28 Aug 2009
It’s the early 21st century. You discover a new TV show when someone searches twitter for the usage of a new term of the zeitgeist, “funemployed”; because they’ve named their show that.
Because keyword searching on twitter is all they really need to do in order to market it, to make it viral.
Except it’s not on broadcast or cable TV, it’s on YouTube.
They’ve had the idea for the show, knuckled down, made the thing and uploaded it.
You are impressed. You notice how much it has improved from the first episode. You instantly recall the earlier eps of Pure Pwnage and how that grew to become an internet sensation.
You become ever curious, so decide to ask the makers of the show some questions. Because this is the 21st Century all that requires is a direct message on twitter.
They graciously agree to a QnA and you post the results. (You aren’t quite sure why you write the intro in the second-person; you decide to reference Stross’s Halting State and then run the QnA)
Funemployed is one of the best shows I’ve seen on YouTube. How did it come to be?
Thanks! Funemployed started out in its planning stages over a year and a half ago. After college I took a year off to save up money and then moved to Chicago in June 2007. When I got here a friend told me it’d be hard to find work for about 3 months — The 3 Month Curse. I scoffed at the time, but really couldn’t find work and ended up having to work crappy temp jobs and promotions out in public to make rent. My friends who also moved to the city found the same problem, having to take up unpaid internships and temp jobs until something landed.
A friend of mine, David L. Andrews, who is also inspiration for one of the characters in the show, described it as being “Funemployed”, which I thought was hilarious, and my girlfriend at the time, Courtney Lane and I thought might be a good basis for a musical or a TV Show. After all, so many of my favorite movies and TV shows target certain times of people’s lives and rites of passage, i.e. High School Graduation, freshman year of college, getting married and having kids; but what about that year right after college? When you realize after all the hard work you did in school didn’t teach you a thing about actually going out and and making your way in the world?
My neighbor, improviser Alex Harris (Lockwood) and I decided we wanted to do something creative with our time and express the frustrations of our post college lives, and started planning out characters based on people we knew who eventually became the guys you see in the show. My friends from college, filmmaker and actor Michael Lippert (Jay) and his wife, actor Kate Carson-Groner (Amy) moved to the city as well, and we all started collaborating writing scripts. It went on like this until we had about a season’s worth of episodes written, and then we met up with some old college friends, filmmaker Christopher TK Coyne and Producer Katey Selix, and sequential artist Dan Hale (Bill) and started making Funemployed a reality.
The production value is particularly impressive. Can you tell us a bit about the equipment and software you’re using to create it?
The production value is thanks to the efforts and abilities of Christopher TK Coyne and Michael Lippert. Chris is basically a one man film crew, and though he lives in Milwaukee, and travels all over shooting an array of projects, still makes the time to come to Chicago to film Funemployed. Chris is a proud owner of a RED Camera, which allows us to film at up to 4 times HD quality. The camera has an ability to film incredibly beautiful imagery without necessarily needing a lot of lighting setups, although he is responsible for that as well. We film mainly on the RED, and also film pickups and smaller scenes with Michael Lippert’s HVX camera, which shoots HD as well, just without the same ability and depth of field as the RED. The editing is thanks to Michael, who works full time at Cutters, a posthouse here in Chicago. He works primarily with Final Cut, and does an excellent job making sure we all look good. Both filmmakers bring an immense amount of passion and professionalism to Funemployed that really made this project what it is today.
What’s your rough budget per episode?
We operate on a shoestring budget. We’re Funemployed after all. But we do try to use our surroundings and capabilities to our advantage. We try to use Chicago based artists for music and locations for shooting as much as we can.
We offer free advertising through our show and our website, http://www.funemployedchicago.com, in return for allowing us to utilize assets of other artists and companies. Our biggest advantage has been having Chris Coyne on board, and having the equipment at hand. We mainly spend money on lunch and props, so we each chip in when the episode is over.
The Internet has been providing superior entertainment to commercial TV for a while now. In particular I’m thinking of shows like The Guild and Pure Pwnage. Are these shows that influenced you to try something yourself?
Truthfully, when we originally started talking about the concept for the show, we weren’t as into the webseries world as one would think. We just wrote what we thought would be funny and hoped that somehow we’d be able to make a show that looked professional and worth our time. However, as we have started making Funemployed happen, we have become aware of shows that draw a strong parallel to the type of show we are trying to do. Shows like The Guild, We Need Girlfriends and others are similar in feel, but we didn’t necessarily draw as much inspiration from existing shows on the web.
If not them, then what did inspire you?
