 Okay, thank you all for coming. I'm Clarice, I'm Elsie and I'm Minnie and what are you going to get out of this session? Well, we're going to explain to you how we, the Candlewasters, have managed to gain a supportive, creative, international and predominantly female fan base through creating web series on YouTube. So the fourth member of our team, the Candlewasters, Sally, couldn't be here today. So we'll just, we'll think about her and we'll just, we'll keep, we'll keep powering through. So our two web series are Nothing Much to Do and Lovely Little Losers. And through those web series, we've amassed over 1.8 million views on YouTube and we have 10,000 subscribers. And you can find us on tumblr at thecandlewasters.tumblr.com, on Twitter at Candlewasters, Facebook, if you just, Candlewasters, there's also a page for each of our web series, web series, and on YouTube, if you just search it, it'll be there. Yeah. So before we go any further into explaining our projects, we're just going to give you a little bit of a background on what, yeah, the basis of our series. So our videos are based on vlogs. So what's that? A vlog is a video blog. So there are like a huge variety of video blogs that people create online. Some are like diaries. Some are informative. We've got like, there's beauty experts. There's people who do reviews. There are people who make educational videos. Some bloggers discuss the creative projects that they're making. Others provide a space to discuss topics that concern them and their peers, like social anxiety or sex education. And there's also daily vloggers who take the cameras around wherever they go and they film their lives, like self-mediated reality TV. And the vlogs vary in length, but mostly they're around three minutes long. And yeah, so people who make these videos, some of them have thousands or millions of people who watch these. Yeah, and it's a big genre of content for our generation and it's essentially a new type of television that's amateur-created. Here's an example of a vlog. Good morning, John. The internet is pretty great. It's weird and economically and culturally diverse and it's my hobby and it's my job and it's my passion and it's my friend. A lot of the marvelous weirdness and diversity of the internet was and is because of a concept called net neutrality. Basically, the idea that all the information flowing through the pipes of the internet has to be treated the same way, which is kind of a new thing. Other information distribution systems never really had that. So YouTuber Hank Green, half of the vlog brothers and American YouTube channel worth over 2.5 million subscribers, came up with the idea of adapting a classic novel to the modern day. The result of this is the Lizzie Bennett Diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Where Elizabeth Bennett, aka Lizzie, vlogs about her life and experiences. The series ran from April 2012 to March 2013. It was the first literary inspired web series and won the Emmy for original interactive program in 2013. Since the show finished, mostly young amateur creators have made series such as The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, Camilla, Green Gables Fables and The March Family Letters, having been inspired by the Lizzie Bennett Diaries. It is appealing to creators to be able to reinterpret a well-known story, which is often out of copyright. It's appealing to an audience of mostly young women aged 18 to 24 to be able to watch their favorite classical stories reimagined and see stories with female leads and romantic arcs. Cool. So now about us. So we met at high school. We were a group of friends there. And that was at Western Springs College in Auckland. And our age range is 18 to 22. And so last year, no, not last year, a couple of years ago, once Lizzie Bennett Diaries had finished, it was wrapping up and we were thinking that that was awesome because it was made so well, but also because of the low budget format. And we were thinking a lot of people are going to be making more series like this, especially inspired by classic novels and plays and things. So we thought, like, hypothetically, what would we do if we were to make a web series? And we thought about Shakespeare. And we're all big Shakespeare nerds. And one of our favorite Shakespeare plays is Much Adore About Nothing. And we were thinking it would be really great if you had Benedict and Beatrice saying their soliloquies directly to the camera, just like people do nowadays with vlogs. And so we talked about this for a while and then we realized, okay, well, why don't we just do that then? And so we did. And that turned into Nothing Much To Do. And yeah, a big part of the success of Nothing Much To Do is because we sort of just happened to tap into a niche audience. In the 21st century, there's, you know, the fragmented audiences. You've got people watching TV, people watching TV sort of things on YouTube, people watching Netflix. Everything's so spread out in a way that it never used to be. And so the niches that we've sort of fell into are the people looking for literary web series and also the Shakespeare fans. Our audience is 94% female. So 53% of that is people 18 to 24. So quite interestingly, that's exactly what we are. So it just totally fit with we were making something exactly what we wanted to see for people exactly like us. Yeah. In the two series we've made, we've pretended our characters are real. They exist in the real world. This means our characters needed reasons to film, edit and upload their videos because whatever content they posted could have a fix on their lives outside of their YouTube channel. With vlog series, you need to justify