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48 dga quarterly PHOTOS: (TOP) BARBARA NITKE/BRAVO; (BOTTOM) ROBYN VON SWANK to them. There's no radical shift in tone and look. You figure out ev- erything about the look for the whole season. Cross-boarding three episodes is less confusing than I thought it would be. I thought of it as doing a feature." Even given the tight schedule, Fleming was able to keep shooting days short and sane. "All the cameras are going at the same time, so you don't have to worry about matching, it's all just right there. You finish a full day in eight hours, and everybody's so happy. You have a mini-master, a two-shot and dueling singles and we'll get the scene in one pass. People love that, especially actors, because you don't want to be doing off-camera voice-overs at two in the morning." Whether working on a generous network budget or a stringent cable one, Fleming says, "My job is pretty much the same. At the net- work, there are more people by the monitor on the set. But I still have to figure out how to shoot it and communicate with the actors and crew. On Odd Mom Out, I had more opportunities to take chances with the material." Grismer, who worked on Syfy's Killjoys, a tale of galactic bounty hunters, also embraced the direct-to-series ethos. To create Killjoys' universe (or galaxy), Grismer had to collaborate with designers to con- struct three different alien militaries, spaceships and other sets, as well as hire effects houses, oversee casting, and sit through chemistry reads. "When you get a series purchase, there's more at stake, the pressure is higher. You don't want to screw up an episode," he says. Conversely, it can be more rewarding: "It's just being part of something from begin- ning to end. When you're a director-for-hire, you collect the footage and move on. You have little say in what happens. I enjoyed staying on a show and having a voice and seeing things turn out the way I wanted them to. It's more creative than just directing an episode." From the Internet to Pilot The most recent iteration of pilots comes from TV series based on Web content. IFC has developed a number of comedies that originat- ed on the Internet, including Maron, Comedy Bang! Bang! and its Peabody Award-winning cult hit, Portlandia. "A great many things we've taken to series since Portlandia existed in one form or another [on the Web]— a podcast or short-form video or sketch," says IFC Senior Vice Presi- dent of Original Programming Christine Lubrano. "It's great when you have a piece of video to use as inspiration. The resulting show isn't always a replication of the sketch or podcast, but it's a great jumping-off place. Proof of concept for us is tre- mendously helpful." Portlandia is a sketch comedy star- ring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein playing multiple characters fondly skewering the laidback, earth-tone-wearing denizens of Port- land, Ore. Wrangling all of these characters and performances and transforming what started as cheap, two-hand videos into a critically acclaimed television series was the job of director Jonathan Krisel, a fan of public access and other forms of no-budget TV. "Originally, it was the two of them in a vacuum, very, very low-fi," Krisel says of the duo's online work. "It was more a live performance that was captured and cut down a little bit. The Internet is a good way to try some stuff with no big crew and no money being spent. Since there are no stakes to it, you can try to be a little experimen- tal. I wanted to keep that sensibility. It wasn't like, 'You're now going to do it, quote unquote, the right way.' It was important to try to get away from the scary production environment and just make it a play- ground. I said, 'I'll be the grown-up, and you can just play around in "We were taking a show that existed as a slice-of-life web series and turning it into a version of a sitcom. What was the best way to keep the essence? We discussed it a lot." —LUCIA ANIELLO