Sanctuary Leaps From Net To Network - Page 2

After his own web-based experiment, Wood's answer to those questions is to move to television. "What we've learned from the net is you have to make a bigger noise somehow. And the way to do that is to go to television. Then bring everybody back to the net if you want to."

Wood said the SanctuaryForAll website has a subscriber base of 889,000 people, with 20-40,000 involved in the social network, and yet "that doesn't translate to money. That just translates into people who are really interested in our show. It doesn't help you make the show."

He stressed the importance of an online presence that does more than simply offer fans a place to talk or content that's not targeted to the web. "We have to stop thinking about interactivity as repurposed television," Wood said. "It has to be thought of as when you're on this site, you have the ability to do something you can't do on YouTube and you can't do if you're on one of the bittorrent sites and you can't do on television."

They're not entirely repurposing the web stories for the television version, either, as showrunners Damian Kindler and Sam Egan rewrote parts of a couple of the web episodes, fleshing out the characters and stories and redoing visual effects, but wrote new original material for most of the series.

Wood explained that "70 to 80 percent of our show is not real – it's a virtual set," shot on green screen. While that is "so liberating" as a director, it leads to him spending half his day explaining to the actors exactly where they are. "That's not normally how I spend my day doing a television show," he pointed out before describing the technique of using tennis balls to demonstrate to the actors where the eyes of a computer generated character will be.

"It's all part of the goofiness of making sci fi. It's so much fun every day to go in and say, 'where am I going to screw this up today?"

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things by day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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