While Action Flick Chick Katrina Hill conquers San Diego Comic-Con, Elizabeth Ann steps in by interviewing the webseries’ Shelf Life‘s Tara Platt and Yuri Lowenthal.

Continued from part one.

What would you say are some of the biggest challenges in creating a web series?

Y– Part of what Tara said the viewership question. How do you get it out there? As far as the creation part, is overcoming the fear that (which is usually paralyzing) that it’s not going to be good enough, that people won’t like it, that it’s won’t come out exactly the way you want it.

T– That you won’t know what you’re doing.

Y– That you won’t know what you’re doing, you don’t have enough money. I think that stops a lot of people from creating in general, but for the web definitely. I think overcoming that and saying “Well, we wanna make something and we’ll make it as well as we can with what we have, and we’ll see what happens. People will like it or they won’t but we made it.” I think that, and then keeping the momentum going, too, when you’re not pulling a big salary or you don’t have a million hits per episode, or whatever, just keeping the momentum. We’ve also seen this and I think you mentioned this earlier, a lot of web series, they peter out pretty quickly, or they have two, three great episodes and that’s all they did, because they were hoping that it would be this huge thing, and even if people do love it at that point, then they’ve gotta go back, and then there’s this huge time lag between those first three amazing episodes and then coming back, and you lose—the internet moves so quickly, and you lose your viewership. So for us I know maintaining momentum has been huge, and staying consistent. We’re airing a season- we have to come out every Tuesday. We can’t not come out Tuesday and say “oh, it wasn’t ready yet, we’re going to do it on Thursday this week” because then people won’t know when to tune in. Every little thing you do to make it harder for somebody to watch your show, you lose people. Those are some of the biggies. You’ve seen a lot of the shows out there—anybody can create for the web. Continue reading →

While Action Flick Chick Katrina Hill covers San Diego Comic-Con, Elizabeth Ann steps in by interviewing the webseries Shelf Life‘s Tara Platt and Yuri Lowenthal.

If you grew up anything like me, you wondered what your toys were thinking. Or more importantly- what they did when you weren’t around. I know I often found them in places/positions that I didn’t leave them. And I know my toys- Toy Story wasn’t blue enough to accurately represent them. Well, now you’re in luck! Shelf Life, the series, a web show created by Tara Platt, written by Yuri Lowenthal, and produced by the couplem answers those questions.

Shelf Life shares the online adventures of four action figures stuck on a shelf; once their owner leaves the room, they can finally reveal that they are alive. Hero Man (Travis Willingham), Hero Lass (Platt), Bug Boy (Lowenthal), and their compatriot Samurai Snake (Bryan Enk and Dee Bradley Baker) have spent two seasons reacting to the horrors of their Hitler-esque (their descriptive), 10 year old owner. Now in its third season, Shelf Life has grown by leaps and bounds from its humble beginning as an off the cuff idea.

I sat down with Platt and Lowenthal to discuss the series from its inception to its future directions. With topics ranging from the original idea for the show to the perils of creating content for the web, Platt and Lowenthal provided their comments and insight.

What was the process for creating Shelf Life? The Inspiration?

Tara– It’s kinda funny because in our household, definitely Yuri is the bonafide nerd of the house not me, – ya know, I grew up and I read comics but they were like Archie, Betty & Veronica, I wasn’t reading Superman or things like that-

Yuri– Or collecting action figures.

T– Or collecting action figures. The irony is that I actually had the idea for the show- Yuri didn’t, so he feels he lost a little geek cred on that one. We were in pre-production on a different web series… We were down in our studio one night and I was speaking sort of off the top of my head, “Oh my god, wouldn’t it be so much easier to make a show that was all done green screen”, rather than what we were building and working on at the time. “And yeah, it could be funny… could be like action figures and they’re stuck on the shelf and they can’t do anything cuz they’re action figures and it’s us as the characters”, and Yuri was like “Oh my god, we have to do that!” And it kind of took off from there.

What was the casting process?

Y– As is the case with a lot of low budget stuff, you usually go to people that you know first. And if that doesn’t work out then you can cast a wider net. We knew we wanted to play two of them, and we knew Travis Willingham was born to play Hero Man. There’s literally no one else. He’s both handsome and funny- which I don’t think should be allowed, you can have one but you can’t have both. And he’s not afraid to make an ass of himself. For our silent character- what we call the Chewbacca of the series- well he’s not so much silent but no one knows what he’s saying.

T– Well, we know what he’s saying but the audience, and Hero Man, doesn’t. They sort of have to figure it out based on how we respond.

Y– We knew we’d need somebody that could physically carry that off without having a lot of dialogue. Luckily a friend, Bryan Enk had just moved to town and I said, “Bryan you have to join us on this epic adventure,” and he jumped right in. And then Dee Bradley Baker, who you will know from anything and everything.

T– He’s amazing.

Y– So we thought- we need some sort of crazy voice, like a snake creature voice and we immediately thought of Dee.

You’ve announced Aaron Douglas and Phil Morris as guests; can you talk a bit about who they’ll be playing?

Y– Phil Morris- I don’t want to give too much away on either side but Phil is basically playing our big bad in the season finale. Continue reading →