Telemovies

[lupercal]

Question: where would you put a made for TV movie, which wasn't subsequently released on video or DVD?

It couldn't be a DTV, by definition, but it's also not a feature film, unless my definition of feature film is wrong. I've always used whether it was shown cinematically as the guideline. If the definition of a feature film was that it appeared, either in cinemas or on TV, before it appeared on video, then that would solve it.

...but if I'm right it would also mean that the Balto sequels - certainly Wolf Quest - were feature films, since I think they were shown on cable TV in the US either the same day, or the day before their DVD release, but nevermind that...

Loop

[MonkeyFunk]

Probably best just to change direct-to-video to direct-to-video nad made-for-TV (although that's a trifle long).

Say, did anyone decide where Homestar Runner would be filed?

[athena]

Question: where would you put a made for TV movie, which wasn't subsequently released on video or DVD?

hrmm... I'd be tempted to file it under Feature Film... right now the Hobbit is in there which was originally a TV movie if I remember correctly...

OR... in some instances I've lumped the TV movie in with the TV series it was associated with--ie. Kim Possible: A Stitch in Time would just be a merchandise release with Kim Possible...


What was it you were thinking of adding?

[lupercal]

The one that brought the thought up was a 1982 Australian telemovie called 'The Seventh Match' , though it's called 'Sarah' in the US, I think.

Loop

[athena]

Say, did anyone decide where Homestar Runner would be filed?
hrmm, it was actually not my intention to open Keyframe up to web animation profiles...

HOWEVER, as you guys probably guessed by now I'm pretty flexible about these sorts of things if there's a demand for it... if we were to start adding web animation I would say it needs its own category and someone who'd be willing to take responsibility for that category. Homestar Runner is obviously one of the most famous web series out there--I've heard of it and I'm not even a fan--but to justify a category I would say there needs to be at least a dozen or more web series of equal caliber... a job that would require a certain amount of legwork and I think our current editorial staff has their hands full with our existing categories.

[MonkeyFunk]

I'd volunteer to deal with webaniamtion. I figured that if they had their own section, then each episode of a series could be listed individually, the same way that Lonney Tunes are listed in the theatrical section.

That way series such as Homestar Runner, Bonus Stage, Happy Tree Friends, Salad Fingers, Weebl and Bob etc. could be grouped with stand-alones such as The Egg Song, Ultimate Showdown and Europe and Italy (which is already listed in the short film category)

[P.C. Unfunny]

hrmm... I'd be tempted to file it under Feature Film... right now the Hobbit is in there which was originally a TV movie if I remember correctly...

OR... in some instances I've lumped the TV movie in with the TV series it was associated with--ie. Kim Possible: A Stitch in Time would just be a merchandise release with Kim Possible...


What was it you were thinking of adding?

You could definetly put the Lupin III TV specials in this new tv movie section.

[athena]

I'd volunteer to deal with webaniamtion.
hehe. And another editor is absorbed into the fold... I think at this rate the editors are going to outnumber the regulars around here. Now I just need to convince Inkwolf to make her title 'Master of the Mouse Avatars' and Thalia to be our official 'Screencap Wizard' and we'll be set. ;)

Just kidding... we're always happy to have all the help we can get. :woohoo:


Two questions... 1) Do you have some kind of graphics program which you can use to resize and crop images? Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks...?

2) I've noticed in the past that you're usually the one to post news headlines to the forum... think I could convince you to do a little news hounding for us too? I wouldn't ask that it be your main responsibility, just popping an interesting headline here and there to make the 'Latest Buzz' on the homepage look a little less out of date... ?


I figured that if they had their own section, then each episode of a series could be listed individually, the same way that Lonney Tunes are listed in the theatrical section.
Actually this is an approach I hadn't even considered... which shows how much I know about web animation... I had thought of Homestar Runner more like an episodic TV series... I take it it's not..?

Hmm... this seems like we're coming back to that parent-child profile system that keeps cropping up...


The Egg Song, Ultimate Showdown and Europe and Italy (which is already listed in the short film category)
hehe, I'll admit the only reason that they're there is that I didn't know they were there. :D

[athena]

You could definetly put the Lupin III TV specials in this new tv movie section.
Ooo... I don't think I'd want to open a separate section for TV movies unless there's a huge demand for it in terms of number of profiles to go in...


And loop, I'd still class Balto II or III or whatever it was as a DTV because it was promoted as a DTV... a television movie in my mind is like those Hallmark Entertainment mini-series or something -10th Kingdom, Merlin, Dinotopia, etc. etc.--where there's a big promo surge on TV and then 6 months later it gets a video release almost as an after thought.

Now admittedly, there *were* a few TV specials back in the 80s that weren't feature length but have thus far remained unclassifiable...

hehe, anyone else have a headache? I'm just glad I never thought to start putting genres on the profiles... they we'd really have a nightmare on our hands... :headbang:

[starlac]

That way series such as Homestar Runner, Bonus Stage, Happy Tree Friends, Salad Fingers, Weebl and Bob etc. could be grouped with stand-alones such as The Egg Song, Ultimate Showdown and Europe and Italy (which is already listed in the short film category)

Wouldn't that way mean we'll end up with 20-30 (however many have they made) episodes of Happy Tree Friends etc? Couldn't you put an episode count instead?