People tell us all the time that Funemployed has a strong similarity to Flight of the Conchords or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And it’s true, we love these shows and did draw inspiration from them. One thing we dealt with in the planning stages of the show was, “OK, we’ve got four guys and a girl, how do we not make this ‘Sunny’?” But I think we’ve tried to develop characters that are hopefully memorable and based on ourselves. One thing we’ve tried to do to separate this show from others is developing a heightened sense of reality; a feeling of life or death in every mundane or otherwise ordinary scenario. And many of the situations are based off of real life experiences. Trying to hit on a girl at an office temp job, having things stolen at a house party, passing out with my shoes on, trying to grow a beard unsuccessfully; these scenarios are based on our lives and then exaggerated to ridiculous heights. I constantly ask people to share stories about what their lives were like when they were unemployed, or stories from being employed with awful jobs as well to draw inspiration. But I think that’s what makes the show so fun, is that it is rooted in reality while still having a sense of the ludicrous in it.
Now that YouTube will share revenue with it’s “top creators” do you think it’s become a viable medium to work in? Or are you just putting this out there for free in order to raise your profile and get paid work down the road?
Getting paid to film Funemployed would be awesome. Do I think it will happen? Maybe not, but I think that Youtube has proven itself to be a viable resource for young unknown creatives and people across the world to get their stuff seen. And you can see a number of people who have made careers for themselves purely from YouTube fame. I think we all do this not expecting anything but to make the best thing we possibly can. We are all very dedicated and passionate about the show and want to do it as long as we can come up with funny ideas and a good story. And we have a blast filming it.
Gen Y seems to be coping a lot of flack in the media as the generation that’s had it too good and never had to struggle. Yet your show is all about graduating and looking for employment just as the economy is collapsing. Do you see the parallels between now and the early 90s, when the young Gen Xers were known as Slackers?
One thing I think has been incredibly bizarre is that when we started writing this show, it was just about us having trouble finding work. It had nothing to do with the onset of the current recession, just about our personal experiences. It was more about us being theatre and film majors graduating without the ability to get a decent paying job right away. It was probably sometime in the winter of ‘08 that I had even heard of a recession, and people still weren’t taking it very seriously. So with the economic climate the way it has become, suddenly the idea of Funemployed became even more poignant and accessible to a wider audience than we had ever planned on. ”Funemployed” suddenly has become a sort of buzzword all over the media, even put into Urban Dictionary, and here we have a show about exactly that. I would never take credit for coming up with the word “funemployed”, after all I took the idea from something my friend randomly said back in June of ‘07, but now you see it in newspapers and on TV, and it’s exciting to be making this series when it’s so relevant to the times.
I think you can draw a lot of parallels from generation to generation. I think the adjustment from college life, where you are led and facilitated to do the work that hopefully you are able to continue doing in a professional setting, to actually being in the real world, where everything you do is on your own, is a pretty jarring experience. No one’s holding your hand anymore, noone’s telling you what to do; at first it seems like permanent summer vacation. But when you realize that this isn’t a vacation, this is your life, and you need to get up off your ass and get your shit together (I mean hopefully we all come to this conclusion rapidly after getting out of college), it can be pretty weird. And that adjustment period is nothing that we haven’t all experienced in some way or another.
So if Generation X were a bunch of slackers, what is our generation? Boomerang Kids? The Internet Generation? I don’t know, but I think technology has changed things for both good and bad. You can easily apply for jobs online, but so can everyone. So even though there’s that ease in applying for things, the competition is much higher than it might have been twenty years ago. I think each generation struggles in its own way. But honestly I am pretty lazy.
Do you dream of being the next Kevin Smith, the “slacker” made good?
All of us on the creative team have different goals for our careers. Really all I want is to be able to support myself with what I love to do. I think that’s what all of us want. Michael and Chris are definitely geared towards being successful filmmakers, while Kate and I would love to be more in front of the camera or on stage. I know that our main concern is to always be pushing ourselves and growing as artists. We’d all love to have the opportunity to keep working together in the future and work on projects that we all find as entertaining as this. I think to be as widely recognized as Kevin Smith would be cool, but we’re just doing what we love right now. It has been such an awesome experience, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see an idea we had almost two years ago finally snap into reality. If we can continue doing stuff like this until we’re old, we’ll be happy people.
Looking forward, how many episodes of Funemployed do you have planned? Any hints as to what adventures we might be seeing?
We’ve got at least a season and a half of episodes written. We’re in the middle of wrapping up production on Episode 3, “There Will Be Beards”, and Episode 4, “Dark Ted”. We’ll also be dropping a Funemployed parody music video later this month. As far as the story arc goes, you can expect plenty more roommate rivalry, a slew of different crappy jobs, more insight into mind of Lockwood, and maybe even a little romance. We’re excited to continue making Funemployed, and making it as awesome as we can.