anything that goes online. So our characters overshare their lives. We took a lot of YouTube conventions to help us show aspects of the story in a realistic manner. For example, when we wanted to show the relationship between hero and Claudio, we use the My Boyfriend Does My Makeup, a vlogging convention used by beauty experts on YouTube. Beatrice uses her vlog as a space to go on rants about her life and issues that she's passionate about. So low budget filmmaking. We made nothing much to do on a budget of $0. We had nothing. So for our auditions, we sort of, you know, made a Facebook group invited people to that, told people from our school, told our friends. We're also like people who have been all involved in like theater and drama groups. So we had friends through that. In terms of equipment, we owned some stuff and we had some friends who owned like a good camera. So we borrowed that. And we filmed in our summer holidays over three weeks. We sort of did nothing else in those three weeks, which was, we just managed to find that time. And yeah, our casting crew were just pretty amazing that they gave us that time. So we're really grateful to them for that. Yeah, and promotion. We didn't spend any money on promoting our series. Like we mentioned before, we've got a Facebook page and a Tumblr page and Twitter. We recently got Snapchat. Yeah, and we update people regularly on these platforms. And if you're subscribed to any of our YouTube channels, then you get a notification when we upload a video. And we made sure that for our first series, we had regular days that we updated. So that was a Wednesday. And then occasionally there'd be like extra videos in that week. So people knew when they were going to get content. Also Tumblr was a really important platform for us. Because that's where people who are interested in literary blog series reside. There's also a platform that we understand ourselves because we use Tumblr a lot. And it's really neat that, yeah, that we go on there to see kind of communities who enjoy different TV shows and things. And so that's also we now have a community there who enjoy our web series. And that's where we can see they then create different stuff inspired by a series. But we'll talk about that more later. Yeah, so our little subscribers. We released nothing much to do from March last year until November. At the end of the releasing schedule in November, we had 6,000 subscribers. And from the end of that until now, we've gained that extra 4,000 subscribers. So it's it's just like it keeps spreading. If you are to watch our series, the whole of nothing much to do, it will take you longer than four hours. So that's like more than just your average movie. Most videos between three to five minutes long, with a maximum of seven minutes. And our subscribers are from all around the world. What's really interesting is that 52% of them are American, which is something we just never would have guessed. And then after that, it's like, you know, the United Kingdom, then Australia, then Canada, then New Zealand, Germany, France, and just I mean, if you keep going through our analytics, it's like all these countries around the world with people watch our show. Yeah. Yeah, so trans media was something that was really important to us with the series. So not only did our characters have YouTube channels, but they also used other types of media to express themselves. Beatrice had a Twitter where she wrote random thoughts and updated her viewers on her when she put up a new video. Hero had an Instagram where she put up photos from her life, such as Outfit of the Day, which is her Instagram fad. And our characters also commented on each other's videos, which audience really enjoyed. And yeah, this kind of content is extra content. It didn't necessarily further the story, but it created the world for the characters. Yeah, another cool thing about that was like audience interactions. You've got a random YouTuber, Elfriend 2009, talking to Benedict, our character. Yeah. Yeah. As mentioned earlier, when making a vlog series, we constantly ask questions like, why would a character film this? And why would they upload this to YouTube? In this way, we ensured we maintained the realism of our characters existing in the real world. In effect, time has also been incredibly important. We uploaded some videos at like 3am because it's what the characters would do. It was necessary for us to create our next series this year, while nothing much to do was still relevant and fresh in people's minds. It was realistic for the characters to move to uni this year. Our fans appreciate this level of realism. And it's part of what makes our series stand out amongst others in the same genre. I do. Okay. So, yeah, we literally only thought that our parents and our friends would watch the show, nothing much to do. And so now 10,000 people watch it. And so they're the kind of people that love to make gifts on YouTube, which if you don't know, it's kind of like a little of a Harry Potter vibe of like a little picture that moves on the internet. It's amazing. And so that will be like stills from our show that move. And so they've also created fan art. They've made socks inspired by our characters. They've made tea. And there are over 500 works of fan fiction about our show on the internet, which you can read at your leisure. We have songs in our series, which our characters sing, which we've written ourselves. So there are a lot of people out there who like to cover our songs and put that online. And they've also written songs inspired by our story, which is just amazing. There have been meetups in London, in Australia, in New York and in New