Category: Episodes

Welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out, welcome back.

Oops, I think that’s the wrong song!

But welcome back to The Joint Cafe in downtown Guelph, where we record Episode the Sixty Fourth and refuse to sing a classic Beatles song. It goes without saying that if you want the best service, coffee and food in Guelph, you need to go to The Joint Cafe. But we say it anyway.

We cover a little news upfront since summer seems to be the busiest time of the year for webseries news, for both new and returning shows. But finally we get to the reviews.

Everyone knows ‘that guy’. Now meet… “Those Guys!”

An Out with Dad Season 3 trailer is on the horizon. We caught a glimpse of it because we’re special that way, but watch for it on the channel ’cause when it hits, you’re going to love it!

Mermaids are the new big thing in the horror genre apparently, evidenced by the trend of short horror films that we’ve noticed featuring the slippery creatures. This may have gotten started with Cabin in the Woods now that I think about it. Here’s a couple we’ve noticed, for your viewing pleasure: The Little Mermaid, directed by Nicholas Humphries(also directed the webseries Riese), is certainly not the Disney version you remember; and Mermaid Down, which is in pre-production and has a kinda chilling teaser up right now.

Welcome to our experiment in locations. We recorded this episode live from our favourite place here in Guelph, The Joint Cafe. The Joint Cafe makes the best macaroni and cheese, french toast and molasses ginger cookies in the world (at least according to me, Candice)

They were very gracious and accommodating, letting us take up a table with a bunch of equipment and keeping us well lubricated and sated with coffee and cookies.

This may be a permanent solution, but it will almost certainly be where we record the next bunch of episodes since Synndicus Studios is making a move out of their current location, in the heart of downtown Guelph, to some unknown new and exciting location.

Let us know what you think! The sound is certainly different from our usual, but hey, we got coffee and cookies.

And on to the content!

We got some news from the folks at Standard Action about their webcomic, going live tomorrow! (Or is that today?) Be sure and check it out.

And then we watched a webseries about making a webseries… Chop Socky Boom is another one of those shows we’ve never seen but is part of the Super Mashed Up series of crossover web series.

It’s only four episodes so far, but a successful Kickstarter campaign and great reviews and awards from the webseries community means more are on the way.

In the meantime, watch the opening credits over and over and over.

And then, head on over to The Mop & Lucky Files and learn how you can become a Personal Espionage Specialist. This is a plucky girl detective show appealing to an older audience than Ruby Skye P.I. The first season follows one mystery from beginning to solving. But the mystery we all want to know the answer to is, “How does a person end up with the name Mop, and what are the chances she will find a best friend named Lucky?” Hopefully that will be tackled in the next season.

Thanks for listening to our experiment in recording studios. Let us know your thoughts about recording in the wild. I guess we will find out if you listen to our show for the content, or for the excellent sound quality.

And one final note… Our biggest fan Rob Routledge moved even further away from us this week, all the way to Nanaimo, BC. Good thing he won that shirt before he moved so we didn’t have to ship it to him. He assures us he will spread the good word of Limited Release out there on the island, so we expect to start seeing more tweets, Facebook comments, Google+ fans and emails from BC!

We start with a bang, or more rightly a shot, a shot of bourbon. Mix drinking with cooking and a need to be the internet’s cutest couple and we really peel back the layers and let you behind the scenes in our everyday relationship. And it gets ugly.

Perhaps we should have followed along with a recipe from at least one episode of either show we covered and brought some food with us to recording. But instead, we hungrily review two shows about cooking.

First up, a Limited Release Exclusive! Thanks to Sandy Nicholson, writer and creator of Comfort Food, for giving us access to all 6 episodes of the series before release. A very cute show about a couple who recently moved apart from each other trying to keep their relationship going by making desserts together over the phone.

Because Nick and I are strictly forbidden from cooking together it really drew us both in. And once you’ve watched all the episodes, particularly episode 5, you may ask me more about which character I took issue with, but for now we remain frustratingly spoiler free.

