Writing for web series

This is part of an University assignment. The scope is to analyse the characterization process in a web series. The chosen series is Riese: Kingdom falling. (Falling kingdom of spain users click here)

The web series are a new format. A new way to explain visual stories. TV taughts us, that the new formats has new requirements and new challenges to face instead of the traditional cinema ones. For the web series we face several of them as the audience atomization, the distribution technological revolution, (both of them directly related to the production budget) and the new consuming behavior of the audience. The audience behavior concerns directly the format. One of the most obvious feature of this new format is the screen time. The web series chapters takes between 2 as minimum and 20 as maximum minutes. The visual storytelling basis is the script. Is obvious that is not the same to write a 7 minutes script than a 50 or 120 minutes one. A lot has been written about scriptwriting. It's a very wide topic. My interest is on scriptwriting for web series but due to narrow the topic I'll focus my essay in the characterization process. The character is a key point in the story. “Screenplays are usually about a key incident, and the story is the character acting and reacting to it”ⁱ. To know and to understand how to build and how the characters are build up is a goal for any scriptwriter. “Create a character and you'll create a story”ⁱⁱ. The process whereby the character is build up is the characterization process. A writer needs screen time to characterize his characters but, as we already know, the brief screen time is one of the most representative features of the web video.

The hypothesis for this essay is that the lack of screen time in the webisode format results in a bunch of weak characters that hinds the creation of strong standalone dramatic narratives. The subject of this analysis is “Riese: Kingdom falling” and the three most important characters of it: Riese, Amara and Herric. Riese: kingdom falling is an Syfy (Universal Studios) webisode series debuted on autumn 2009. The episode length is between 8 and 10 minutes for all of the 10 chapters that compound the series. Due the low (ridiculously low someone would think) audience the series abruptly end in the 10^th chapter.

“Every screenplay dramatizes an action and a character”ⁱⁱⁱ. “You need a subject to embody and dramatize the idea. A subject is defined as an action and a character. An action is what the story is about, and a character is who the story is about”^iv.“The audience's emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy. If the writer fails to fuse a bond between film-goer and protagonist, we sit outside feeling nothing. Involvement has nothing to do with evoking altruism or compassion^v”.”A characters exists as much as they relate with their environment”^vi “The characters are a reflex from people, people needs to get reflexed on the characters”^vii We can be reading statements about the importance of the stories' characters for all the day but the aim of this battery of citations is to enforce one premise: Weak characters means weak stories.

Three are the character capabilities in a movie: Talk, act and react. And their objective is to move the story forward and/or give information due to characterize characters or contextualize characters, events or facts to the viewer. Therefore we have the character own words, the character own acts, the other characters words, the other characters acts, and the character reaction to them, to build up a character. To think, to feel, belongs to other storytelling formats as literature, radio or spoken tales. It's because of this that the voice over is really criticized by all the experts. The voice over can be used but doesn't purely belongs to the cinematographic language. Syd Field quotes a Chinese proverb a propose of this that says: “Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I'll may remember, involve me and I'll understand”.

“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure” states Robert Mckee. In Riese the pressure doesn't change and the choices are set up in the beginning. Some pieces of the following character description may look naive “she is bad” , “she is good” but those descriptions are not more naive than the characters by themselves.

Riese: She is the fallen princess and she just runs away from the Sect. She is the lawful heir to the throne and the Sect wanna kill her as they did with her family some (is not clear in the series) time ago. She feels alone and she would like to recover the throne. She is the protagonist. The voice over is who gives us all of this information. After the first chapter her identity is a mystery, the viewer just know that a cute girl that owns a wolf is prosecuted by the bad guys. The continuous flashbacks about her scape from the Sect during the murder of her family time ago are a resource that strives to show us the undeserved suffering of she. Undeserved suffering is the most important empathy trigger in storytelling. She has a wolf. Lonely animal, like she. This sign is reinforced in a dialog of she: “I would like you should talk”. This scene characterizes her loneliness.

Amara: Is the usurper Empress. After depose the royal family the Sect made she Empress. She wants to keep her throne and because of this she wants Riese to die. She is ambitious and bad. She is the antagonist. In the second chapter the voice over explains us who is she and what she wants. This character don't evolve in any way. Her conversations with her henchmen show us how whimsical and ambitious she is. It's a surprisingly flat character. She is bad and wants to kill Riese. The voice over uses to explain us her plains while the character appears looking far away.

Herric: Is The Sect leader. He is pursuing Riese due to kill her. He is the really bad guy. He just obeys the Empress and tries to capture Riese. All his attempts are a fight scene between Riese and three Sect's henchmen with knives. Riese's wolf beat them and she runs away. Time over time. This kind of scene appears four times. He is the second antagonist. This character is the unique that is not explained to us by the voice over. We realize that he is the Sect commander because he commands to the minions. We know he is scary because the secondary characters looks scared when talking with him. We know that he is serving the Empress because of the dialogs with she. This is the unique genuine visual storytelling in this series because he is build up with visual tools. Further, in the last chapter there's an interesting turning point on his behavior that points that he is not as loyal as we thought. Anyway there are not going to be anymore chapters produced so we never will know about this.

Riese: kingdom falling is a spoken tale accompanied with images. All the story is moved forward by the voice over. The characterization process is something that the voice over tell to us, not a thing that really happens. The unique character characterized is Herric but he has not enough time to evolute. Another element dramatized that tries to characterize are the Riese flashbacks about time ago that tries to persuade us about the suffering that she undeservedly suffered time ago. The events and the scenes rhythm is the same than a TV series but one difference: This chapters has a 10 minute length and absolutely nothing happens on most of them. Riese: Kingdom falling is a really bad series. The viewers statistics confirms this. Definitively is a spoken tale with background images. You should consume the same story just listening the voice over as a podcast.

Due the lack of time, the web series format requires a really shocking inciting incident that catches the viewer interest enough time while the characterization process and the resultant empathy gets done. Another alternative is to explain stories about transmediatic characters previously characterized in other stories or products. The analyzed product demonstrates that less screen time doesn't mean less work. Well in production terms yes it do but in a writer point of view the web series requires a sharp wit due to catch the viewer attention until the next chapter. It's a race against the clock. Convince the viewer to watch the next chapter before the current one ends. The viewer statistics of Riese Kingdom falling explains us why it abruptly ended at the 10^th chapter.

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iv

Field, Syd. (2005). Screenplay: The foundations of screenwriting (4^th ed.). New York: Bantam Dell.

v

Mckee, Robert. (1997) . Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting.