver! Dreamweaver is an example of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor – super handy if you don’t know your doctypes from your div layers.

Dreamweaver is not free, but there are any number of free WYSIWYG editors out there. Check out this article by thefreecountry.com on free HTML editors, web editors, and WYSIWYG web editors and site builders.

2. Blogger

Life On Fletcher is powered by Blogger and we chose Blogger for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to keep the existing site intact and I didn’t want to do a big integration or move it off Dreamweaver. Blogger allows us to update the blog online and publish it to our site via ftp. Secondly, I wanted the blog published on our URL i.e. www.bjfletcherprivateeye.com/blog as opposed to e.g. bjfletcherprivateeye.wordpress.com so that it would be search engine friendly.

Instead of adding a blog to your site, you can follow some of our favourite shows and put your show straight onto a blog. For example, Seeking Simone is powered by Typepad, while GOLD The Series is powered by Expression Engine (with comments powered by Disqus, natch!).

3. Daily Motion

Our episodes are available on Daily Motion’s player. We chose Daily Motion after signing up to the Motion Maker programme, which allows us to upload videos of a higher file size and of any length compared to their standard offering.

The main advantage to having a third party video player is that we don’t have to utilise our bandwidth or server space to allow you to enjoy our episodes. There are many video hosting services out there with embeddable players. Look for one that gives you a nice encode, might offer you quicker upload times and allows you to upload videos suitable for the file size and episode length of your show. Vimeo, another one of our favourites, is used by We Have To Stop Now, and blip.tv is used by Seeking Simone and Anyone But Me.

4. Picasa

There are many advantages to hosting your pictures in an online slide show. The main one is that, if you have a gazillion behind the scenes pictures like we do, as with video, you don’t take up valuable storage space and bandwidth when people view your high res images. The fact that it’s also embeddable means that people can embed them in their blogs and on their sites – free publicity for you!

We chose Picasa because you can upload and create photo galleries in five different sizes, something we were quite keen on to show off the skills of our photographer, Jonathan Thomas. Other free, popular, embeddable photo gallery sharing aps include Flickr and Photobucket.

5. Photoshop

A must-have ap for anyone doing anything with images online, Photoshop is responsible for our image retouching, resizing, and most of our artwork. Have you noticed the grey and beige backgrounds on our site? The texture actually comes from a close-up of a photo of a pool table in the bar where George works in Season 1. We enhanced the texture and applied an overlay colour in Photoshop.

Photoshop is expensive, but you can also use the open source alternative, GIMP, for all your image work.  GIMP is an open source image manipulator (and it’s free!).

6. PayPal

As a no-budget show, we couldn’t have accomplished a lot of what we’ve done without the support of our fans, many of whom donated via PayPal. After linking up your bank account, you can integrate a PayPal button of your choice into your site to start funding gas money, equipment rental or that prop from the Goodwill store.

7. Zoomerang

Have you taken part in one of our audience surveys? If so, you’ve already been introduced to Zoomerang, a free online survey tool. We’ve used it to put together demographic surveys of our viewers to give potential sponsors a better understanding of who watches our show.

We’ve also recently discovered QuestionPro. Their free account allows you to collect unlimited responses and has some basic reporting functions lacking in Zoomerang’s free account, saving you oodles of time manually entering date into a spreadsheet to crunch your numbers.

8. Google Analytics

This one's for your marketing people (although, this being a web series, that's probably you too!).  Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks not only the number of visitors to your site and where they came from, but also where they go once they get to your site – very useful when you’re trying to work out where to best place one of your sponsor’s ads so that the most people see it, or to track whether anyone can find your deeply buried FAQ page. How else would we know that, in the month of June 2009, the most popular link on our homepage was the Season 2 link in our tag cloud?

9. Add This

We like to make it as easy as possible for you to share all the cool stuff on our site with your friends on all of your social networks. So you’ll see a handy little ‘Share This’ button courtesy of Add This on most of our pages that will allow you to share our content across 55 (and counting) different social networks.

10. Twitter

And speaking of social networking, we couldn’t let it go without mentioning the latest pretender to the social networking crown – Twitter. We’re big fans, and it has allowed us to connect with some new friends, including the editors at Eurout and Cherrygrrl; some old friends, like the teams at AfterEllen and One More Lesbian, and some other web series talents including Mel Robertson from FEED, Renee Olbert and Rosemary Rowe from Seeking Simone and Tubefilter’s Marc Hustvedt. Reach out, connect, plug your show and keep everyone up to date with your latest developments – it all helps your marketing efforts.

The Twitter widgets on our homepage and blog are from Twitter’s own site and the ‘follow us’ tab that you see on every page comes courtesy of Go2Web.

So that’s 10 tools that keep our website ticking along. There are many more out there that we’re currently playing with and that you might see on our site in future, including Nabble, a free online embeddable forum where all of you can gather to ponder whether George will pick Fletcher or Jenna. There are some incredible sites out there, ranging from sites that were put up on a wish and a prayer and absolutely no coding knowledge, to sites that were built by marketing powerhouses. Take a good look at them all for inspiration for your site – just don’t forget to watch some incredible shows too!

Which tools should we incorporate into the next Fletcher website?