Traditional Independant films, like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, operated on a smaller budget than other movies. This restricted them to actors who are either less well-known, or in the case of Resevoir Dogs, willing to work for less money if the script is good enough.
Similarly, web original content operates on an even smaller budget, although the ease of delivering the content through the web reduces advertising and distribution costs. Some of the more ambitious web original movies to have come around include Channel Awesome’s anniversary trilogy (Kickassia, Suburban Knights and To Boldly Flee), and Roosterteeth’s flagship machinima series Red VS Blue.
Channel Awesome is a company consisting of a network of satrical movie, game and music reviewers. Originally founded by Mike Michaud, Mike Ellis and Bhargav Dronamraju in 2008, it originally consisted of just Doug Walker (Best known for his character and series The Nostalgia Critic), but eventually grew to have a much larger number of contributors, and recently purchased their own studio for their new series Demo Reel.
Each year, Channel Awesome creates a crossover event/movie to celebrate their anniversary. From 2010-2012, the three anniversary events were increasingly ambitious projects that have also been released in a feature film format, although all three are still viewable on their website. After the end of the 2012 special, To Boldly Flee, Doug Walker announced that this would be the last ‘epic’ anniversary movie, and that he was retiring the Nostalgia Critic character in order to work on Demo Reel.
Rooster Teeth is a Texas-based company that originally grew to fame thanks to their Red VS Blue series, the first machinima (Recorded using an in-game engine) series to reach popularity. Microsoft entered a psuedo-partnership with them, allowing Rooster Teeth to sell RvB related merchandise, in return for the amount of free advertising they were getting. Originally consisting of Burnie Burns, Gus Sorola, Mat Hulumn, Jason Saldana, Joel Heyman and Geoff Ramsay, it eventually grew into a much larger crew, most notably including 3D-animator Monty Oum.
Rooster Teeth eventually released multiple other non-machinima series, including the comedic sketch show RTShorts and Mythbusters-esque Immersion, which was recently announced to be entering its second season.
EddsWorld was originally a four-man show created by british wanna-be animator and comedian Edd Gould with his friends Matt, Tord and Tom. After Edd’s death from cancer on 25th Mark 2012, Tom Ridgewell (Now better known for his own Youtube sketch show under the name TomSka rather than his Eddsworld character) got together a new team of animators to continue the series for the fans, with all profits (Stuff they didn’t need for the software, to pay the animator enough to live on, etc.) going towards cancer charities. Tom’s own sketch series has been highly succesful, and he is now one of the more prominent YouTube partners, with 1,098,728 subscribers as of November 10th 2012. According to an interview with BBC talk program The One Show in 2011, he originally didn’t realize he could make money off of viral videos on the internet, but apparently if you’re good, you could end up making five figures a month, although youtube partners are contractually forbidden from explicitly stating their total revenue. Once he had gotten a good camera and mic, the more action-packed TomSka episodes take about a 1000 pounds to make, while the comedy-based ones can take significantly less.
All three of them primarily make their income off of advertisement revenue that they split with their service provider – Channel Awesome uses Blip.tv, RoosterTeeth uses Youtube and some in-house flash players, and TomSka along with other YouTube partners just use YouTube. They also make some income off of DVD’s, T-Shirts, and so on.
Dawson Independent Cinema 