We’ll throw up more details as we get them.

We’ve got 180 episodes in Tights and Fights: Ashes, and between improvisation on the set and tweaking stuff in the editing, the finished episode is far enough off the script that we can’t just copy and paste. YouTube has a function that automatically creates closed captions, and I’ve heard that for other people’s shows it gives you a pretty good start on captioning the episode. They claim that all they have to do is download the text, edit some of the missed words, and re-upload it. Well… that never worked for us. The machine generated closed captions came out just gobble-de-gook.

That means we have to transcribe our show by hand. All ten plus hours of it.

At first this was a daunting task. It is almost impossible to make a text file to upload to YouTube from scratch. We tried doing this when we first started uploading episodes, but the first one took poor Marlon a whole day. To do one episode. We couldn’t keep doing that. So it wasn’t until we were contacted by an advocate for the hard of hearing, around episode 80, that we turned our attention back to it.

That’s when we found it: http://yt-subs.appspot.com/

This web app, while a little confusing at first glance, turns the task of creating subtitles into an easy, breezy one that many of the people who help us out actually enjoy doing.

Here’s a quick rundown of how it works…

1) Click on “Add Subtitles”

You’ll be asked to log in using your Google credentials. Really all you’re doing is giving YT-Subs access to your YouTube videos. If you have multiple accounts, like we do, make sure you sign in with the account that uploaded the video you are going to subtitle. The importance of this will be clear at the very end of the process, but by then it’ll be too late.

2) You’ll be on the Dashboard. Click “New Video”

You’ll come to a screen that you can pick your video. For us, because we’re mostly working on the latest video we have uploaded, it’s right there, waiting for us to click it. If you have many videos, and you don’t see the one you want right away, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to find it.

Click on the video you want. It’s info will drop down. Click the “Add” button down near the bottom.

3) Transcribe

Great, now you’re on step one of the four step transcription process. On this page, you can watch the video and write out the text as you go.

Try to write the text into chunks. Break them up as much as possible. In the next stages, you’ll be matching the text to times in the video. It takes a little while to get a sense of the right lengths for your text. When you’re just starting out, just try to remember to break up the text at natural pauses in the video.

Hit “Save and Process”

4) Process

Here’s where the app will show you the actual blocks of text that will get matched to the video. You’ll see that if you have blocks of text that are too long to fit on the screen all at once, the app will break them up into smaller chunks. You can’t change anything in this tab. If you see something that’s wrong or you don’t like the way the app broke up the text, you’ll have to go back to the Transcribe tab and edit the text to your liking, and then hit “Save and Process” again until you are happy with it all.

Hit “Save and Sync”

5) Sync

This is the fun part.

Just below the video is the first subtitle, that the app is waiting to sync to the video. Find the yellow lightning bolt. See it? Click it with the mouse and hold it down. That sets the in point for your subtitle. Wait until you want it to end, and let go. That one subtitle is now synced and the next one is on deck. Just click down on the lightning bolt when you want it to start, hold it, and let go when you want it to end.

It’s that easy.

Sometimes you’ll find that the subtitles don’t quite work as you had hoped. If you need to, you can click back to the Transcribe Tab and rejig things, which means you’ll have to go through the following two steps again.

Or, if you just want to tweak the times, the in point and out point for the subtitle are the timecode numbers under the image to the right.

There’s a few other ways to adjust the subtitles and times, but that’s the basics and the slightly more advanced stuff is pretty easy to figure out if you play with the interface for a few moments.

When you’re done, hit “Save” (the button above the subtitles to the far left) and then click on the “Publish” Tab.

6) Publish

Okay, here’s where you add the subtitles to YouTube.

If you have logged in with the correct account, the one that uploaded the video, you can just hit “Upload” and YTSubs saves the subtitles to the video and within moments they should be there for everyone to see!

If there’s a problem adding the subtitles to YouTube, the process to get them there is slightly more tricky, but only slightly. Click “Donwload” and save the file to your computer. Log on to Youtube and go to your Videos and Playlist area. Find your video, and click “Captions.” Select “Add New Captions or Transcript.” Hit “Browse,” find the file and upload it. Make sure the correct transcription file is checkmarked – that’s the one that will play by default. And that’s it!

Enjoy!

