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!

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

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.

During our soft launch, we’ve been posting episodes for those of you who subscribed to our production blog here at Gopherx.net.

We thank you for watching (we really, really do!) but now that our official website has launch – pictures from the party are coming soon! – we will no longer be notifying you about each episode in this blog.

We’ll have lots of other goodies to share with you – as much as we can squeeze into our days and weeks to tell you about. So no need to cancel your subscription here.

But to continue receiving updates about each episode, go here…

http://www.tightsandfights.com/how-to/

The above link will take you to a page on our new site that all kinds of helpful hints to keep you on top of all the wacky super powered goings on.

There’s a new episode up today! If you just want to jump to the episode while you’re subscribing to our main website, here it is!

Episode 17 “Shopping for Super Clothes”

Robert Strovesco begins his search for Captain Euchre in the likeliest of places — The Internet.

Welcome to Episode 16!

Another Episode featuring Scott Watkins as The Plumber. The Plumber knows he has to find Captain Euchre… maybe the internet can help?

Robert Strovesco has a pleasant conservation with his Uncle Sal in an attempt to get his job back.

The Plumber tries to convince Uncle Sal to give him his job back. It doesn’t go so well.

Hope you’re enjoying watching the episodes! Do you have a favourite character yet?

In the last post, I talked about the people. Now let’s talk about the set up.

We mostly met in my “office” which is in the basement of a church nearby where I live. I bought tables and chairs from a retirement home, and Joel and I spent many hours scrubbing the cream corn off them. Once they were set up in my room, there was barely enough room to squeeze around the edge of the room to grab a snack or a coffee.

We bought ourselves a roll of craft paper and tacked it to the wall. We marked off four character streams – Evil Trojan Borscht, written by me, Fantabulous Gal, written by Melanie Hunter, The Plumber, written by the team of Scott Watkins and Adam Swimmer, and Major Faultline & Leopard Woman, written by Conor O’Hegarty and Chelsea Larkin. Then we made a grid by dividing the character streams into 15 parts. This was our Bump 1.

Then we just started tossing around ideas of what happens to each character. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had a general idea where each character was starting from, since they all picked up from the aftermath of Captain Euchre. The only one that did not start from a Captain Euchre plot point was Fantabulous Gal. It was Mel’s suggestion that Fantabulous Gal be DynaGal’s sidekick/personal assistant. I immediately said no. But then I started to think about it… and realized it added quite a bit to an otherwise murky character (at the time).

Each time we had an idea for an episode that made us laugh and moved the story forward, we wrote it on an index card and slotted it on the grid. We didn’t start at the beginning and come up with the story in order. We started with what we already knew we wanted to have happen and then filled in the blanks. It’s a technique that I use all the time – it really helps to find your story quickly, instead of getting stuck because you don’t know point two, or whatever.

In the first session, we had all 15 episodes for all 4 character streams up on the board. And so we all went away to write. The scripts came to Neil, who polished them and reworked them as needed, and then they came to me, where I did the same. Two weeks later, we all met again to go over the scripts and tried to figure out if they made any sense. We talked them through, and then we all went away to rewrite. Again, the scripts went to Neil, who rewrote them, and then to me.

Including the punch up room sessions, each script went through at least 7 revisions! That’s a lot of writing for something that was going to be semi-improvised anyway, but we want to do our best to give ourselves a solid foundation of story, character and humour… that they can then dive off of on the day of the shoot.

We did that same process – meet to discuss, write, rewrite, meet to discuss, write, rewrite twice more until we had scripts for all three bumps – 180 episodes! I’m trying to remember now how long it took – something like 5 or 6 months. And while we weren’t working on it everyday 9 to 5, each of us put in a lot of free time. And Joel, our script coordinator, put in many hours of additional work; formatting, organizing, writing synopses and keywords… Thanks Joel!

And now, about 2 years later, we’re finally going to camera. We’re already posted 15 episodes online! It’s weird, because I’ve known them for so long as theoretical things typed into a computer, it is a little hard t adjust and realize – no, that one’s actually done and out there for the audience!

Oh, the punch up room is about to start! I gotta get going. Tonight we’re going to be working on scripts for Fantabulous Gal’s episodes #16-31! We’ll be shooting them in December, and they’ll start airing in February.

Thanks for reading this post! I hope that someday I’ll have a chance to add a part three and give you a little more detail about our Punch Up Rooms!