Transcript Episode 3: Comikaze 2014 — Interview with Cracked’s Dan O’Brien
Intro music.
Angie: Welcome to Geek Out with Angie Fiedler Sutton, an ongoing discussion on geeky topics.
In this episode, we take our first venture into Stan Lee’s Comikaze, 2014 Edition. I got the chance to talk to Dan O’Brien, the head writer and head of creative video at Cracked.com to talk about their latest venture.
Dan: We’ve been doing video for about six years, and then last year, we launched Cracked Studios, which is our big, new, exciting endeavor where we’re creating a new three-to-five-episode narrative sitcom every month. And if the audience likes it, the shows will get renewed and we’ll keep making them, and if not, we’ll never talk about it again.
Angie: How quickly does it take you to put together something like this?
Dan: It takes kind of a while. We had— last January, actually, we got our main start where we got all of our writers in a room together and just pitched every short-form sitcom idea that we’ve ever had, all of us, and sort of decided our slate from that big writers room. We’re such a small team that our writers are performers, as well. My coworkers would stop writing so they could go and be in the show and then run off on the weekends and write their next show.
So, it’s hard to give an exact start to finish because we’ve never really had that luxury of just saying, “Now, we’re working on this one project now,” ’cause we’re all juggling six or seven at once at all times.
Angie: You said how long were these?
Dan: They vary. Some of them are three episodes, some are four. I think the longest show we did was “Antiheroes,” which is a five-episode series.
Angie: But each episode is how long?
Dan: Oh, about seven to nine minutes.
Angie: And is that something you came about through trial and error or is that something that you’re experimenting with?
Dan: We’re finding the audience is getting more excited about that kind of thing, which we love because for a very long time, making comedy videos on the internet, the rule of thumb was two-and-a-half minutes and under, that’s as much time as people can handle. Now, it’s the future where people are watching “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” on their computer, they’re watching movies on their computer, they’re getting them on their mobile devices and watching anything of any length of time, anywhere.
So, we know that there’s an audience that is ready for that, and our favorite complaint that we got from our audience when we used to do videos was, “I wish this was longer.” So, we took an initial gamble that they would stick with us for seven to nine minutes and it paid off. They did. They like it.
Angie: For anybody wanting to start into video, what would be the one piece of advice you’d give them?
Dan: Just do it— don’t wait for the perfect anything ’cause it’s not gonna come, especially if you’re making internet sketch videos. Understand and feel relieved by the fact that the first 1000 you make are going to be terrible, so just get them out of the way. It’s never been so easy to do something so incredibly difficult because cameras are so much better, you have friends, they want to make things— just make it. Make it, put it on the internet, do as many as you can until they’re perfect and you take my job and destroy me.
Angie: And any future comedy trends that you can predict?
Dan: Oo! I think there are going to be more shows like “Louie.” I think more people are excited about that. The freedom that he’s been given where he can do this show that is, “Now I’m doing a five-minute sketch,” “now I’m doing a half-hour sitcom,” “now I’m doing a six-part thing,” “now I’m doing an hour-and-a-half-long movie,” I think audiences are going to be really, really hungry for that kind of thing ’cause they’re gonna just start following creators like Louis C.K. and like Marc Maron, people like them, where they think, “I just want whatever you’re excited about right now. Just give me the thing that you’re most excited about, whether it’s sketch or song or hour-and-a-half-long movie.”
My name is Dan O’Brien. Check out Cracked.com. It is the stuff you didn’t know about the stuff you thought you knew. We have books and we create (background screaming)… 35 to 40 pieces of brand-new original content every single week. Those people screaming in the background, they’re clearly excited about it (laughs).
Outro music.
And that’s round one of Geek Out’s take on Stan Lee’s Comikaze, 2014 Edition. Next round will be an interview with Huston Huddleston, the man behind the upcoming Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum. Stay tuned to Sci-Fi for Me on Twitter and Instagram for more coverage of the 2014 Comikaze Expo.
Thanks for listening to Geek Out With Angie Fiedler Sutton. The theme song is “Schoolyard Haze” by Jari Pitkanen, available via the Free Music Archive. The podcast is recorded in partnership with Sci-Fi For Me Radio and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Links for more information on all this are available on angiefsutton.com.