Here’s the first one, released March 31:

First of all, it’s a good show. I’d probably watch it, even if it doesn’t have a gimmick to it.

But it does, and I’m going to be watching it’s numbers very carefully.

For a show that’s all over the web series community pipelines, on twitter and various blogs, their views for yesterday’s first episode much be disappointing. At the time of this article, it is 265 views. For one day, and a brand new series, that’s not bad. But for a series that is promoting itself as so time sensitive, I can’t imagine that’s the day 1 numbers they were hoping for. I dunno, maybe I’m wrong. (They also have zero comments. Seems a little odd to me.)

Many shows only find their stride a week, or a month, after the episode is released. These guys are going to be pumping them out every day. And while I’m sure it will build, I’m curious to see how the watching patterns work out. Will episode one continue to rapidly balloon as people catch up? Will people not watch if they’ve come in the middle? Will they watch individual episodes?

These are all questions that we have been grappling with on Tights and Fights: Ashes, with releasing multiple episodes over a week. The big difference is, we’re still releasing new episodes for months, but 31 will be over and done with by May.

I have a feeling that they’re kinda shooting themselves in the foot by making their show a “micro TV show” by which I mean small episodes, small release schedule, small series time span. More and more I’m coming to realize that web series don’t have to live by TV release rules of “watch it now or miss out.” People constantly discover old series, who cares if it came out three years ago – if they’ve never heard of it it might as well of came out today. This is vastly different from, say movies, because for the most part we have heard of many movies, and if you come across it in the movie section on Netflix you kinda feel like its old news, because you know it is 3 years old, because you had to sit through commercial after commercial three years ago.

As was mentioned on The Watch List post for the second episode, I wonder if people who discover the show after it is done its 31 day run will feel like there’s less reason to watch it. The creators have put so much hype into the schedule, that those who find it in June will have their attention drawn to the fact that it was released in April. Maybe the creators will revamp all their material to focus it more on the 15 minute short film they’ll end with.

I had breakfast with a guy named Alex today, and we were talking about promotion. And here’s the thing, promoting a web series is really, really hard. I have a suspicion that the creators of 31 are discovering that. And speaking of promotion, be careful about saying other people are calling you a “phenom” on a blog post that clearly has your name on it.

Like I said, I’ll be watching this show very carefully, and you should too. It is a good show worth watching for its own sake, but I also think it will be a case study in release schedules – will it work? Will people tune in because it is one short episode every day for a month? Will it continue to find views after the month is up?

It’s almost more suspenseful than the show!

When they offered the program for a second year, we put in our application and held our breath.

Honestly, we weren’t convinced that we would make it through this year. We went in an entirely new direction from our plans with Tights and Fights: Ashes. Our proposed series, John McFetridge’s The Box, is what we think of as a prestige project – we want it to noticed and win awards… and, oh yeah, make some money. While with Tights and Fights: Ashes, our over riding goal was to create a giant amount of content. And oh yeah, make money. We’re still working on that part.

And so we were very relieved to see that we had at least made it into round two of the application process. We were happy to see some very talented people that we know make it as well, and saddened to see some equally talented creators not get the nod. It is hard when you’re competing against friends for the same money.

Anyway, for those who are interested, here’s the results!

http://www.ipf.ca/IPF/releases/Webseries_Finalists-1-March-2011.pdf

We’re very pleased about how Chapter 1 went. We learned a lot, and we did meet with some set backs, most notably our inability to interest any brands in sponsoring or advertising with us. In Canada, we’re a conservative culture to begin with, and since the economic downturn brands here have retreated somewhat into their core marketing strategies. Video diary super hero web series are not comfortable, well worn marketing venues.

Added to the fact that we learned that, for instance, credit cards companies won’t sponsor you or advertise with you if you have any jokes about stealing someone’s credit card. Who knew?

Anyway, this isn’t some much a break down of all the things we learned during Chapter 1, although that would probably make a good post, too. This is specifically why and how we’re changing our video release strategy.

You see, during Chapter 1 we were uploading our videos to YouTube, prepping the metadata, tags and annotations, and then releasing each episode by changing it to public.

Recently, we learned this isn’t the best strategy.

(NOTE: All that follows is our understanding of how YouTube works. YouTube and Google go out of their way to make their system a secret, so that spammers have a harder time gaming their searches. If you read something that you know is incorrect, we’d love to hear from you!)

