Aussie heads-up: It's a geeky new vodcast that claims to know geek culture inside and out, and it's shaping up to be one to watch.
We geeks can be pretty harsh critics, even of our own kind, and god help anyone claiming to be an authority on us, or on geekdom itself. Which makes the folks who came up with The Periodic Table of Awesome quite brave, really. The Periodic Table of Awesome pitches itself as ‘a lifestyle show for Geeks, bringing you the best of Geek from week to week' - it sounds great, though we couldn't help but worry.
At least until we look a little deeper.
Dion Brookes and David Quinn - best known for the geeky goodness of the award-winning (Cool) Shite On The Tube, one of Australia's first podcasts - and documentary filmmaker Felicity Blake are the brave/foolish souls behind the project. Between (Cool) Shite and the fact that all three have a long involvement with pop-culture fest Supanova, it does appear that these guys do indeed know their stuff.
Well aware that their core audience have all but abandoned traditional methods of TV viewing, the planned series of ten ten-minute episodes will be distributed via the web. Make no mistake though, this is no backyard vodcast (not that there's anything wrong with the purely DIY model) - the pilot episode will be shot both in Australia and on location at this years New York Comic Con, a place where pop-culture geeks go to die and go to geek heaven.
That doesn't come cheap, and TPToA is hoping to get its pilot episode funded through crowd funding. Crowd funding allows them to keep control of the project, but also allows them to build a fan base at the same time as raising capital. An added bonus is that they can use site analytics down the track to demonstrate interest in the project to potential sponsors and partners.
To sweeten the crowd funding pot, they've come up with a swag of rewards for people kind enough to donate, ranging from autographed comic books and MADMAN gift vouchers right through to original illustrations by top illustrators, having a character named after you in an upcoming novel or even an original page of comic book cover art by John Cassaday, the award winning comic book artist behind Astonishing X-Men (with Joss Whedon) among others. That's some geek cred right there, and shows the level of effort these guys are going to - both to show their supporters they love them, and to show the world they mean business.
The hope is that once the pilot goes live, it'll attract some interest from either commercial sponsors or webcast partners, or both. They wouldn't say no to television broadcast interest, but don't want to lock themselves or their viewers into a traditional delivery method alone. From there it's all on: a season (or more, they hope) of ten episodes of ten minutes each, featuring not only Brookes and Quinn, but celebrity guests, reviews, news, memes, and pure distilled geek awesome. Like this warning label on their site:
WARNING: THIS WEBSITE FEATURES EXTREME VIEWPOINTS, FOUL LANGUAGE, ADULT THEMES, CAFFEINATED RANTS, MEDIUM LEVEL SEX SCENES, DREAM INTERPRETATION, AND LOTS OF MEN (AND SOMETIMES A WOMAN OR TWO) RAVING ABOUT THEIR FAVOURITE FILMS, TV SHOWS & POP CULTURE.
It's all very ambitious, but we think anything that promotes the cause of the geek is probably worth a ‘watch this space', at the very least.
If you want to find out more, check out their indiegogo page, or you can find them on Facebook.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012