Tag: H+ The Digital Series

Episode Fifty-Five: Reviews of The Inn and Transolar Galactica

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.

The Norman! (image provided by CBC)

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

Episode the Fifty Third: Reviewing H+ The Digital Series & News Roundup

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!