For one thing, the new subscription service on YouTube can be set up to notify subscribers when a video is uploaded – so we had people eager to see the new episode who would head there, find it marked as private, and be confused.

For another, YouTube’s clock starts ticking from the moment you upload it. The “first day” on YouTube, from which YouTube’s measure of the success of your video is measured, starts at midnight California time, and ends 24 hours later. A video’s first day isn’t the 24 hour period after it is made public, or even uploaded – it ends at midnight. So someone who uploads their video at 10 PM YouTube time only has 2 hours on their “first day.” If you upload at 12:01 AM YouTube time, you have the full 24 hours to build your stats. And you only have until midnight to be on the new lists and such.

That means we need to be uploading at 3:00 AM in our time zone.

So we needed to make the switch, from staging videos on YouTube and changing them to public to release them, to uploading them in the wee hours of the morning. But how? We can’t do all the things we do to do during business hours and stay up until 3:00 AM every time an episode comes out. Nor do we have the resources to have a night shift come in and handle it.

For a while, we were stumped.

But then we came across TubeShack.

TubeShack is an auto uploader to YouTube. And it’s free.

TubeShack was a bit of a life saver. We could stage the video in TubeShack, enter in our tags and metadata, and set it to upload at 3:01 AM EST.

It’s not a perfect solution. For one thing, there’s no YouTube API access to annotations, you can only do them after the video is uploaded. For another, we used to be able to pre-populate things like our website page for the video because we knew the YouTube Video ID once we upload it. But now we can only do all the things we need to do to support the launch after the video is uploaded.

And even more changes – we were releasing the videos at 4:00 PM, so we had the characters living their lives on Twitter and Facebook up to the episodes, and then reacting to the episodes after they launched. But with videos launching int he middle of the night, we’ll now need our character to be living their Transmedia lives between the episodes. I know, it probably doesn’t sound like much, but it is a complete change in the way we need to treat the linkage between the episodes and the Transmedia.

What does any of that mean to the audience? Almost nothing. their won’t be a set release time anymore, but other than that, I don’t think they will even notice a change. But for us it should result in a noticeable increase in organic views.

We got a report about optimizing our YouTube channel for TightsandFights. This one piece of advice was news to me, and I thought I would share it with you all.

It seems that it is not uncommon for YouTube videos view statistics to freeze once they hit the 300 mark. Your video continues to play, but the view counts don’t go up. Eventually, the video unfreezes, and the counts go up again.

Like many other things about why Youtube works (or sometimes doesn’t work) the way it does, there’s very little hard information about this. Is it a glitch? Is it part of the the design? There’s much speculation that once your videos hit 300 views, a different way of counting views kicks in (to try to head of fraudulent view counts). Some feel strongly that you will actually lose your views during that time. Others feel, just as strongly, that eventually your view count will catch up, and no views are lost, only delayed in being reported.

What’s weird about working with YouTube is that you’re very much flying blind – it’s difficult to understand how things work, and why. YouTube and Google are both notoriously difficult to communicate with, and they deliberately keep details of their business secret – even from clients and costumers. This week, a cautionary story floated around my twitter circle about the dangers of working with YouTube…

http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/index.htm

He describes essentially being fired by a YouTube algorithm. Is that our future?

It makes it difficult to earn money off of web series when you’re uncertain of such fundamental information as whether or not YouTube counts a view as a view. Which raises the question that consumes hundreds of hours of web series producers’ time – why stick with YouTube? That’s a whole post in itself, but as long as YouTube is the first and often only place the casual viewer goes to find new stuff to watch, GopherX.net is going to be there. Sure, other sites have better players or widgets, but if you’re serious about making some money doing video and transmedia storytelling, YouTube’s the only true game in town.

If you’d like to read a little more about the 300 Video View Freeze controversy, here’s where I got a bunch of my information…

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=085169998178ca55&hl=en

The last couple of days have been both tiring and kinda impressive, if I do say so myself. We’ve been shooting, launching and promoting episodes, all at the same time!

But I wanted to jump on here and invite you all to our live Transmedia twitter performance this Thursday (December 9th) at 7:00 PM EST!

Our super hero characters will be acting out a short scene in their lives from 7:00 to 8:00. We try to do three every month, that means we’ll have a performance most Thursdays at the same time.