Zealand. Yeah. So after the success of Nothing Much to Do, we decided to make another web series. And this was a sequel series. It has some of the same characters from NMTD, from Nothing Much to Do, and then some new ones. And it's centered around a university students and a flat in Wellington. And we decided to take our inspiration from another Shakespeare play, which is Love Sleevers Lost. And it's called, our series is called Lovely Little Losers. And it translates quite well, which is quite fun. And we also wanted to push ourselves with this series and try and branch out a little bit in no different ways. And we started releasing these videos in July, and we've currently got 43 episodes. And we're still releasing them. And the channel currently has 7,000 subscribers. Yeah. Another cool thing about doing Nothing Much to Do and Lovely Little Losers is that NMTD was based on Much to Do About Nothing and LLL was based on Love Sleevers Lost. And those two plays are often paired together, but the other way round. Earlier this year, I believe it was Shakespeare's Globe, like all the Royal Shakespeare Company. They released videos of the two plays, and they had the same actors and translated them through into both casts. So like what we've done. We utilized the fan interest in NMTD by setting up a Kickstarter for the sequel series. And the lead up to the announcement for Lovely Little Losers, we, and our call for fan funding through the Kickstarter, we released a series of clues via our social media, which hyped people up for the upcoming announcement. We put our Kickstarter out during the last two weeks of NMTD. So we had some crossover between Nothing Much to Do Finishing and people being excited for LLL. We ended up gaining over $1,000 in the first hour of our Kickstarter being live. And within two hours, we had successfully been funded. By the end of the 31 days, we had gained over $22,000. The difference between our original funding goal and how much we actually raised was mind blowing. So our second web series. This time around, we had more money, obviously, but less time to write the series. The first series, we'd sort of spent a year just like chilled out, writing it, everything's fine. We could just not make this. Everything's all good. This time we were like, well, we've been given money. Everyone knows it's happening. We've got to actually do this. We also filmed more content, which is you can't really tell that now because we haven't finished releasing the series, but I definitely think it's going to be longer than four hours this time around. Yeah. And so we had the same cast and then some extra people and those extra actors were through acquaintances. So we didn't do a big round of auditions again. And the Kickstarter was mostly used for transport. We had a lot of actors that we were transporting from Auckland to Wellington and for food for the cast and crew. Again, we filmed on three weeks in the summer holidays. And this time around, we bought a lot of equipment, which is really exciting stuff that we're still using now and will continue to use in the future. And again, our amazing casting crew just did that for the fun of it. And we're really grateful to them. Yeah. So what are we going to do next? This year we applied for funding from New Zealand on Air for their digital web series fund. And there were 109 groups that entered into that. And that was a mix of professionals and amateurs and overall really tough competition. And at the beginning of this month, we found out that we got funded $100,000. Yeah. And that's going to be really great because we're going to need like more money to make it the project that we want to make. But that's like an incredibly, it's incredibly encouraging for us. So yeah, it's it's it's insane. Yeah, so our working title is Bright Summer Night. And this is based on a mid-summer night's dream. And yeah, we want to push ourselves further. We want to move away from the vlog style. We want to make it more like your kind of normal drama style, which means we can move the camera more, which we are very excited about and not having to justify why the camera is capturing their lives at all times. So that's very exciting. And then after that, we just want to keep creating stuff. So we might make short films and TV series, maybe maybe movies, more web series. We're just really, really excited that we can, yeah, that we've been given these opportunities to just keep making stuff. So yeah. So we put a lot of time into our two series, and we wouldn't have been able to create what we did or even close to what we did if we hadn't put that much time into it. Or the amount of thought we put into it. And it's like also our collaboration as a team without that we wouldn't be anywhere, even though we're such a democracy, it can slow us down. Yeah, it's ultimately so important that we're constantly supporting each other as even when we're not thinking about our characters lives, we're answering emails and managing our social media to keep up with the fans. We think our experience proves that if you persist, you can do a lot. We're still learning and we're so keen to learn more from, well, people like you guys as well. So if you have any information you want to share with us, come talk to us or ask questions at the question, but which will be soon. We have so many ideas would like to make reality and to keep working in a creative space where if you put in the work and the time and you love and care about what you're doing, you can truly achieve so much. So thank you guys for coming along to hear us speak. Do you guys have any questions? Thanks. I was curious as to how you script transmedia. How do you develop