And regarding the gender of creator Sandy, I tried very hard to play the pronoun game since it’s a somewhat gender-less name. Interestingly the only two people I know named Sandy are both men. But in Nick’s defense, it is far more likely in North America for Sandy to be a woman’s name, so he went with it.

Listen closely around the 20 minute mark and place your bets on whether we can hold it together for 8 more minutes while we review Pairings.

Pairings is food pornography at it’s best, money shots with a story so it appeals to everyone! Do not watch this show hungry, or with an empty pantry. You will definitely want to cook after one episode, especially if you are a single man.

We’re not sure why this one took so long for us to review since it’s littered with some of our favourite creators, artists and actors from the LA scene, but we love it now, and we want to see Season Two so consider donating!

Did you place your bets? Did we hold it together? I don’t think I did.

So why don’t you get in touch with us via the Twitters, the Facebooks  or the Google+s and let us know if you like the shows, if you like us, or if you have your own show you want us to review. We also accept email at backtalk@limitedreleasepodcast.ca, and reviews on iTunes.

Nobody ever said making web series was easy! Maybe we don’t give enough respect to these people who work for little to nothing, sometimes even giving thousands of dollars of their own money to make our entertainment, but we do appreciate it. We also appreciate that lots of times these creators are doing something for the first time because the technology makes it so damn easy nowadays. But of course, it’s rarely the technology that keeps series and films in production hell.

In this episode we chat about some of the shows that have had false starts, and changed paths over the long process from the idea to the release. First up, Causality the Series, a time travel show we’ve been waiting for since 2011.

We finally cover the long awaited Mila’s Fountain, unfortunately not delivering the news that Nick, or the other 999 followers of their Facebook page, want to hear. But we and the creators still hold hope.

Welcome internet listeners to the Gilmore Girls show… at least for the first 5 minutes. Candice is re-watching the show since she’s been getting the smack down laid on her by H+ The Digital Series writer John Cabrera. With 7 seasons of the show to go through, there might be an update each episode for the next couple of months.

And on to what we really do, talk about webseries. We hear from the folks at Standard Action that there is a

Kickstarter campaign imminent to raise funds for season 3 of the show. In the meantime, you should catch up on season 2 which has been coming out pretty regularly every couple of weeks since the beginning of the year.

And then we tried to watch some shows to review them. Nick saw this on his phone while watching from the road, and Candice had so much trouble streaming the episodes clearly that one 5:41min episode took 12.5mins to get through! Ah Koldcast, god love ya!

We open up this episode with comments from our listeners. Our reviews of H+ and House of Cards (not officially a review but we talked about it for a long time) in episode Fifty-Third brought in lots of comments. Our biggest fan (aka Robert Routledge) shared some thoughts about the medium of making shows for the internet and someone who should not be as gracious and well spoken as he was (John Cabrera, writer of H+) schools Candice on her pedestrian taste in story-telling.

You too can leave a message and we might read it on the air.

We quickly move onto yet more awards show news, this time the Canadian Screen Awards (or their more commonly known name _________). Congrats to Guidestones for winning the only category we at Limited Release Podcast cares about, Best Original Program or Series produced for Digital Media – Fiction.

Moving on to the reviews. First up is The Inn from Pretty the Series creator Steve Silverman. If you have watched Pretty you know it is a hilarious, absurd comedy. The Inn is not that. It is a mystery with a touch of supernatural to it. But does that come across when you are watching it? It’s up to you to decide if it is creepy enough to  give you chills.

As usual, Nick’s major complaint is that this show does not have it’s own home on the web, it is bundled up with Pretty the Series. However, you can check out their Facebook page to stay up to date on the webseries.

While The Inn might be the most recent show we’ve ever reviewed (the season finale having aired the day before we recorded) Transolar Galactica might be the longest we’ve ever gone before reviewing a show.

Not only has Transolar Galactica been around for eons (in internet years) but I believe both Rob Hunt and Mike Fly have been on our show and told us to watch it. As it turns out, they were right and we should not have saved every episode to hard-core through them all at once. And neither should you. Take your time, enjoy an episode a week and get ready because it sounds like Season 2 is on it’s way.

Download up! Yeah, I know that makes no sense.

