reel-exchange

Filmmaker Brian Dalton is preparing for Season Three of his online video series Mr. Deity, in which Dalton wears the hat of Writer, Director, Cinematographer, Editor, Composer, Producer and Actor. The series was recently given distribution via Sony’s Crackle.com and can also be found on MrDeity.com. Dalton discusses creating and producing the web-based project with Reel-Exchange Community Manager Craig Erpelding. For more on Dalton visit his Reel-Exhange profile.

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CE: Where did the genesis of the Mr. Deity show come from and talk about your mindset for producing a show for the web versus traditional media.

BD: I wrote the first Mr. Deity in January of 2005 after the Indonesian Tsunami killed nearly a quarter of a million people on December 26, 2004. I was musing about why an all good, all knowing, all loving God would allow such a thing. After all, taking natural disasters out of the mix would not threaten our free will, or natural law or any of the standard arguments for why God allows evil to exist.

It was really just something I wrote for myself—just musing. But, I showed it around to some friends and they loved it—particularly the characters and the tone. So, I started putting it out to my actor friends. But no one wanted to do it. Finally, I was driving home one day from a shoot and my buddy Jimbo [Marshall] (who plays Larry) talked me into playing the lead role and shooting that first episode.

We posted that on YouTube in January of 2007 and began getting a lot of views. The next thing you know, we're getting calls from companies like Sony… It's a Cinderella story.

CE: You're now in season three of Mr. Deity, can you talk a bit about what it takes to create a successful, "long"-running web series?

First of all, you have to create something that's going to have legs in terms of material, and characters that people will want to see over and over again. I don't think a show that's something completely different every week would work. I'm putting together a new series now and these were my primary concerns. I also think it helps to have something conceptually unique and interesting. If you can put all of that together, I think you'll have something that can keep people interested for a while.

For season three of Mr. Deity, Sony wanted to put a star in each episode, so I did something I haven't done before—I wrote ten episodes that were based largely around another character (Adam, John The Baptist, Eve, Death), and I think it's going to really surprise people. The episodes are very different from seasons 1 and 2, but in many ways I think they have the potential to be the best we've done.

CE: What camera do you use and how do you shoot knowing that primary distribution is via the web—what about encoding?

BD: We shoot on Panasonic HVX200s. Sometimes we shoot one camera at a time. Sometimes we shoot with multiple cameras. For the first season, we shot with the Red Rock M2 35mm adapter, but for the web and with the white background etc., it just wasn't worth the hassle. We shoot in 720p at 24 fps in DVCProHD. Crackle.com encodes the show now, and for them, I just give them the actual 720p master in DVCProHD. But when we were encoding the show ourselves, we'd just shoot it directly out of Final Cut Pro at 640 x 360 using H.264, 24 frames, and I'd take the audio down to AAC VBR 96-128 at 32K. That's the file we'd upload to YouTube and iTunes.