Combining intensely colourful, head-twisting art with apocalyptically dark humour, Trying My Best is the ramshackle product of a joyously demented host. Featuring sparkle-eyed puppets, mutated set pieces and a catchy soundtrack, the show quickly descends into a perverse surrealist nightmare. The result is a children’s variety show, which must never be seen by any children. Ever.
What was your release strategy?
Trying My Best starts off seeming really light and stupid, but gradually gets more upsetting and more interesting as it progresses. For this reason it was really important to us that we very quickly build a solid audience who had seen it end-to-end, so they would tell their friends. We launched with a big-bang cinema screening of the entire series, and released every episode simultaneously, Netflix-style. That gave us a good springboard of shares on Facebook when we launched.
What was your target audience and how did you build a relationship with them?
When we think about our target audience, we tend to talk about what we think is important to them. We think that the kind of people who’ll like our show are probably people who are tired of the expected, who like comedy that explores deviance and sexuality, and especially is a fan of the surreal and lowbrow. We hope to reach audiences who are as strange as we are. We don’t expect mainstream success – we want to make things for our fellow misfits!
Our audience have come to us via previous live work we’ve done as well as our other web videos. We try to stay fairly active across our key social media platforms, and we interact with our audience quite a bit when they comment. We’re trying to be more disciplined about that lately.
How long did it take to produce and shoot the series?
We wanted our script to be tightly packed and our visuals to be intense; those two elements by far took the greatest investment of time. Since we were writing on weekends and our production designer, Jessie, suffers from chronic pain, our pre-production (from the day of our first writing session) stretched across 2 years. After that we filmed 90% of the show in a solid 3 week block at DCF Studios, but then scheduling conflicts on the remaining 10% (and the completion of post-production) took another year to knock over.
What is your background as a web series creator?
Wes & Lucas were filming comedy shorts together in high school, and have been uploading stuff to Youtube on-and-off since 2006. At around the same time, Jessie was doing her Masters of Fine Arts and filming bizarre intense performance art. Our first major project was to try and combine Jessie’s obscene hyper-colourful art with Wes & Lucas’s comedy, with the live musical theatre show ‘Slutmonster and Friends’. We took it to Melbourne Fringe and Melbourne International Comedy Festivals under the direction of Nelson, and it was a hit both times.
‘Trying My Best’ represents our attempt to try and marry some of the intensity of our live show with the pacing and flexibility of a web series.
What did you learn from making this series? What would you do differently?
One of our key lessons was how amazing it is to work with people who really know what they’re doing. We were ridiculously lucky to land the crew we ended up with, and it was a real joy at each stage to see these technically adept but also very funny people keep adding their own senses of humour through the lens of their individual crafts. We had no idea the audio mix could be funny, but there you go. We have a funny audio mix.
The main thing we would do differently is treat publicity the same way and rope in someone to do PR for us early on. We are very time-poor, and really haven’t been able to dedicate as much time to PR as the show deserves.
What did you want to achieve in creating this series?
We are trying to make the sort of stuff we want to see more of in the world. We have a mission to create comedy that is visually exciting, sex-positive, and queer-friendly. With Trying My Best in particular we wanted to examine neuroses, loneliness and deviance in ways that are joyously puerile, but reward attentive audiences with hidden depths if they dig deeper. Our vision for the series as a whole was something that would catch people’s attention by being fun and colourful, but then would slowly begin to allude to a darker, more complex storyline hidden below the surface.
How did you choose the platform you released the series on?
We grew up on the internet! We were there before it was cool, and we were using Youtube from its very early days. We have always loved the platform because it is one that anyone can use and access; it’s liberating and egalitarian, in contrast to older media. There are no gatekeepers to YouTube, and the creative freedom that allows us is compelling. For this reason we very deliberately wrote the show for YouTube, using the visual language of YouTube, which meant we were able to make the episodes whatever length we felt fit that plot, so we could fully allow the show to morph into the strange and monstrous thing that it wanted to be!
We’re rather idealistic in that we want to make art with a vision that isn’t compromised by what everyone else is doing. This show was written by weirdos, for weirdos, and YouTube is overflowing with weird.
What inspired your props and set?
Our production designer, Jessie Ngaio, comes from a fine arts background. She’s a painter who is interested in and influenced by pop-surrealism, erotica, lowbrow art and concepts of otherness, deviance and kitsch culture. Jessie created the props and sets as we wrote, so the sets influenced the scripts and vice versa. We’re really into the idea of the aesthetic of a show not simply illustrating the writing, but actually influencing and informing it. In “Trying My Best” the concept of the show is that the main character, Ngaio, has created everything herself, so making the sets while forming the character really helped us to get in her mind.
With all of the puppetry, clay-animation and props, is the series gathered from any external sources of inspiration such as Noel Fielding’s Luxury comedy, Play School or a variation of sources?
There’s definitely some Playschool influences there! Jessie is really into the ideas of constructed spaces that illustrate the psychology of the characters inhabiting them, so she’s spent a lot of time studying the designs of kids shows. She’s particularly taken with shows like PeeWee’s Playhouse, that combine beautiful, creepy set design with a terrifyingly energetic rhythm. There’s also a strong surrealist influence there, partially from Monty Python, and the work of gloriously demented contemporary artists like Olaf Bruening, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy and Matthew Barney. We’ve also been deeply influenced by growing up exploring the weirdest parts of the internet. Goatse has forever changed us.
Your series is very unique, what reactions have you gotten from your audience?
We’ve been really pleased with the reactions we have received so far! Obviously the show isn’t for everyone but a lot of the positive responses we get are along the lines of “I don’t know what the f**k I just watched but I love it!” We also have a lot of people telling us they have watched the show multiple times, and they are starting to come up with theories about the darker storyline hidden in the cracks of the show – which is exactly what we’d hoped for! We also have had a few people ask if they can do covers of songs from the show which we are pretty thrilled about!
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