LA WEBFEST

On the Leesh is thrilled to announce that two of our web series: The In-Betweens of Holly Malone and The Sexually have been accepted in this year's LA Webfest.

LA WEB FEST KICKS OFF MARCH 26-28, 2010: at Stage 52 Theater , 5299 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016

The In-Betweens of Holly Malone - Re: Sex Tapes

I have some thoughts on sex tapes.

It’s, you know, a Tuesday, so yet another “leaked” tape has emerged from the abyss of Hollywood actors on their downtime. The latest is Eric “McSteamy” Dane and his wife Rebecca “Noxema” Gayheart. The couple, along with some former beauty queen girl gone Hollywood madam are running around in their skivvies and bathing together or something. Now, this might surprise some of you out there who are aware of my all-in reputation when it comes to sex, but truly, ENOUGH WITH THE SEX TAPES!

Look, I get it, maybe your career feels stagnant, or the part your playing on a certain show has type cast you in some way that you don’t like so one night, while sitting at home having a few beers you look over at your little shelf of old VHS tapes and you think, ‘Wait a minute! I am incredibly good looking! And I captured myself in all my naked incredibly good-looking glory, having sex with someone else who is incredibly good looking! The public must be informed!’

And thus, the release (better known as ‘the leak’) of the tape occurs.

I love sex as much as anyone (okay, truth be told, I love it more than most), but I no longer videotape it, nor do I have sex with someone who asks to videotape it. And here’s why: if I’m going to take the time to have sex with you, I want you playing to me NOT the cameras. Focus people! Focus! I’m sure that if you’re thinking about how to angle yourself so that it’s the most complimentary to the camera, that you are NOT focusing on my orgasm. So, unless you’re inventing a new move in the bedroom that is to unbelievable without proof, nobody needs to see you humping someone else.

Oh, and by the way, I watched the Dane/Gayheart/Whoever tape and they never even have sex! They’re just drunk or high and naked. And to that I say, BORING! I have things to do.

-Francesca

Holly Directs Holly

Jessica Arinella aka Holly Malone of The In-Betweens of Holly Malone has made her directorial debut! It is rare that the character of Holly doesn't appear in her own series, but today, OTL shot an episode in which Holly is merely spoken of and NEVER seen! Jess took advantage of this scenario and put herself behind the camera instead! So, Holly fans you may not see Holly throughout Intervention Part 1, but never you mind... she's definitely there!

Great White Greatness on SHARK WEEK!

I love many things about the summer. Bbq's, long walks in the park with my dog, sitting outside at restaurants and people watching and... SHARK WEEK on the Discovery Channel! For many years now, I have been fascinated by sharks. Where some see black, dead eyes, I see curiosity and determination (and sometimes, cuteness). So, each year I sweat my way through the humidity of New York and wait for early August to come along and BAM, a week of shark information! Awesomeness. In fact, I have a friend who dresses up every year to watch the Oscars because she loves it so much and if I could sit in my apartment in a big water tank with a dorsal fin strapped to my back I would, but alas, friends might think I've finally reached my breaking point!

Here at On the Leesh, I keep trying to come up with story ideas that would REQUIRE me to go shark cage diving. Say... for example... on The In-Betweens of Holly Malone Francesca meets a marine biologist who takes her shark cage diving with Great Whites on their first date. OR... on In the Can Bernice tries to scare herself out of her love obsession for Borg that she too needs to lay her eyes on a few Great Whites. I think these are great ideas! Compelling! Funny! Edge-of-your-seat gripping! But, (as Alicia reminds me) they might just exceed our usual low/no budget for our series seeing as I'd have to fly many miles to say, the likes of South Africa to film (not to mention the insurance fees that would go along with the shoot). So... here I am, left with nothing to do but take the What Shark Are You Quiz on the Discovery Channel's Shark Week website. Take it yourself HERE.

Oh and... no surprise here... it says I'm a Great White.

And if your DVR isn't yet set for Shark Week... do it now! Or do I have to start playing the Jaws theme music for you?

-Signing off and diving in: jules

Holly Gets Another Great Review!

Web Series Magazine had great things to say about our little web series that could: The In-Betweens of Holly Malone. Be sure to check out the great shout out on their site: webseriesmagazine.blogspot.com. And as always, watch the show HERE!

The Making of The In-Betweens of Holly Malone

On the Leesh is asked a lot how we make our web series. How long does it take? How big is the crew? Who on the team does what?

In response, we made a little making of video with our Flip camera. Have a look!

Holly's Stake in Belmont

Yesterday OTL shot another episode of The In-Betweens of Holly Malone. As you know, we like to keep Holly current with what's going on locally and internationally. So, with that in mind (and with a suggestion by a Holly fan), we decided to tackle upcoming Belmont Stakes. You horse racing fans will know that Belmont is quickly approaching on June 6th, so we shot this episode just under the wire!

