…a snazzy trailer they produced helped snag Sony Pictures Television as a partner.
“We came up with this idea,” said Warren, 31. “There’s no limit to how many episodes there can be in a Web series. So why don’t we design it as a (feature-length movie) so we can sell it as a DVD feature at the end?”
Sony executives, it turns out, had the same idea.
The studio picked up the project in April and gave it a budget of around $1 million. That’s nowhere near the $30 million-plus budgets of many Hollywood movies, but more than the producers were told they could sell it for. Web sites typically pay up to $5,000 for a short clip of original video; with 16 episodes, other Web sites might have paid around $100,000 for “The Bannen Way.” …