I only mention this cause I'm having trouble thinking up different synopsises for the Road Runner cartoons (outside of stated what acme products are used [i.e. the one with the Earthquake pills / retractable steel wall]), which in a way are similar, in so far as the premise is more or less the same in every cartoon.

Anyway...

I've been wondering where to add the TV movies "The Wind in the Willows" and "The Willows in Winter" the later of which has nothing to do with any kind of holidays so that category's out. Both did eventually did released on video, I think, I'm not sure about Winter.

EDIT: I suppose you could take the word holiday off "Holiday Special" but at present I don't think there is a huge demand.

[MonkeyFunk]

Two questions... 1) Do you have some kind of graphics program which you can use to resize and crop images? Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks...?

Paint Shop Pro. I've done a lot of that for my own site, so I'm okay with it.

2) I've noticed in the past that you're usually the one to post news headlines to the forum... think I could convince you to do a little news hounding for us too? I wouldn't ask that it be your main responsibility, just popping an interesting headline here and there to make the 'Latest Buzz' on the homepage look a little less out of date... ?

Yeah, sure.



Actually this is an approach I hadn't even considered... which shows how much I know about web animation... I had thought of Homestar Runner more like an episodic TV series... I take it it's not..?

Well... yeah, it is, but you could say Looney Tunes is too. Here are the main things to be considered:

-HR generally tries to keep to weekly updates, but there are no actual deadlines, commissions or seasons, unlike TV series. In this way it could be seen as something like Wallace and Gromit, the three "episodes" of which are listed differently here.

-It's divided up into several "sub series": the main cartoons starring the whole cast, a spin-off series starring one character who answers viewer' e-mails, a spin-off of that which is ostensibly a cartoon created by that character etc. Over at the Toon Zone forums it actually got nominated for the "best webcartoon" award three times by virtue of this. Also take a look at http://www.fat-pie.com/flash.htm where there are several series - Salad Fingers, Spilsbury Toast Boy, Sock, Burnt Face Man - along with a load of stand-alone shorts, raising the question of whether we make an entry for each series and each stand-alone, or one entry for the whole site

-Episodes can get shifted around; the first ever Homestar episode isn't on the official site anymore, but is preserved on a fansite.

-If all the webcartoons are going in one category, then it'd be kind of inconsistent if some entries are for shorts and some are for series...

-On the other hand, Homestar Runner has over 150 individual episodes which are all very short and might not be worth posting individually (Road Runner syndrome, I suppose you could say).

-However, if there's a webanimated category, then maybe it won't matter if it's flooded by a few major series; after all, some animators are bound to be more prolific than others...

I guess it boils down to this: the most consistent and accurate option would be to list each episode of a web series as an individual short. However, this will result in the webanimation section of the database being filled with weirdly-titled entries and generally looking a bit untidy. Any thoughts?

[lupercal]

I'm not very up on web animations, so these are general principles only, however I think they can be made to pertain.

I don't believe we should have individual episode listings for anything. I think Athena and I agreed on that forever ago when we were looking at what a dog's breakfast bcdb is.

The one 'exception' is theatrical shorts, and that's because they're not episodes. 'What's Opera Doc' is not episode 284 of 'Bugs Bunny'. He just happens to be in it.

Although you could make a stronger case for shorts like 'Betty Boop' or 'Tom and Jerry' being a series, ultimately they're not. They're theatrically released short films which had no fixed schedule or 'seasons' or anticipated number of episodes. If they're a series, they're a series in the sense that James Bond movies are a series.

I would argue that if we're going to have web-series - and again forgive me if I'm being ignorant in this dept - they should be listed seperately where they genuinely are discreet from each other in some way, and have mutliple episodes. So a spin-off would be fine; a spin-off of a spin-off is fine, provided it genuinely is a series and not just a one-shot. But every episode of every spin-off.... well put it this way, anyone who wants to introduce that kind of system is welcome to start by doing the synopsis for every episode of The Simpsons.

With perhaps some rare exceptions, people don't come here to find out about episodes of series; they come to find out about the series as a whole. OTOH they <i>do</i> come here to look for specific theatrical shorts. I check the search engine hits. Last month there were 21 specific search engine hits on 'Red Hot Riding Hood'. There were about 150 for variations on 'Rocko's Modern Life', but none at all for something like 'Rocko's modern life (episode title'), or a single search result anywhere which suggested anyone was trying to find information about a specific episode of anything. We get requests for screencaps and pictures and gan art fairly often, but rarely episodes. There have been rare rare exceptions in the past, like the episode of Bakshi's 'Mighty Mouse' that got taken off the air for the supposed cocaine sniffing reference, but that could be a half dozen out of 20,000.

