By the time the new Web series “Foreign Body” premieres May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug — the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic LLC — will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. “Seinfeld” barely managed 180 shows, and it was on for a decade. True, these Webisodes are exponentially shorter — usually two minutes, tops — but somehow that doesn’t make the production schedule any less grueling.
Big Fantastic had 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of “Foreign Body,” a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set.
Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast — the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise, before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney already has started editing the next. And on and on, a tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that suits the Internet’s yawning appetite for content.
The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials, is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?
“You have to cut out all the fluff and just get to the three beats that are the essence of that episode,” said Hampel, the group’s resident philosopher. “We’re always paying mind to the question: What’s the audience going to come back the next day for?”
Yet the foursome agreed that because every second counts, fluff removal and an emphasis on cliffhangers can lead to a loss of old-fashioned subtlety.
“You almost go in the other direction when you’re creating nuances in this medium,” McCaleb said. “You’re turning up the volume on emotions — it’s a new way of storytelling.”
High-volume nuance and relentless pacing are two features of the series they’ve produced — “Prom Queen” and their breakthrough series “Sam Has Seven Friends” are basically sexy, soap-operatic murder-mysteries — not necessarily Shakespearean in their dramatic reach or complexity. In “Prom Queen: Summer Heat,” the two most popular forms of clothing among the characters are bikinis (for the bad girls) and ski masks (for the bad guys), and when someone gets killed, you can almost feel the resentment that the pool party has been interrupted.
Still, the tight construction and fast movement of Big Fantastic’s shows can generate a hum of magnetism, and people are watching. According to its production company, Tornante, the “Prom Queen” franchise has racked up more than 20 million views and made enough of a splash that Eisner placed another bet on the group, this time with higher stakes.
Not only are the budget, cast and crew bigger this time, but “Foreign Body” is also tied in to the launch of a book of the same name by author Robin Cook.
