SCREENSHOT: YARDHILL
Google “funny website” and you’ll find 1 million of the least funny websites, ever. The funny ones are few and far between. We’ve featured a couple of the few, and now we’ve got another for you. Aaron Hilliard’s Yardhill.
How did you come up with the idea for Yardhill and how long have you been doing it?
After learning a ton working in television for years, I wanted to tell my own story. This spurred a push to shoot self-produced comedy videos. I wanted to show producers/execs that I knew how to build a series (albeit on a very low budget), and develop ideas and characters that might blossom into a TV show. Yardhill became my “clearinghouse” of comedy, the one-stop shop I could point an executive toward, showing them my comedic sensibility and producing capabilities.
What gave you the confidence to go out and start doing it? What made you so certain people would like it?
I have a huge ego, so the confidence thing wasn’t a big stumbling block. Sort of kidding. But I definitely have a sense of my own talents, and a thick skin for those who don’t respond to those talents. I’ve never had a YouTube “hit,” but I haven’t really been aiming for one. Those who have stumbled across my Yardhill videos respond pretty positively, but I’m not pandering or spending 20 hours a week self-promoting. I take a long-tail view: keep producing high-quality material for a niche audience, and it will build momentum – either on the web or on TV.
Does this site support you financially?
TV comedy writing/producing is my day job, and recently I’ve been mainly writing pilots and pitching series. This gives me plenty of time to work on little videos for Yardhill, and those videos feed right back into the “professional” (ie. paid) work.
It’s easy to rationalize spending my time and money on these shorts and webisodes. They aren’t a hobby or something separate from my TV/film development process, they’re an integral part of it; the seeds of larger projects. For example, my friend Kit Pongetti and I have developed a character for her (you can see it in our “Nothing Ventured” shorts), and now I’m writing that character into TV pilot scripts. Another fun little video I put up last year has developed into a full-blown feature project. It started as a brain fart that might’ve gone nowhere, but the short helped me figure out the idea, and now I’m enjoying writing the screenplay.
How do you get your audience to keep folks coming back?
I have a tiny but devoted following. Definitely don’t want to pretend to be a web guru. But if I WAS pretending… I think the key to growing an audience and getting them addicted to your podcast, web series, blog, etc., is CONSTANTLY putting out fresh material. This is a problem for me, as my projects tend to cost more and take immensely longer to produce than the webcam bang-em-out shows that rule YouTube. I’ve been brainstorming on a bang-em-out project of my own, but haven’t settled on something repeatable yet. Maybe in 2012…
What’s the hardest part of putting the series together?
As a kid, I remember reading somewhere that Brian DePalma hated production, hated being on set. He loved editing, but found shooting movies annoying or boring. Back then, I thought that sounded crazy. How could you hate all that movie magic? But now that I do it myself, I understand DePalma. Production can be tough, and on my projects I tend to wear many hats (writer, director, producer, actor), so my heart rate is through the roof from 5am until we wrap a shoot day. I think as my budgets (hopefully?) get bigger in coming years, that stress will subside and I’ll enjoy production more.
Do you have people that help?
I’ve cultivated relationships with a bunch of great, talented collaborators. Actors, D.P.’s, composers. Mainly, I work with people on a similar rung on the Hollywood ladder. We’re not “newbies,” we’ve proven ourselves to a degree, but haven’t been given keys to the kingdom. At this point, I can help out a great cinematographer or music composer by giving them the chance to build up their reel, and they can help me by working cheap. From what I gather, there are a lot more low-budget dramas being shot in Hollywood, so offering them up a quickie comedy project is a good change of pace.
Yardhill.com is a site chock full of comedy greatness in the form of video and podcasts. Because he mentioned it, take a peek and the first episode of Nothing Ventured featuring Aaron Hilliard and Kit Pongetti!
February 9th, 2012 • No Comments
