You have a lot of Web-celeb talent associated with the series – how did everyone get attached? Was that a difficult feat?
Wilson Cleveland: Whenever I work with a brand that’s investing in Web TV, I want to include people on the project who are making Web TV worthy of investment. I’m either friends, or have worked with a lot of these people as an actor, producer or marketer so, between my buddy Sandeep and I, we made a lot of calls and sent a lot of emails and we feel lucky and grateful everyone wanted to do the show. I think if we were shooting “Webventures” at any time other than the week before The Streamys, it would have been very difficult to assemble this many Web TV celebs in a single series.
What prompted you to team up with Trident? What was that process like?
Wilson Cleveland:Horizon Media actually brought in CJP to produce “Webventures” for their clients at Trident. We’d met the team from Horizon last summer at Tubefilter’s Onfronts Event for brands and content creators and we’d been discussing partnering on a project ever since.
How do you integrate a product like Trident gum into a web series without it coming off like a commercial? Or does it? What was your angle?
Wilson Cleveland: “Webventures” has ninjas, vampires, superheroes, time travel, and George Washington as a principle character… so we’ve essentially eliminated subtlety and realism right off the bat like any smart, absurdest comedy does. The genius of Sandeep and Tony’s script is, they’ve established this world that’s so ridiculous, so funny, that making the gum itself anything less than a main character throughout the series would be more obvious that if we were trying to keep the branding subtle. You can’t sneak a product placement in a scene where the first President of the United States is siphoning gas out of a beat-up Nissan like it’s no big deal; and that’s why this series works so well.