Another One Comes
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New web series from Saskatchewan filmmaker explores conflict and the struggle to be normal by ADAM HAWBOLDT
T
he life of a writer can be a lonely existence. Hours are spent alone, holed away in a room. You’re isolated from the rest of the world, staring at the blinking cursor on your computer screen. To fully describe the life of a writer is a tricky business. To explain to others that you sit in a room alone for hours on end, creating new worlds, having fake conversations with fake people in your mind — well, it might just make you sound a little insane. It might make it sound as though you live a mad and strange and lonely life. It is a life that Jarrett Rusnak knows all too well. For the first two years after moving to Toronto from his hometown of Regina, Rusnak wrote. He wrote like hell. Determined to wriggle his way into Toronto’s cinematic scene, he would wake up in the mornings and get to work. Back then, the work he was doing mostly involved writing feature films and television pilots. But then, not so long ago, he started doing something a little different. Something shorter, something more tangible.
Photo: courtesy of Jarrett Rusnak
He started writing and making webisodes. “I just kind of fell into it, stumbled upon it,” explains Rusnak. “Originally, I kind of became interested in writing some short two-handers with some actors that I met here. They were looking for some demo-reel material and I was looking to try my hand at writing something shorter. So I thought, hey … why not go for it?” The working relationship blossomed and began expanding. And eventually it ended up evolving into a web series called Another One Comes.
Think of a webisode as a short story. A really short story. If the shows of today’s New Golden Age of Television are like novels — sprawling and epic, with sustained narratives stretched from season to season — then webisodes are more like flash fiction. They’re quick (most webisodes last anywhere from two to 10 minutes), easily digestible and, if done well, linger with you long after their short runtime has expired. By most accounts, the first webisodes appeared on the Internet in
the mid-’90s. A web publisher called Bullseye Art was one of the first to issue webisodic content — stuff like Rat Chicken, Internet the Animated Series, and Miss Muffy and the Muf Mob. Since then, the industry has exploded. With the rise in popularity of the Internet, and the improvements in video-streaming/videomaking technology, webseries have popped up everywhere, making huge gains in popularity and — sometimes — notoriety over the years. They have gotten so big that now there are entire festivals devoted to web series. There are award shows — the Streamy Awards and the Webby Awards — devoted to naming the best comedic, dramatic, animated web series on the Net. Heck, in recent years the big boys in Hollywood have even jumped on the web series bandwagon. And while Netflix shows like House of Cards, Hemlock Grove and Arrested Development are longer in format than your average webisode, they still use the Internet as their sole means for distribution. And for Rusnak, all this only makes sense.
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