Review: It’s Not All About the Glamour This Season

Finally, after a year of hard hitting one hour drama shows, two pilots sealed the deal for me just when I thought there was no hope for the remainder of 2014. ‘House of Cards’ ended its second season with an overly dramatic table knocking from Frank (something which was more fiery than the 12 episodes that preceded it), True Detective left me feeling all dreary about the fact that there was no other thread to the story to obsess about (however I must admit that I too was swallowed up by the mayhem about who was going to be in the cast for the second season- not Brad Pitt, thank God) and Fargo spun me into an avalanche of a journey that was chilling (and a little idle at times, unfortunately).

But then it was silent.

I thought it was time to hit IMDB and look up some feature films I had shamefully missed out on. There were so many that I watched. So many, that I understood why the same type of film wins at the Oscars. EVERY YEAR.

Then, these happened:

The Honourable Woman Poster

Extant Poster

What.

Two highly riveting dramas lead by female characters. Thank you very much. And who would have seen this coming? For some reason I was under the notion that execs would block all chances of such a concept because it was against tradition and a bane for “sales” (which we all know is total BS).

So here we have two very different stories with strong leads who are tormented by their pasts, hope for a better future and are actively working towards it, have highly challenging professions and are- wait for it, because it made me raise my brows- extremely secretive.

Yes, they keep things from us and from those around them. The latter is fun to watch, but the former is really risky. Especially in the case of ‘The Honourable Woman’, Nessa Stein (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is plagued by her past- an event that took place which has caused terrible repercussions in her present life.

Maggie Gylenhaal

We spend every episode trying to uncover this and we learn more about her as a person in the process. It’s skillfully done, as writer Hugo Blick makes sure that we are with her, invested in this journey that gives us very little clues.

On the other hand, with Extant, we know what Molly (played by Halle Berry) is dealing with right from the beginning. The thrill is in watching her trying to hide her secret from her family and friends, some of whom are evil- therein lies another pit of secrets which we have no access to. The antagonists hold the veil over themselves and we want to find out about what they’re hiding.

Female characters can be more complex and fun to watch, especially when the drama is so carefully crafted to seem like a deep web of hidden truths and past experiences of characters that we yearn to untangle before us. I think this should spark off more shows (there have been perhaps a few here and there in the past) where female actors are deemed equally capable as male actors in carrying off gritty and thrilling stories for audiences to be a part of.

At LA’s Standard Hotel with Franklin Leonard

Franklin Leonard

Founder of The Blacklist (the most sought after online network where scripts are made into films), Franklin Leonard, spent an evening talking about the future of scripts that will be produced in Hollywood. He said that writers who have been selected recently have been people who represent diverse backgrounds and cultures. He added that producers from Hollywood are focusing on China; as it’s the biggest market out there for feature films and that the new ‘fool-proof’ trend in scripts are mostly biopics.

Marketing a Webseries on Social Media

After drafts and drafts and some head-smacking and then more drafts, 3 out of 7 scripts were selected for the first season of our webseries.  All of them were super Singaporean oriented, with a slice of kooky and a dash of ‘wait, what?’ as they progressively get weirder with every click.

My team of writers and I finalized three webisodes which you can view here:

Being a marketing queen, I took the reigns and galloped to the most influential social media platform: Facebook.

Despite the hardwork put into the story, characters, dialogues and production value, a webseries isn’t a webseries unless it’s been marketed properly on the web. One would think that such a thing would be easy, I mean ‘what doesn’t go viral these days?’ but the reality is quite an eye opener.

I want to tell you about my journey of getting this little new, colourful kite of a Webseries off the ground and into mid-air.

Day 1: A pretty ‘big’ announcement was made before the filming of the first webisode:

Day 1_stats

What do you think about the engagement? Pretty tight for a first day where 190 people liked it within the first 20 hours.  In fact our page likes practically sky rocketed:

Stats_Week 1

 

In just about a week, our fans doubled without any posts of our content at this point.

All I was posting were pictures of what was happening behind the scenes of our set. Again, people didn’t know what our show looked like or what the tone was going to be like.

Day1.2_stats

The numbers were climbing as I prepped our growing audience members, by introducing them to the set, as if they were a part of it from the very start.

Day1.23_stats

And then BHAM!

Day1.234_stats

This was the secret. Have more than one person in a picture, tag everyone (so that it appears on their walls, duh) and watch the magic unfold. More importantly, have something that makes a point. As you can see in this image; there are 4 females. All of them have really important roles to play on set; something which you don’t see in Hollywood- we have a D.P, a Producer/A.D and Director who are all women. What’s even better is that the script we were shooting that day was also written by a female writer. This caught people’s attention and got them clicking.