As you can see with the pics... Holly and Dimitri's Belmont date begins very nicely...


They look lovely on race day...


And then after an incident goes a bit awry...


And what the hell happened to Dimitri??



We're launching this episode later today so be sure to check it out at: hollymalone.ontheleesh.com

Holly Malone's Top 5 Burger Joints

Holly Malone spends her time with Dimitri and her friends in NYC. Years in the city lends itself to lists of faves... so, for Holly's first list, she decided to name her top 5 favorite burger joints!

Here they are in no particular order...

BLT Burger

Half King

Five Napkin Burger

Shake Shack

And if you're in Brooklyn...12th Street Bar and Grill

EAT ON!

Holly Shoots the Swine Flu

Yesterday, we headed to Central Park to shoot an episode of our webseries, The In-Betweens of Holly Malone. Of our three comedy webseries (the other two being In the Can and The Sexually), we try to align Holly with current events the most. Granted, we do it through our own Holly-vision (such as having a Barack Obama episode that focuses less on the economy and more on what kinds of sex dreams Holly is having about our newly elected president, or, our episode that addresses the economic downturn by way of having Francesca and Danny discuss the best way to curse someone out). So while, yes, we try to keep our “current events” episodes within the Holly comedic rainbow, we really do try to keep up with the times.



So, what better current event to address within a Holly episode than Swine Flu? Listen, if it’s good enough for the Times, then it’s good enough for Holly. Not only is it current, but, if you’ve ever watched the series, you know that Holly is not exactly a worry-free sort of person. So it goes without saying that a flu epidemic would be foremost in her mind. It also allows us, the writers, actors, producers and directors, to channel our own plague fears for one afternoon. It’s a win-win.



It also should be noted, that this was our first Holly episode that was completely improvised. Alicia, who served as the director, offered up the circumstances and then the actors ran with it. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy our take on the flu of the swine.

Special Invite for "The Sexually" and "The In-Betweens of Holly Malone"

I got a pretty interesting email this morning from a whole other continent! No, I'm not referring to an email from Nigeria in which I'm told I'm the last living beneficiary for like, a ga-billion dollars, this was an actual REAL offer. A representative from The Portable Film Festival located in Melbourne, Australia asked us if the could include both The Sexually and The In-Betweens of Holly Malone in their festival! They said they just happened to come upon them and loved them both!

The Australians love us! Awesome!

Check out this fest at: www.portablefilmfestival.com.

And, as always, check out our three webseries at:

www.thesexually.com

hollymalone.ontheleesh.com

inthecan.ontheleesh.com

2 Holly Episodes Headed to Computer Screens Near You!

Yesterday OTL, along with Holly Malone stars: Jessica Arinella, Brian Patacca and Julie Tortorici shot 2 more episodes of our flagship webseries: The In-Betweens of Holly Malone.



Both episodes were written by Phil Kain and were directed by our own Alicia Arinella.



Be on the lookout for these two funny epi's in the next few weeks!

What Constitutes A Season

Since Webseries are still very much like the Wild West, they don't necessarily follow the same models that are displayed by television shows. This brings up a very interesting question: How do you differentiate between seasons?




For In the Can, the answer is simple. We write each season - with a finite number of episodes in blocks. Because of this, we know what we want to happen in any given Season: there is a very clear through line. Since we have the hopes that In the Can will have a life as a half hour show, we break each season down and call it an episode. This "episode" is then made up of parts. When those parts are strung together you have a season. For instance - Season 1 (Episode One) is made up of 7 episodes (or parts). Got it? Wow, it seems much more confusing now that I've written it.

Watch it at: inthecan.ontheleesh.com

For The Sexually, we have a similar game plan. We know the outline of a season and then Jeff writes the episodes and we throw in a bunch of improved sketches. The sketches came out of need to create content while competing with busy schedules. Out of necessity, these created a great place for the boys to really stretch out their characters and provide us with a lot of backstory that we no longer need to jam into a three minute episode. Even though this was our master plan, our story lines have changed as the series has developed. We didn't conceive of the park episodes until we realized we needed a through line. Since we started filming the improved interviews, and the boys brought such intricicacies to their characters, Jeff needed to weave it all together. Thus the park scenes. So...breaking down the sexually so far has been a bit tougher. I look at Season 1 as the Lawyer office episodes and the Central Park episodes. Season 2 are the interviews. Moving forward we have a more clear cut idea of the next couple of seasons - Season 3 brings the boys to therapy. We will still feature both improv and scripted episodes, but they will have a central focus behind them.