Please join us! You can read more about what’s going on in this Thursday’s performance here on our site!

Every day I say I’m going to post what we have learned and what bumps we have hit here on this blog. But every day I don’t get quite that far down my To-Do list.

And guess what!? We’re shooting tomorrow! Yep, we’re just that crazy that we’ve started round two of our production cycle in early December in Canada. Lucky for us, Toronto is barely Canada on the best of days so weather wise we should be okay.

So wish us luck, but what I wanted to talk a bit about today was the tools we are using to run our transmedia. We’ve been pushing hard to add more and more live transmedia experience to our show, whether twitter or Facebook or whatever. And what we have discovered is… it’s hard.

And there aren’t many tools out there designed to do what we do – tell a story in real time using Social Media. And so through trial and error we are slowly figuring out what works for us. Here’s a list with some pros and cons…

TweetChat

http://tweetchat.com/room/tightsandfights

TweetChat takes your hashtag and uses it to make a chatroom that updates in real time. It’s pretty neat. We’re trying to use it for our live twitter performances. Sadly, the two times we have tried to make use of it, it hasn’t worked so well. The first time, all use of hashtags in Toronto didn’t work and we had to cancel our performance. The second time, it sucked in all the posts well enough, but it didn’t post them if you wrote them through the TweetChat. Very disappointing, but at least we kept going. We’re going to do some tests, but it still seems like the best way to have all the posts and a way for people to jump in all in one place.

HootSuite

http://www.hootsuite.com

Sure, I’m not cracking any secrets of the web by mentioning Hootsuite, but you what – Hootsuite is the only twitter client that doesn’t slow, stall or crash my computer.

The biggest problem is keeping an eye on our 16 twitter feeds, as well as 6 Facebook pages, 7 blogs, 8 YouTube channels and one website. It can be overwhelming. But let’s just stick to twitter for now. Hootsuite was doing well at first, even through I hadn’t quite figured out how to best organize it to see in a glance everything I need to see. But then they went to a paid model, so I went in search of a free client that replaced HootSuite. None of them did. To me, HootSuite’s killer feature is it’s easy to use scheduled tweets. And, oh yeah, it doesn’t crash.

I’ve gone back to the free version, which only allows you have 5 social networks. This limitation turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it led me to try having two accounts. Nothing has made my life easier than using the two accounts to organize all those feeds. Character feeds go into one account, all other feeds into the other. It means lots less clicking around in slow loading tabs to see who is interacting to whom, and who is saying what. But that’s not all I use…

Seesmic Desktop

http://www.seesmic.com

Seesmic filled in for Hootsuite for a short time, and I fell in love with the one thing Hootsuite doesn’t have – having all your accounts updates dhow up in one column. So I can glance at it and see if anyone is talking to me (or my characters) and then I can dig into the individual account to talk back.

One of the smaller things I don’t like about it, there’s not much way to control what shows up in the constant visual twitter updates in the corner of my screen. Why can’t a twitter client realize there are some tweets I consider important and others I don’t need to know about?

The big drawback on Seesmic? Add too many columns and it drags your computer to a halt. Granted, some of the problems I thought I was having with it I traced to another program, so I’ll keep playing with it and if it turns out it wasn’t at all effecting my computer’s performance, I’ll let you know.

But without a way to schedule tweets, it can never be the only twitter client I use.

But the one thing that is the biggest (and most surprising help) is…

Yoono

http://www.yoono.com

It’s main purpose is be a twitter client type interface for YouTube, IM, Facebook and others, including twitter. It doesn’t really do that very well, in my opinion. It is its secondary function that has turned my life around.

Since Google and YouTube is now one, every time I need to log into a character’s YouTube page, it logs me out of gmail, google docs, etc. And it is a pain to go through the five steps required to log in to YouTube from a different account. With Yoono in my Firefox browser, there’s a drop down menu that not only lets me switch between YouTube account with a single click – each tab can be logged into a Google/YouTube account of its own! I can be logged into my Gmail and multiple character’s YouTube pages simultaneously. I can’t stress enough how this has simplified my daily work flow.

The same thing works for twitter. Before, to be logged into multiple Twitter accounts at once, I needed to use multiple browsers and even multiple computers! Now, with Yoono’s Firefox extension, I can log in to different Twitter accounts in each tab.

