The Secrets of Their Success
Brent Friedman: Internet Enthusiast
For many, web production is a steppingstone toward work in the film or television industry. But for Brent Friedman, an executive producer and co-creator of Gemini Division, the internet is a welcome retreat from those worlds.
Figure 3.Director of photography Dave Klein films Rosario Dawson, of the films Kids and Sin City, and executive producer Stan Rogow on the set of Gemini Division. The show, which debuted in August 2008, stars Dawson as Anna Diaz, a police officer investigating an organization that is producing human clones.
Friedman, who co-created the TV series Dark Skies for NBC in the mid-1990s, began his move to the internet by becoming a consultant for video game producer Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA), where he penned the script for Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.
"I just got really enamored with a different way of storytelling," he says, adding that TV producers often "don’t have the luxury of figuring out what their 5-year plan is," while video game writers know exactly where the story begins and where it will eventually end.
According to Friedman, web series share that quality and more with video games, and he was able to translate the skills he gained from EA into web success with Afterworld, an animated series that followed main character Russell Shoemaker’s journey through a postapocalyptic wasteland. The series was funded entirely by Friedman’s studio, Electric Farm Entertainment, LLC, giving him full ownership of the content.
"When you’re making content that you want to own, you have to fund the project yourself," Friedman says. "You can go out and get distribution and licensing deals, but the money on those deals only comes once you’ve delivered the content, or some of the money comes up front, but the bulk of the money to produce the content, you have to come up with."
Using the profits from Afterworld, Friedman’s studio self-financed Gemini Division, which focuses on police officer Anna Diaz—played by Rosario Dawson of the films Kids, Sin City, and Clerks II—as she investigates an organization producing human clones. The show, which debuted in August 2008, consists of a series of video messages from Diaz to a friend in which she directly addresses the camera. According to Friedman, he chose that format because he wanted the show to have an intimate feel and because he wanted to do something that television and film couldn’t do.
"What we found is that it really allows people to be drawn in to one person’s story, and in 3–5 minutes on a little window, that feels like a really great way to connect with your audience," he says.
According to Friedman, Gemini Division is heavily monetized. The domestic distribution rights were sold to NBC, with international rights going to Sony, which also licenses a mobile game and digital graphic novel based on the show. In addition, Electric Farm inked brand integration deals with Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Intel, Acura, and UPS. However, the focal point of the series, the mobile phone Diaz uses to record her messages, was never branded.
"You’re seeing what’s on the phone, so there theoretically was an opportunity there because the phone was kind of the centerpiece of the whole show, except you never saw it," Friedman says. "And so we had to turn down a number of sponsorship opportunities because it would have meant reconceiving the show, and we only wanted to do stuff that was organic to the narrative."
Michael Davies: The Sci-Fi Guy
Science fiction has always been a part of Michael Davies’ life. The first movie he remembers seeing, at the age of 4, was the original Star Wars. "That clearly made an impact on me," says Davies, who launched the web series After Judgment in October 2008.
Figure 4.Michael Davies’ After Judgment follows a group of survivors living 100 years after an unknown event wiped out a significant portion of the world’s population and rendered all electronic devices unusable.