Watch it at: www.thesexually.com

This brings us to The In-Betweens of Holly Malone. When we started Holly, we had a lot to learn. She was our flagship show, and we were still getting our feet wet on creating the language of a webseries. The first season of Holly - episodes 1 through 17 have a clear over arching story line. As we progressed, we realized that fast and funny was best and that our audience was willing to overlook certain expositional plot points in exchange for funny jokes. We also learned to keep the episodes current. Now we have jokes about the Oscars, politics and the economy. Right now we're still in Season 2 of Holly, but this season could go on indefinitely. Since we haven't delineated the idea of what marks a season in Holly, we're likely to just keep creating and not worrying about seasons.




Watch it here: hollymalone.ontheleesh.com

However, these theories could all go out the window as each series develops!


In other news, we've been tossing around ideas to combine all three series into an "On the Leesh Webseries Special." We don't have a plot line yet, but our idea is that all the characters would meet and interact. Imagine Holly up against Johnnie or Juice with Phillipa...

Stay Tuned!

Growing Pains: A Web Story

A few years ago we developed the website that you see when you visit www.ontheleesh.com. We were still small at that point - smaller than we are now. We had just one web series under our belt, and only a few episodes at that. We had only completed five short films, and we hadn't begun to span into the realm of instructional videos at all. As we've grown and continued to develop our products, we have pushed our website to the brink.

We are redesigning! We have hired a wonderful programmer, Noah Diamond. He has started to reformat the website piece by piece. Our first goal has been to create a web page for each of our web series that reflects the tone and feel of that show. Noah started with The In-Betweens of Holly Malone, and has since taken on In the Can.

Our next hurdle is our third web series, The Sexually, and then we need to create a more in-depth page for clients to look at for information about our corporate/instructional video services.

After this work is completed, our goal is to reformat the whole website. It's going to be about a six month process. So please check back periodically for new updates.

OTL's Webseries on Tivo

On the Leesh is proud to announce that, through a partnership with Koldcast (www.koldcast.tv) our three webseries: The In-Betweens of Holly Malone, In the Can and The Sexually, will be available on Tivos!

We'd like to thank Koldcast for allowing our shows to be a part of this amazing deal!

If you have Tivo, be sure to check them out!

Help On the Leesh Out and Vote for Us!

Do you like any (or hopefully all) of our webseries?

Then go to:




And nominate The In-Betweens of Holly Malone, In the Can and The Sexually for a Streamy Award!
Here's what you do:

Click here:




And then type in either:
The In-Betweens of Holly Malone (for the show link, enter: http://hollymalone.blip.tv)

In the Can (for the show link enter: http://inthecan.blip.tv)
or
The Sexually (for the show link enter: http://thesexually.blip.tv)

Help us out and DO IT NOW!

On the Leesh in Craines NY

Alicia was interviewed by Craine's NY about On the Leesh's ongoing webseries and the opportunities that the Internet provides production companies. Also featured in the article is Jessica Arinella as Holly Malone in our webseries, "The In-Betweens of Holly Malone." Be sure to check out the article at:

Craines NY

And to watch all of our webseries go to:
www.ontheleesh.com/web-series/current

MY WEEKEND OF EDITING, BUDGETING AND SCHEDULING

On the Leesh has a very busy fall, our busiest yet. As they say in the
restaurant biz - "We're in the weeds." While other production
companies our size will work on one or two projects a year, we
currently have eleven open projects that are in one phase of
production or another.

We normally have this number of projects open, but what makes this
different is that six of our projects right now are in open production. This means cameras are rolling and computers are editing. We don't
get like this all the time, but right now and through December, we're
completely excited about all the work that is coming through our
office and we don't want to say no to any of it.

How does each
project get it's fair access of the On the Leesh spotlight? Well sometimes, I have to work weekends.

It's not so bad really - I give myself certain liberties when working
on weekends: I'm allowed to wear pajamas to work, I can eat ice cream for lunch and if I need to take a Broadcast News-Holly
Hunter-break, I allow myself to do so. All in all, it's not that bad. Come to think of it, I'm almost my own lifetime television for women reality
show. The only difference is people would be bored out of their mind
watching me sing to myself as I generate title cards on videos, or try
to figure out the nebulous cost of gas for a line item in a budget. I pride myself on my organizational abilities, so I do have that on my
side.

I've noticed recently though, that my dreams include all the characters I'm
editing. Holly from The In-Betweens of Holly Malone visits Johnnie from The Sexually and Bernice from In the Can Productions has cupcakes at Frannie's
house from For Belly. It's kind of interesting to see what will happen next with
them. Perhaps we have a whole new season right there. A sort of cross
over, Buffy/Angel kind of thing.

Oh no, I just made it twelve projects!

More updates as I go along...