Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog

This is an interesting new idea from the mind of Joss Whedon, conceived during the recent writer's strike as a project outside the realm of usual media. The idea was to make the project first, with a group of friends, some famous (Nathan Fillion, for example) and some not-so-famous, then figure out after the fact how they were going to market it. It's a musical with a super hero and a super villain, and I just can't see that being considered mainstream material. It might be great, or it might crash and burn, but it won't be like anything else. They had a vague idea that it would be distributed via the internet somehow, and that was about it. The final decision is to make it available for viewing online for free for a brief time (and in three separate parts) in mid-July, then it'll eventually be available for purchase as a download or as a CD. I'm an unabashed Joss Whedon fan, as well as a Nathan Fillion fan, so I'm definitely on board for this one.

In a similar vein, Amanda Tapping of Stargate TV series fame had her own side project with a bunch of other Stargate people, which was called Sanctuary. Sanctuary had some success as a webisode project, and has been picked up as a full blown series by the Sci Fi Channel. One of the distinctive aspects of Sanctuary is that it's done with green screen backgrounds rather than full sets (like the movie "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"), and I understand it, fans of the show are encouraged to create their own backgrounds for it. Interactive play with a television show! It's a modest start, but I can see someone creative taking that concept to much more complex levels.

This is interesting stuff to me. The creative people are taking some of the technology that's available and doing new sorts of creative projects with new ways of playing with them. I'm sure we'll see a time when it won't necessarily mean a project is low quality because it's available as a download and not made by a big production company.