Warner Premiere, which had great success with its Mortal Kombat live action series, has funded Singer’s newest project, H+, which you can watch here every Wednesday on YouTube and Facebook. It’s a digitally distributed futuristic thriller in which people can forgo tablets and smartphones and jack directly into the Net via chips installed in their head. The story is told through 48 5-minute episodes, which can be viewed in any order. Singer talks about the brave new world of online entertainment and how H+ came to be in this exclusive interview.
What opportunities is the Internet opening up now for shows like H+?
It’s ever expanding. More and more people are getting comfortable watching content online, provided it’s the right kind of content presented in the right format, meaning usually a much more shorter form…shorter episodes at the moment.
Why did you decide to make the leap to online entertainment?
For me, I saw the Internet as being a little bit like television. During the dawn of television, the first programming was primarily vaudevillian comedy and variety shows. Eventually, it expanded into the one-hour drama, and eventually the TV movie and mini-series. With the Internet, what I’m attempting to do is something that’s structured and formatted in a way that is fun to consume on the Web, but at the same time from a production value standpoint, is elegant and cinematic.
I think eventually they’re all going to merge. At some point, cable, television, and the Internet will somehow merge. I don’t know how; maybe it will all be phone-based and then transmitted to large screens for consumption, but I think somewhere, somehow, it’s all going to be on your phone, the whole thing, everything: TV, access, streaming, music, Internet connectivity; everything. Which is why H+ was so interesting as a subject, because it deals with people being physically online using the implants…and the benefits and dangers of that.
Where did the idea for this series come from?
It was brought to my company, originally, as a concept for a television series some years ago by the writers. We felt it was a real opportunity to do something fresh and new for the Internet, both because of the subject matter and the possibilities of the structure; the short form webisodes, or episodes, centering around a technology-driven cataclysmic event, and then bouncing back and forth across time from minutes before the event, hours before the event, years before the event. In doing so, slowly build a mystery from the inside out. It just seemed to be perfect for the Internet.
What are the challenges of trying to tell a story within a shorter timeframe segment like have done with this show?
What we’ve done is, when you’re watching something, is focus on expectation and surprise. To satisfy the expectation, we have continuity between each episode. Each episode begins with a point-of-view shot from a character and ends in a kind of cliffhanger, which makes it very addictive, because you want to just jump to the next one.
It takes place all over the world, but then very often takes you back to close to the actual event. So you’re meeting characters all over the world, both before and after the event, of how they either affected the event or have been affected by the event, and have that drawing closer together. Yet you’re always coming back to the drama of the initial event. You don’t feel like you’re getting lost. You feel like you’re getting found, piece by piece.
What did the nature of the Internet open up creatively?
It offers an interactivity which your average television show or movie doesn’t, which is the ability to stream episodes in a different order, perhaps in continuity, your favorite character or certain location. Then, of course, there’s the interactivity in the Internet, where you can correspond with us, the fans, and then learn more about the characters in the story than just what you see on the screen.
What are your thoughts about the opportunities that the Internet, Twitter, and Facebook have opened up for you as a creative to be able to connect back to the people who are enjoying your entertainment?
As Woody Allen once said, “The audience never lies.” If you could be connected to a portion of that audience, even though you have to accept the fact that you can’t believe all of the people all of the time, but if you can at least be connected to your audience, then for them, they feel connected to the art and the artists. For us, we can learn from them and how they react to what we’re doing. In that way, there’s a discourse between the fans, the audience, and us, as opposed to just us creatives and the executives.
The director of H+, Stewart Handler, talks about the online series in the video below.
