Afterworld Readies Relaunch – for Real This Time?

Afterworld, the big-budget post-apocalyptic web series, hasn’t quite made a smooth entry onto the internet. The series has developed audiences on the problem-ridden Bud.TV platform, YouTube, and its own site, spending “multiple millions of dollars” on a thirty person team to write, animate, direct, score, and mix it.

But episode releases keep getting delayed and an initially impressed audience has gotten impatient. Now, promised producer and director Stan Rogow in an interview today, the show will finally start its five-day-a-week schedule in the first week of August.

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To rev up the audience in the meantime, the series is launching a bunch of extras on its site on Tuesday, including a journal, a casual game, music videos, and soon “mashupable episodes,” according to Rogow. (How about some embeds while you’re at it, please?) The new strategy is to have Afterworld.tv be the destination for the show, with multiple other sites also distributing it.

Karina had given the show high marks in April after seeing the first eight three-minute episodes — of a promised 130 episode story arc. As she described it,

The storytelling style breaks the old “show don’t tell” film school rule pretty drastically––the soundtrack is virtually wall-to-wall narration, and as the animation style precludes the characters from engaging in any serious movement or action, most episodes play like spoken word with illustrations…. In willful defiance of the tropes laid out both by contemporary genres and pretty much every other video on YouTube, the creators of Afterworld have dared to make a web series seemingly devoid of irony. In this cultural climate, that kind of gamble is incredibly brave.”

Rogow, whose Lizzie McGuire franchise is perhaps his best-known effort, admitted to NewTeeVee that our assessment of “fits and starts” in the show’s rollout was accurate. “We were intending to take advantage of what was semingly a very large opportunity to be launched after the Superbowl on Bud.tv,” he said. “And then we had the desire to get more episodes out with the whole YouTube experience, so many people subscribing to our channel and commenting on it. But then we had to go back and make the episodes.”

The show’s unique animation style, which as Rogow described it “owes a fair amount to anime, and owes a fair amount to graphic novel,” is extremely time consuming, he said. But Afterworld wasn’t struggling to survive like many other home-grown web video efforts; it had the cushion of profitable distribution deals signed early in the process. Sony Pictures had acquired rights to distribute the show internationally before it was ever produced, he said. And Bud.tv signed for an 10-day exclusive window. Such deals have allowed the show to focus solely on content rather than selling ads or weaving in product placement.

Before even releasing the 113 more episodes it’s promised (of which Rogow said half are completed), Afterworld parent company Electric Farm has already started active development on four new series, also intended to be mostly animated and science fiction, to be launched over the next year.

Afterworld has declined offers to do the series as both a television show and a movie “because we wanted to make a point that we think there is vvalidity to making something purely for the internet,” said Rogow. So go ahead and make it already! We want to watch.

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