the script and kind of sequence all of the different channels? I can talk about Instagram. I was script writing first that we wrote for all the scripts. Oh, yeah. Then you can talk about it. Yeah. To see live. Yeah. So we wrote scripts for every single video. And then so the actors will let those scripts and then some of the videos we got them to like improv little little moments where we thought that that would kind of bring out different things. But most of it was scripted. And then with transmedia, it's a little bit more spontaneous. But yeah, I think that's right. Oh, well, I was in charge for NMTD for the Instagram heroes Instagram account. So I'm reasonably familiar with that. But sort of the way I did it was just like going off and planning stuff on my own. And then I'd be like, hey, guys, these are my ideas. This is the picture I want to upload. This is the caption I want to do. What do you think? And you'd tell me that you'd liked it most of the time. But yeah, a big part of the transmedia, like a sort of solid moment that we all like remember is the in the videos coming up to like the kind of climax of the story. They're like, it's hero's birthday soon. Oh my god, she's turning 16. And then like on the day when they said her birthday was going to be, which I think was a Saturday, the 16th of August, we put out some pictures on her Instagram that were like people are arriving at my party. So it was like her and her boyfriend, her and her brother, her and her cousin. And then it was like, everything's going great. And we also did tweets from Beatrice being like people arrived at the party. And then the tweets stopped, the Instagram pictures stopped and there was nothing for a week. And our fans were like, what the flippin neck is going on? And we were like, take it. Even our actors and ourselves, we stopped using social media for that week, which really freaked people out. But people knew that something was coming up. And most of them had also read much ado about nothing. So they knew that hero's birthday was our version of the wedding scene in much ado about nothing where she gets left at the altar and dies. Yeah, which we didn't kill her. Yeah, a lot of our trans media, like the YouTube comments was done sort of in the spur of the moment. But as I understand it, there's like other people who make vlog series who have actually planned out their trans media from the get go, which is incredible. And I don't know how they have time for it. Especially like with Lovely Little Losers, we upload three videos a week. And like having the time for like intense social media at the same time as that would be crazy. Yeah, especially like doing uni as well and stuff like which joined the time. Yeah. What do you imagine will happen when you move to a more traditional format? Are you going to lose fans? Are you going to get pushed back from them? What's going to happen? Do you think? Well, it's really neat that our fans are so supportive of us. I think it's quite cool that they feel because we're their age, they feel like we're all kind of a big community. So I think they'll just be excited that we're trying new things and that we're branching out. And I think I think it's definitely it'll be we have to think about ways that like our fans really, really enjoy the realism of our series at the moment. So we have to find ways that we can still engage them, but not have that not have them talking directly to the camera. So yeah, it's going to be challenging, but I think it's also incredibly exciting. And I think overall, it will be they'll just appreciate the the the fact that it is new and different. Yeah. And that we're adapting another Shakespeare play means that we're sort of sticking close to what we've done before with a literary inspired web series. But this time it will be more like a traditional web series where everyone doesn't see the camera. And in terms of like being traditional, like lots of our fans, the way Tumblr works is amazing because I'm just on there and I can like follow someone who watches my stuff and they can follow me and I can see what other things they like. And a lot of them like traditional television shows and movies and stuff. So it doesn't surprise me that they would still like what we would keep making, even if it's going to become like a little bit more like traditional. Have you thought about capturing that whole series for later because people watched in real time? They were seeing you tweet Instagram in real time. Have you thought about, you know, creating that whole collection of media, capturing it for future? One of our fans has actually gone through and taken all of the trans media elements of our series and put them onto like a PowerPoint presentation with the videos and the comments. And it's also incredible. We're really grateful for them for doing it because we don't have the time for it. But like because it's on the internet, it's hopefully there and available for people to be able to watch forever if they want to. And we'd also really like to make it more obviously available to like schools and universities who are teaching Shakespeare to try and get their kids more engaged with the content that they're learning in a way that is perhaps more relatable for them as young people. But I think, yeah, it's very true that what is also exciting about the series is that it is uploading over such a long period of time so people can come in and start seeing it being uploaded live. And that experience, I think you do lose a little bit of that if you're watching it post us uploading. I think it definitely affects it. Yeah, yeah. We'll be in Oceania after this if you want to come talk to us about anything.