New York Times article about my streaming platform I created in 2001

Originally purchased by The New York Times

A Wing, a Prayer And Presto, It’s Web TV

By Chris Erikson
May 6, 2000

Estimated reading time: 21 minutes

On a Sunday night in February, in the second-floor lounge of a West Houston Street bar called Madame X, two dozen twentysomethings sit on a bank of red velvet couches sipping cosmopolitans and highballs. As they chat amid candles and tasseled red lampshades, Patrick Shields, at the far end of the room, has a problem to solve. The cocktails are fake, and the drinkers are actors whom Mr. Shields has brought here for two nights to film scenes for ”The New Guard,” a dramatic series designed for broadcast on the Internet, for which he serves as producer, writer, director, administrator, cameraman, set dresser and lighting technician. Right now, it’s this last role that’s causing him trouble: the lighting for the shot, supplied by a black fixture clamped onto an exit sign, is too bright. Mr. Shields, perched precariously on a railing, is trying to figure out how to tame it. He has at his disposal a $4,000 video camera, a DAT recorder, and a laptop-size mixing board, but right now, a decidedly lower-tech item, whose name momentarily escapes him, is required.”I need a . . . .” He frowns. ”A clothespin.”He is handed one, which he uses to secure a makeshift gel. ”If you’re keeping score,” he says to a bystander, ‘this is what you call learning under fire.”

For Mr. Shields, learning under fire has been a key strategy as he prepares to give life to ”The New Guard,” a drama about the postcollegiate members of rival Greenwich Village political clubs that he likens to ” ‘The West Wing’ with young Manhattan politicians,” and that is scheduled to go onstream today at www.radicalzoo.com. The digital revolution has created a new world of opportunity for would-be auteurs like Mr. Shields, who can shoot their own material cheaply on digital cameras and send it via the Internet to a potentially limitless pool of viewers.

It’s hardly a fast track to success. Contrary to rosy predictions of years past, the audience for Web shows remains modest — 2,500 viewers a week makes for a hit — and for every ”Webisodic” that attracts interest, hundreds of others fold, peter out, or limp along in search of viewers.

But Mr. Shields, who burns with old-fashioned ambition, sees in streaming video a chance to make his mark. And so he has set about creating ”The New Guard” from scratch, with a skeleton crew and a rock-bottom budget of under $2,000 an episode, supplied by his day job as a window cleaner.

But Mr. Shields, who burns with old-fashioned ambition, sees in streaming video a chance to make his mark. And so he has set about creating ”The New Guard” from scratch, with a skeleton crew and a rock-bottom budget of under $2,000 an episode, supplied by his day job as a window cleaner.

It hasn’t been easy. As he prepared to shoot his first block of six five-minute bimonthly episodes, he faced an obstacle course of setbacks, from scheduling headaches to dropouts among the cast members, who, like his crew, are working for free and thus tend to disappear when paying jobs turn up. For the past two weeks, he has pulled a series of late-night rewrites to accommodate sudden cast changes, e-mailing new scripts to the actors each time.

”Everything that can happen has happened,” says Mr. Shields, a sincere and self-assured 37-year-old with a boyish face and a habit of blinking and arching his eyebrows when he’s concentrating, which is much of the time. ”I’ve got 30 percent more gray in my beard than when I started.””There is no more character named Cherry. She is now known as Anna Roderigo.”From an e-mail message exchanged during the making of ”The New Guard.”THE premise of ”The New Guard” is that a group of young Republicans has set out to challenge the longtime liberal domination of Village politics. To that end, it has rented an office that turns out to be next door to the headquarters of the Village Democratic Youth, paving the way for both political maneuvering and intertribal romance.The scene being shot this night in February is set in a fictional bar called the Soapbox, a hangout for political types where extemporaneous outbursts of oratory can earn a free drink. The Republicans are making their maiden voyage to the bar, where they’re eyed with suspicion by their Democratic counterparts. The crowd includes a pair of newspaper reporters, a towering bouncer named Tall Paul and a smattering of extras, though fewer than Mr. Shields had hoped for, despite a last-minute recruitment drive.