Getting back to the short/series definition, I realise this is somewhat arbitrary. For example, a Loopy de Loop cartoon isn't intrinsically different from a Huckleberry Hound one, except that the latter was on TV and came out once a week for a specific duration, whereas the former was theatrical and came out erratically with sometimes many months between films. That isn't a perfect system, but as far as I can see, you either draw an arbitrary line somewhere, or you treat every episode of everything ever made as an individual entity, and I don't believe we'll ever be up to that. I could see us maybe listing the episode titles one day, but that's about it.

On the subject of inconsistency within a category, we already have it. In 'Part live action' some entries are feature films and some are 10 minute shorts. That bugs me a little, but at the moment I'm just glad we got the category happening at all, and at the moment I'm conscious of the need to stop the category list ballooning out of control. I would give a lot of thought to what extra categories we think we might eventually need before adding more, because I don't think it can take much more without getting unweildly.

One thing I've less of a problem with, though, are subcategories which open up inside top level categories. For instance, WB and MGM within theatrical shorts.

I don't believe there should be a seperate category for telemovies. I've added (I think) 137 profiles, and not one of them so far has been a telemovie that wasn't released on VHS or DVD. The closest I can think of is 'Lassie's Rescue Rangers, the pilot of which was a telemovie, but basically it was treated as a long episode of the series. Telemovies should be absorbed into an existing category based on some other criteria.

I was just kidding around with that Wolf Quest thing.

Loop

[MonkeyFunk]

Yeah, let's go with entries for entire series. One idea though - to help distinguish series from one-shots, do you think maybe Homestar Runner or whatever should have "(series)" in the title, sort of like the disambiguation markers for entries with the same title (the various Astro Boys, Lupin IIIs and Dennis the Menaces)? Or is tht best left in the description or wherever?

[lupercal]

Yeah, I see your problem. One easy solution, which nobody will like, including me actually, would be to absorb web shorts into 'short films' and absorb web series into 'tv series' (changing the title to merely 'series', or branching into TV and Web at a lower level)

But if we're just going to have a single 'web animation' category, yeah, I think it makes sense to have (series) next to a series, and nothing at all next to a one-shot.

Loop

[MonkeyFunk]

Yeah, I see your problem. One easy solution, which nobody will like, including me actually, would be to absorb web shorts into 'short films' and absorb web series into 'tv series' (changing the title to merely 'series', or branching into TV and Web at a lower level)


That would also solve another problem: precisely how we define "web animation". I mean, I found a couple animations which are probably only available on the Internet, but were originally created as student films. So do they count as web animations?

Then there are web animations that later move to TV, like Happy Tree Friends...

[athena]

That would also solve another problem: precisely how we define "web animation". I mean, I found a couple animations which are probably only available on the Internet, but were originally created as student films. So do they count as web animations?
Oh dear that's true...
Strictly speaking you can't define it as animation produced with web software because then stuff like Mucha Lucha and John Callahan's Quads would qualify (both made in Flash, I believe) and if you defined it as animation that has its primary release through the web you'd have to class those student films--which could've been created in any number of animation methods--as 'web animation'...

I don't know about slipping them into series and shorts though... to me it's non-intuitive... the first thing you think of when you think 'The Simpsons' is "on TV"... the first thing you think of for Homestar runner is "on the web"...


I'm beginning to see why BCDB just categorized by studio... :irked:

[MonkeyFunk]

And the way things are going TV and the web are going to be blurred together anyway. I mean, WB is streaming its TV shows over its site, Disney's distibuting its old cartoons as podcasts... only a matter of time before original content created specifically for the Internet hits a boom.

I don't really see anything wrong with posting individual web animations in the shorts category. I mean, there are things there that were primarily released into festivals, some into theatres (the later Pixar shorts) and some onto TV (Wallace and Gromit), so I don't see why stuff made for the web couldn't go in. As for web series, well... I guess that could just wait a while. There aren't that many.

[lupercal]

Oh dear that's true...
Strictly speaking you can't define it as animation produced with web software because then stuff like Mucha Lucha and John Callahan's Quads would qualify (both made in Flash, I believe) and if you defined it as animation that has its primary release through the web you'd have to class those student films--which could've been created in any number of animation methods--as 'web animation'...

I would define them by where they were shown, or primarily shown, if one migrates from the web to TV (or if a TV show migrates to the web, as in 'The Critic'). So 'Quads' is a TV show. I don't think it matters what it was made with. We don't differentiate between TV series that are CGI vs 2D.



I don't know about slipping them into series and shorts though... to me it's non-intuitive... the first thing you think of when you think 'The Simpsons' is "on TV"... the first thing you think of for Homestar runner is "on the web"...



I agree, if you mean they should all stay in the 'web' category, but I disagree if you mean you object to them being labelled as 'series' or not labelled, within that category. In fact, I wouldn't be against doing that with mixed-live action, as well. Picking out which of the two (short and feature) is less common, and labelling them when they appear.

Loop