Now comes the secret part

It’s award season! We’ve been through the IAWTV awards, the Streamys and the

Indie Soap Awards. We’ve talked a bit about a them in the last few episodes and really spend some time talking about right off the top of this one. We celebrate Out With Dad and Husbands Indie Soap Award wins and also chat about whether the awards are being given to the most deserving, or the most popular. And does that really matter.

Read this Tumblr post defending The Streamys, while still being upset at their lack of representation.

What do you think? Should independent (i.e. non industry members) be judged against series with funding from major studios? Should webseries be given their own category in a larger awards ceremony like they are for the Canadian Screen Awards (being given out on Sunday BTW). Let us know your thoughts.

And, on to the reviews! First we watched Super Knocked Up, Nick’s favourite pick from the Make My Series competition from a few episodes ago. We watched the entire first season, reviewed their show and then watched the season 2 premiere the very next day. Did we time that perfectly, or just exactly wrongly?

They had to make a pretty big cast change between seasons 1 and 2, but have been doing lots of outreach with their new leading lady and they’ve won us over. And be sure to catch their weekly live Google+ Hangout show, Super Geeked Up on Wednesday nights.

Next up we review the pilot episode of Out Of Time.  We met lots of great people at the most recent Toronto Webseries Community Meetup, including Rodney V. Smith, the director/producer. He made a great case as to why we should watch and review his unavailable to the public series.

Sure, this one breaks a few of our rules as there are only 3 episodes currently, making up one 30 minute long pilot story, and it is not finished or released yet! But Rodney was pretty convincing. Especially their model for delivery of this show. Right now they are running an IndieGoGo campaign  to raise $40,000. And once they have that done they will be taking their 30 minute pilot episode on the road and do theatre showings in cities with the most interest, using Tugg.com

Go, watch some behind the scenes stuff from their production diaries, drop a few bucks on them and get some goodies.

And then go, listen to our episode, join us on the social medias – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, iTunes and write something to us at backtalk@limitedreleasepodcast.ca!

By the way, we had an amazing response from John Cabrera, writer of H+ The Digital Series on our Google+ page. You should go read it, especially if our review of the show turned you off watching their series.

News, news and more news! In fact we spend as much time talking news as we do talking series. Of course the news is that Netflix’s original series House of Cards was released. Considering how much we talked about it, we could really just say we reviewed it. But this really exemplifies what’s going on in this industry… Is House of Cards a webseries? Or is it a television show released online? Is that the same thing?

After having only watched one episode for Nick and three episodes for Candice, we have certainly watched enough to give it a bit of a review since the 55 minute running time of the pilot episode is as long as entire seasons of shows we’ve reviewed, if not longer.

Feel free to check out what some people are saying about the show’s distribution:

Writer and Producer Elize Morgan

Media blog Antenna

Film and TV blog /Film

Let us know if you’ve watched the show, how you’ve watched it and what you’d call it.

And from one big budget show to another, we move on to reviewing Bryan Singer’s well funded experiment in online story-telling, H+ The Digital Series. This one is one of YouTube’s official channels and is in partnership with Warner Digital Distribution. The fact that such big names are putting their money behind narrative, scripted series, available only online is a step in the right direction for all web creators, right? Or is it just another example of big bad Hollywood coming in and taking all the money, all the views and all the awards and leaving nothing for the little guys?

That’s not for us to decide, we are only here to tell you whether it’s worth your time to watch it. And on that, we are divided. The series is maybe too long, or maybe the episodes are too short, or maybe Candice has a really short attention span.

Either way, this series won Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects at the 2013 IAWTV awards along with Best Direction and Best Sci-Fi Series at the 3rd Annual Streamy Awards so you know it’s at least gonna look and sound good.

We get into a pretty meaty discussion about this show, Guidestones and House of Cards and the episode structure. We’d love to hear what you think about it. Is length of the episode still a guideline for webseries or should the short format be thrown out the window?

And, can you believe it, we cover one more thing in this jam packed episode… Steve Silverman’s new webseries The Inn has started. Watch the pilot episode and get hooked. It’s not Pretty the Series, that’s for sure!