The actors, who are just settling into their roles, are a youthful bunch with the studious energy of up-and-comers. Exhibiting a vaguely Zenlike focus in the eye of the hubbub, Mr. Shields makes a steady stream of small decisions as he cruises the room: adjusting a light, coaching an actor on a line reading, composing a new line on the fly when an inconsistency is pointed out.By 10 p.m. he’s ready to shoot, and the actors run a take. It’s not there yet. ”Lots more volume, lots more energy, lots more everything,” he tells them. They run the scene a half-dozen more times, the energy and pace increasing with each shot. An hour later, Mr. Shields is satisfied, and the actors break as he sends for pizzas.In the final scene of the evening, a sultry Republican ingénue crosses enemy lines to attempt seduction of a cute Democrat in Clark Kent glasses.By 1 a.m. the scene is wrapped. Microphones are packed and sound cables coiled while Amanda Charlton, a capable and levelheaded 30-year-old who has signed on as assistant director, starts washing cocktail glasses in the sink. ”My glamorous life,” she cracks.

Mr. Shields doles out cab fare to the actors and tries to schedule the next shoot. There are problems: one actor is going out of town and another is in a play and can shoot only late at night. Plus, Mr. Shields hasn’t actually written the scene yet. Not that he’s worried; he has a few weeks to figure it out. In the meantime, there is other work to be done.”Tomorrow I’m a window washer again,” he says.’I’m going to have to drop out of ‘The New Guard.’ The collaborative spirit of the project requires a great deal more energy and time than I am able to give.”PAT SHIELDS can pinpoint the exact moment he decided he wanted to be in the entertainment business. Growing up in Cleveland with eight siblings, he planned to take after his lawyer father, and he went off to nearby Kenyon College with a pre-law major in mind. Then one night he went to see a friend perform in a drama about an oil company polluting a Peruvian fishing village.”I sat in my seat and looked around, and the entire audience was rapt,” recalled Mr. Shields, pacing in his compact Bedford Street apartment the week after the bar shoot, still wearing blue coveralls after a day of window cleaning. ”To think of having 500 or 1,000 people listening to something that you believe in was extraordinary.”

He decided to become an actor, and after graduation, he moved to New York to make the rounds. But he soon realized he wanted to be the one writing the words. And after spending some time in Hollywood trying to pitch a feature film titled ”White Flight,” based on the sweeping racial change in the neighborhood where he grew up, he also realized that waiting for others to greenlight his ideas wasn’t for him. ”I realized I wasn’t cut from the cloth that allowed me to be condescended to by people who read less than I do,” he explained.Sign up for the New York Today Newsletter Each morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more. Get it sent to your inbox.He decided that his future lay in the Internet, where streaming video technology was generating booming interest. In 1996, he registered the domain Digital Cinema.com, and was convinced he’d found an outlet for the ideas bubbling over in his imagination.”The day I got that name, I just said, this is it. For the rest of my life I’m going to be able to write a story, pick up a camera, shoot it, put it out there, and someone can look at it, whether it’s 10 people or 800.”

He found a kindred soul in Alex Westerman, an energetic former art director who on an impulse had quit a job working for a children’s television show to found a Web site called RadicalZoo. Mr. Westerman, 32, envisioned the site as a kind of ”artists’ commune in cyberspace,” a home for filmmakers and musicians who wouldn’t necessarily be heard in mainstream media.”

Mr. Westerman needed content. Mr. Shields needed a venue. When they met at a party in 1998, a partnership formed quickly. Mr. Shields had an idea for a show for the Spanish-language market about a Queens-based Latino political club, but when Mr. Westerman decided Radical Zoo needed a teenage-based series, that show morphed into ”The New Guard.” Mr. Shields, a political buff himself, saw the show as an opportunity to present a positive image of young people exerting political influence ”in a series that also has all the other things that they’re interested in — having sex, romance and some cute guys and some cute girls.””Just looked at the tapes again. We forgot to have you identify your party when you got up to speak at the Soapbox. When we shoot the master scene add, ‘Dolly Malone . . . I’m a Democrat.’ ”SEARCHING for young talent hungry for experience and video clips, Mr. Shields posted signs at drama schools, tapped friends of friends and spent a month scouting downtown theater productions in search of actors to match his characters, an eclectic group that included Tara Snowden (”button-down veteran politico of a babe who doesn’t flinch”), Garrison Gordon (”strait-laced but sexy”) and Randall Watkins (”conservative, casual, bookworm, policy wonk”).Despite Mr. Shields’s inability to pay, the novelty of working on a Webcast was a lure, as was the show’s content.

