Interview by Craig Byrne – Read Part 2
Continued from Part 2
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Will Season 10 be split into two parts for DVD?
That’s a very good question. I would like to see it all, but it’s not my decision. It’s the DVD distributor, Echo Bridge. But it makes sense to me to bring out a special Boiling Point edition, and then to do a second one, but of course, at some point it would also be good to do an omnibus. In fact, I’d love at some point to do a huge 10-season set of “Every episode and webisode of Degrassi ever” collector’s set, but I don’t know whether or not we’ll be able to do that.
Have you guys seen Shane Dawson’s parodies of Degrassi and if yes, what did you make of it?
I was thrilled with it. It’s odd for me to say something like that, because obviously it takes liberties that we would never be able to take ourselves, but anybody who has the creativity, and the time, and the engagement, that clearly loves the show… no matter how oddly the characters are portrayed, you can’t do that unless you really know the characters. You can’t poke that much fun without really knowing where they’re coming from in the first place. So, I was just personally thrilled.
You maintain an active Twitter presence as do many of the actors. Can you talk about having that communication with the fans, and why you think that is so important?
That’s been a core part of what we do since 2001. When we came in with The Next Generation, we knew, first off, that our storytelling had to reflect the reality of the day, and of course it’s expanded from there, but internet and mobile, that was it. It wasn’t the social media so much, although the website we created back in 2001 (Degrassi.tv)… the website cost a million and a half dollars, which I raised. We could produce the same website today for $50,000. It was [basically] Myspace. What you did was, you became a student at the school. You were assigned your locker, and in your locker page, you could do blogs, you could send D-mail within the school, you had pictures… it was virtually everything that Myspace was, with one exception, and that was that it was moderated with a flag system. At that point, we were aiming fairly young; we were aiming pre-teen as well as teen, and it was very important to us that it was a very protected community. We had 800,000-plus registered users back then, and so in a sense, we had social media before social media.
In that, the characters also had locker pages, and they would story-tell in the same way we now have Twitter accounts for most of the characters. Not the actors, but the characters, who are sort of bantering back and forth, in tune with their characters.
Back then, there was a blog thread that I was on that started in Season Three that was called “Shooting Season Three.” It actually went on for about five years. It was very much like a Twitter. People would ask questions, and I couldn’t answer all of them, but I’d answer back.
We always had to realize — not only did we need to portray what was then called the New Media…. we had to reach out with the new media. Because that’s how kids were accessing the show. We were one of the very first shows to be streamed. We were one of the very first shows to do webisodes and mobisodes. We tried a whole bunch of things, some of which didn’t work. But we were always trying to figure out ways to use the new media to reach out to people. I’m hoping by the time Season 10B starts in October, that we’ll have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch app. We’re willing to try anything to reach out and engage, and we actually feel that engaging is our prime goal. Not just producing a television show that hopefully people watch. It’s engaging the audience, and empowering the audience, so that the fans become our ambassadors and reach out. Obviously the TV show itself is a core component. We couldn’t do the rest without that, but it’s an entire Degrassi world that we try and reach people through.
Can you tease anything that we might have coming in the second half of Season 10?
What I will say is that first of all, it isn’t called the Breaking Point. I get that on Twitter a lot. But no, there’s no particular branding like that.
Another thing I will say is that it is the same format as the summertime. It’s going to be out on a weekly basis, but the pace and the storytelling will evolve in really the same way as it evolved over the summertime; just that it will be broadcast on a weekly basis, and it will lead towards an interesting climax.
I don’t really want to say anything more than that, other than that if you liked the Boiling Point, I think you’re going to like the rest of the season just as much.
Do you think it would be accessible to someone who might not have seen the show before? Will they be able to just jump in?
That’s a really astute question, and that’s one that we were even talking about last night. We talk about it all the time. We talk about vertical storytelling, meaning storytelling that begins and ends within a half hour; and horizontal storytelling, which is story that’s arced out over more than a half hour. And what we hope we’ve achieved is a balance. That you can have an enjoyable experience without having watched the show before. In other words, there’s enough vertical story elements, that you can get caught up and just be engaged with the characters, and if you don’t quite understand something, it doesn’t really matter. You can fill it in. But also there is enough horizontal storytelling that you’re pulled along and you feel a rich depth of characterization that really enhances your experience as you watch it more and more. That’s the aim. Whether we achieve it or not, it’s a hard thing to achieve. You’ll have to tell me after you see the next episodes.
Thanks to Stephen Stohn for taking the time to participate in this interview. Degrassi returns with new episodes on Friday, October 8!