After the high, I then decided to pepper the page with little promotional teaser-posters:

Teaser_stats_2

And little clues about what our show was focused on:

Teaser_stats

You can probably guess that there’s something brewing about McConaughey in our show. And yeah, you’re right. We’re just as obsessed about him as the world is and we’re not ashamed.

Anyway, you can probably notice some different details in the posts. Some of them were posted by ‘PostPlanner‘. It’s sort of like Buffer but it’s strictly a Facebook app that predicts and performs for you, based on any patterns it notices on your page. After using PostPlanner, I would personally recommend using Buffer, since seems more transparent and user friendly.

Working on Twitter helped, secondary to scheduling posts through Facebook Apps. What really is important here, is to catch onto a forum where your project can be talked about automatically:

Reddit Favourites

In fact, the Twitter account has been growing at an alright rate, someone who hasn’t actually tweeted actively at all. I had almost 900 tweets automatically generated for us by Weeder – a pretty cool site to select what areas/subjects of interest you would like your tweets to be sourced from and sent out to your followers. This was a good way of getting people on our page and now that we’re almost leveling out our number of followers with those we follow, it’s a good time to cool off Weeder (by adjusting the number and frequency of posts each day) and pushing our own, original content and voice forward.

What also caught people’s fancies in a light-hearted way, was our McConaughey/True Detective memes:

Memes_2

Memes_1

And so far we’ve been doing great:

Week 5 Stats

I have had no crazy dips so far. Phew!

Oh and yes, we’re one of those pages that do better at midnight (according to Singapore Standard Time):

Midnight Stats

I choose that time slot, because it keeps the time zones of US (New York- 12pm, LA -9am), India (9:30pm) and Melbourne (2am) on one sort of plateau, when people are generally online scrolling. These regions have the most active mobile users in the world and it was very important for me to focus on this sample of potential, prime audiences.

The next beast I tried to tackle is Reddit. Reddit Week 1

The next step is having individual Pinterest boards for each character, which will be posted shortly.

My inspiration is what this fan did for Rust Cohle‘s character from True Detective: http://www.pinterest.com/rustcohle

It’s freakin insane and awesome at the same time.

If you’re interested in viewing our real Facebook page, you may do so here: 

I wonder if you have any thoughts/suggestions….?

 

 

The Behenji Does Endometriosis

This WordPress just got a tincy-wincy bit juicier with the domain name change.

So here goes. My first post as The Behenji ™ is a semi sweet update on an achievement.

Endometriosis Cover

Let me clarify; I haven’t ‘achieved’ this illness. The calendar was illustrated by me and is part of the official Endometriosis campaign led by NUH (National University Hospital, Singapore).  The experience was a typical Behenji one. It went from me feeling really enthusiastic (like 10 shots of coffee- enthusiastic) to ‘okay, it’s 4am and I have Breaking Bad on, so I can get through it somehow’,  to ‘kill me,  please I’ll pay you all I have’,  finally landing myself on ‘it’s all done,  now print this and tell me how goes it’.

That happened around 4 months ago. I finally got the calendar a few weeks back and you know what, it gives me some bubbles of pride when I flip through it- not because it’s some exceptional collection of le arte works, but because I feel that this is going to help women and girls out there in a big way.

Nobody's Too Young, Girl

 

Painful Ouchies Periods

It was a lot of fun seeing Uncles look at this and go ‘mhm, painful- ah I see’. Hey man, truth be told. Periods are real and they’re painful. They shouldn’t be ‘too painful’, apparently –  that’s a symptom of Endometriosis.

Husband wants a baby.

 

Probably the Most Important Page.
This is an important one. Females who are concerned can use this as their checklist and hopefully not get overwhelmed like the darling in the centre. These statements are more like what people think when they hear about Endometriosis. So none of them are true.

Hand Holding moment

 

Every Guy's Dream

 

And here you have it, guys. This page is for all of you who always wondered what it was like inside. Let your fantasies run free with special features like the Pouch of Douglas, the Peritoneum and the flavour-of-the-month….the Small Intestine.

That’s not all, there are 10 more images to the calendar, which you’d have to fly to Singapore for…. or go to Brazil for the international conference. Yep. This baby’s going to Copacabana and I’m not jealous. No.
I’m thrilled that the Endometriosis campaign is reaching out to more audiences, hence making people more aware. So many women have suffered from this, with the misconception that their cycles are supposed to be painful. There is no cure for Endometriosis at the moment, but doctors are working hard to developing ways of alleviating the symptoms and making sure that women take care of themselves appropriately.