It doesn’t work flawlessly. Sometimes it seems to get confused over which account I want it to use. And you must remember to switch back to the global profile before logging out. But those minor problems don’t even begin to stack up against the added ease that Yoono has given me.

Those are the big tools that I’m using to help navigate all the networks we’re using. My system is continuing to develop, so I’ll post more here if something big gets added to my arsenal.

Gotta go! We’re shooting at first light (short days in December!) and the club music from downstairs is getting louder. I can’t decided which of those are better reasons to go home.

We're having cake! Would you like a slice?

I know, I know, it isn’t cool to talk about your views and your stats. But this is a big milestone for Tights and Fights: Ashes, so I thought a short celebratory post here wouldn’t be so out of line.

I just noticed that we passed 10,000 upload views on our main YouTube channel, Tights and Fights.

We were hoping to hit this mark around next week or the end of the month, so we’re a tiny bit ahead of schedule. (The first time we haven’t been scrambling to make a deadline!) The reason we reached this target today is due to a series of misadventures with Google Adwords.

We knew we could bring in a certain number of views just organically and through promotion. We were getting around 1000 veiws a week, and while we had better days and worse days, it looked like we were holding steady. So we thought we would turn on our advertising to our YouTube channel and see what happens.

It was around then that we discovered that some of our other show sites had been hacked. We had no idea that visitors were being redirected to other, less than savoury destinations until Google pulled our Adwords account. It was a bit of ashock – mostly for poor Christopher as he is managing all of that.

That meant we need to rely on the new Adwords account we were setting up. The problem – Google makes no guarantee of when they will approve your campaign. The web isn’t really set up for split second timing. Most websites apply for their campaign and sit back and wait until whenever it gets approved. It can take up to 4 months! Well, we didn’t want to wait four months.

And Christopher had a plan.

He had read somewhere (don’t ask me where he gets this stuff) that Google may be more inclined to approve your campaign in a hurry of you are spending more money. So we upped our ad bid from about $10 a day (which we were going to use as a short of shake down campaign) to $400 a day. Still no word.

(As a quick aside to those who don’t know, in these cases you bid a certain daily budget, and whenever someone clicks on your ad, you spend a penny or whatever the click rate is for your exact keywords.)

No word, that is, until we showed up this morning to discover that not only the campaign had been approved, but we had already spent our full bid!

YouTube is weird for tracking stats. I have learned to accept that anything sooner than a full week in the past isn’t really a reliable figure – your view counts continue to change as YouTube catches up. So we think our numbers will continue to climb as YouTube tracks the mass number of people who clicked on our ad and were transported to our YouTube channel.

But for right now, we have officially passed 10,000 views on our main channel. Added to those view number are the views on our secondary YouTube Channels and visits to our website, etc. So, we’re happy with that. Even if it was a surprise!

As a quick additional note, it also seems like our strategy of having lots of short videos is working beautifully. The idea is that whatever efforts we do to bring in a single view is leveraged and amplified by a bulk of content. For instance, say we spent 1 dollar to being in 1 view – if that person watches 10 episodes, it lowers our real costs from 1 dollar a view to 10 cents a view. (Or if we spent 10 minutes tweeting or in YouTube activity to bring that view in, the amplifier idea still applies.)

We designed Tights and Fights: Ashes to be very discoverable on the internet. And so far, so good.

Here’s Elize’s take on writing without a net;

Image Credit: Fabio Rex Too

But when it comes to transmedia, going with the flow is often attempting to stop a tide of impeding doom the size of a tsunami – because something isn’t working. It’s akin to actors showing up and finding no set, no microphones, and well, no audience because in actual fact we’re in the middle of podunk nowheresville and this isn’t funny kids.

But in all seriousness, working transmedia means you have to be prepared to make things work in other ways. If things don’t work – don’t lie to your audience. Be able to throw up your hands and say, alright, we done messed up. But next week? Next week will be even better.

And deliver.

So be ready to deal with that twister in the middle of the story when absolutely nothing works – it happens, after all. People lose internet connections, get kicked out of a coffee shops, oh, and then your team gets murdered by ninjas mid-performance (well, maybe not the last one), but the thing is you keep on marching on.

After all – the joy of improv is sometimes that things break.