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.
YouTube Has a Quirky Comedy In Store for You
End of the Hall is a webseries about two expats in Singapore who try to solve the mystery of the apartment at the End of The Hall.
What do you think of this episode? Give me some thoughts and opinions please!
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:
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:
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.
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.
And then BHAM!
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:
And little clues about what our show was focused on:
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:
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:
And so far we’ve been doing great:
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):
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.
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….?
Behenji’s Debut on Singapore’s New Show ‘Ave 13’
Upcoming Series for Singapore’s Network Channel ‘Okto’ to be Premiered this Autumn. Writing 5 Episodes for this has been absolutely great, I tell you!
Paulo Coelho’s Awesome One Liner via Twitter
Cute and Typically Paulo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I Haven’t Blogged and This is Exactly How I Feel About it
Work Takes Over
Things That Make Life Great
I don’t know about you, but lately I was feeling really worn out and bogged down by the world, and the way I conducted myself in it. I was all groggy about how my body felt; tired, slow, painful and stiff, and about how I was mentally- stuck, bored… Basically I was really gloomy and poopy. So tonight, I decided to tire myself out completely on purpose, in order to reset my system. I went on a long walk and heard some really fabulous voice singing in the darkness of 10pm, in a park. I looked up and saw a group of old Chinese men and women sitting in a lit up Pagoda, with a speaker and some snacks, enjoying a musical evening. They were like superstars meeting up to grease their vocal chords. The way they were so upbeat about their art and dedicated to do what I guess they’ve always wanted to, with such a robust and fun attitude, it made me want to kick myself in the groin. Like seriously, I was so mad at myself for being a moping granny, when the real oldies were jamming and living away.
(Excuse the weird peep hole view of the clip, I have yet to learn that video recordings need to be taken horizontally on the phone)
They were so kind to invite me to go in front of the mic, as well. I took pity on them and told them that I would bring a friend over who’d sing really well. They put up their concerts every Friday and Monday.