Web Series are all the buzz right now, which is a good thing because the buzz is good. Writers, comedians, and aspiring filmmakers are creating hilarious shorts that run together like full season sitcoms, in hopes of exposure, but also in hopes to become actual full season television sitcoms, or films. Mix together the previously mentioned writer, comedian, and filmmaker and you get Morgan Evans. He has directed and worked on some of our absolute favorite web series: Broad City, It Gets Betterish, and Missed Connection, so it was only natural (and lucky for us) for him to create his own. ‘The Untitled Webseries‘ is a fifteen-part video love letter from Morgan to us, the viewer. It’s about a potential deal Morgan might get with Paramount Pictures, and a slew of other things, i.e.: girlfriends, stand up, paranoia, and a serious love for movies and television. It’s a refreshing, funny, and honest web series that we highly recommend. Read on to enjoy and interview with Morgan and some insight behind ‘The Untitled Webseries’.
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Serial Optimist: Hi Morgan! Tell our readers a little bit about yourself – where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.
Morgan Evans: Hey! My name is Morgan Evans and I am a 21 year-old comedy person currently living in New York. You’re most likely asking me questions because I created a fifteen episode web series that is on the world wide web! Before I was in New York I lived in Mesa, Arizona and before that I was in a sort of an indefinable void-like nonexistence in which I did nothing at all. I call that my unproductive exaannum. I’d directed an episode of Broad City, all of Missed Connection and It Gets Betterish, and a bunch of other stuff. Uh, what else. I did two shorts. One is called “The Rest of Caesar” and one is called “Upload” and that was an official selection at The Friar’s Club Comedy Festival. That’s a 20-minute short about me getting a disease in which everything I think gets uploaded to YouTube. That’ll be online soon too.
SO: I just finished watching the entire web series, and the first thing I did was Google “what is a first look deal?” Kind of embarrassing… but if you really had three wishes, like in the episode “Leprechaun”, what would they be (now that you’ve had more time to think about it).
Morgan: I’ve thought about this a lot. So thank you for asking. First I’d see if more wishes were possible. For the sake of this argument let’s say the Genie is a stickler and they’re not. I’d wish for
1. Immortality with the ability to opt out
2. Flight
3. Otis Redding’s voice
If there were four wishes I might get to world peace.
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SO: Tell us about the entire process of doing the web series. Did you already have everything written before you started the funding process on kickstarter? What kind of equipment did you use, and how many people were involved; how long was the entire process?
Morgan: The core team was our Director of Photography T.J. Misny, and myself, my producer Matthew Hobby. There’s no way I could have done it without them. Particularly Matthew Hobby, who is a genius. I definitely could have written it, but it’d just be a .PDF somewhere. Let’s see. I wrote pretty much all the episodes in one big thing, like a pilot, and contacted Matt right after ‘Upload’, which he also produced, and told him if I didn’t do something else soon everyone was going to forget about me and I’d die alone somewhere in a ditch. That’s an exaggeration but still a concern. T.J. had directed the “I Heart NY” episode of ‘Broad City’ which I saw one night at 92Y Tribecca, and we actively stalked him until he agreed to shoot everything for us.
SO: What was the biggest challenge in doing a web series? Any surprises along the way?
Morgan: The biggest surprise was assuming I’d be comfortable editing this thing, and then finding out how untrue that was. I really learned that I hate editing and it’s my least favorite thing in the world. Honestly, nothing is worse than having raw footage from fifteen episodes sitting on a hard drive waiting to be cut together, except for maybe getting one of those brain parasites cats carry. Yeah, I’d say the hardest thing was opening Final Cut every day for two months and being like “okay, go!” Matt had to call me and come over every weekend to “look at footage” which he did, but which I think was really his excuse to force me to sit down and do it.
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SO: You’ve done both short films and now a web series. Any preference? Any major differences in creating them?
Morgan: I think it depends on the scale of the project, and how much it will consume your life during production. I want to do whatever I can throw myself into and swim around in for a while. It’s great to try and just focus on one big thing and then have something presentable come out of it. The differences are vast but they each present their own fun-in-a-way challenges. A short you upload once, and a webseries you upload every morning at 6AM for three straight weeks. A web series definitely permeates your every thought more than a short does because I think something serialized has a more serious obligation to the audience. I found myself walking around going, “shit, I hope whomever sees today’s episode watched last Monday’s because they’re related”. It’s like television in the sense that you find yourself giving a shit about “return viewers” and “building an audience” or “tags” whereas when I upload a short I go, “okay, I hope people find it. Here it is, jerks”. This web series was a bigger commitment than my previous shorts, but that was part of the point. My next short might be more intensive than my web series, or more expensive, or whatever. The medium isn’t what is interesting to me. I want to tell stories in all mediums. This one just happened to fit into the glove of a web series pretty seamlessly.
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SO: It seems like you had some pretty great contacts that you got to direct episodes. Was this what you had in mind when you wrote the episodes, or did the idea to have different directors for each come about later?
Morgan: Originally I wanted every single episode to be directed by a woman. I was reading this book at the time I was writing it so I was on a particularly militant kick. It didn’t work out because of scheduling stuff, but the first “Will you direct this?!” emails were sent to 100% women. We ended up having a ratio of 6 women to 6 men (I directed three), which is a better stat than the entertainment industry can give you, so I’m okay with that.
SO: What’s next for you? A first look deal with Paramount?
Morgan: Jesus Christ I hope so. I write a lot of features, so I’d definitely like to do a feature. Either for a studio (duh), or something we can finance independently (we’re talking about it). I’ve started plotting out the second season, and in between this and that I’d like to do another short. I’m also directing a music video for my friend Graham’s band, I’m working with Johnny McNulty on his Boners thing, and I hope to keep directing episodes of people’s webseries.
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SO Note: See all episodes of ‘The Untitled Webseries’ here, and follow him @totallymorgan.