ON a Sunday night in February, in the second-floor lounge of a West Houston Street bar called Madame X, two dozen twentysomethings sit on a bank of red velvet couches sipping cosmopolitans and highballs. As they chat amid candles and tasseled red lampshades, Patrick Shields, at the far end of the room, has a problem to solve.The cocktails are fake, and the drinkers are actors whom Mr. Shields has brought here for two nights to film scenes for ”The New Guard,” a dramatic series designed for broadcast on the Internet, for which he serves as producer, writer, director, administrator, cameraman, set dresser and lighting technician. Right now, it’s this last role that’s causing him trouble: the lighting for the shot, supplied by a black fixture clamped onto an exit sign, is too bright. Mr. Shields, perched precariously on a railing, is trying to figure out how to tame it.He has at his disposal a $4,000 video camera, a DAT recorder and a laptop-size mixing board, but right now a decidedly lower-tech item, whose name momentarily escapes him, is required.”I need a . . . .” He frowns. ”A clothespin.”He is handed one, which he uses to secure a makeshift gel. ”If you’re keeping score,” he says to a bystander, ‘this is what you call learning under fire.’

For Mr. Shields, learning under fire has been a key strategy as he prepares to give life to ”The New Guard,” a drama about the postcollegiate members of rival Greenwich Village political clubs that he likens to ” ‘The West Wing’ with young Manhattan politicians,” and that is scheduled to go onstream today at www.radicalzoo.com. The digital revolution has created a new world of opportunity for would-be auteurs like Mr. Shields, who can shoot their own material cheaply on digital cameras and send it via the Internet to a potentially limitless pool of viewers.It’s hardly a fast track to success. Contrary to rosy predictions of years past, the audience for Web shows remains modest — 2,500 viewers a week makes for a hit — and for every ”Webisodic” that attracts interest, hundreds of others fold, peter out or limp along in search of viewers.Did you know you can share 10 gift articles a month, even with nonsubscribers?Share this article.But Mr. Shields, who burns with old-fashioned ambition, sees in streaming video a chance to make his mark. And so he has set about creating ”The New Guard” from scratch, with a skeleton crew and a rock-bottom budget of under $2,000 an episode, supplied by his day job as a window cleaner.It hasn’t been easy. As he prepared to shoot his first block of six five-minute bimonthly episodes, he faced an obstacle course of setbacks, from scheduling headaches to dropouts among the cast members, who, like his crew, are working for free and thus tend to disappear when paying jobs turn up. For the past two weeks he has pulled a series of late-night rewrites to accommodate sudden cast changes, e-mailing new scripts to the actors each time.

”Everything that can happen has happened,” says Mr. Shields, a sincere and self-assured 37-year-old with a boyish face and a habit of blinking and arching his eyebrows when he’s concentrating, which is much of the time. ”I’ve got 30 percent more gray in my beard than when I started.””There is no more character named Cherry. She is now known as Anna Roderigo.”From an e-mail message exchanged during the making of ”The New Guard.”THE premise of ”The New Guard” is that a group of young Republicans has set out to challenge the longtime liberal domination of Village politics. To that end, it has rented an office that turns out to be next door to the headquarters of the Village Democratic Youth, paving the way for both political maneuvering and intertribal romance.The scene being shot this night in February is set in a fictional bar called the Soapbox, a hangout for political types where extemporaneous outbursts of oratory can earn a free drink. The Republicans are making their maiden voyage to the bar, where they’re eyed with suspicion by their Democratic counterparts. The crowd includes a pair of newspaper reporters, a towering bouncer named Tall Paul and a smattering of extras, though fewer than Mr. Shields had hoped for, despite a last-minute recruitment drive.

The actors, who are just settling into their roles, are a youthful bunch with the studious energy of up-and-comers. Exhibiting a vaguely Zenlike focus in the eye of the hubbub, Mr. Shields makes a steady stream of small decisions as he cruises the room: adjusting a light, coaching an actor on a line reading, composing a new line on the fly when an inconsistency is pointed out.By 10 p.m. he’s ready to shoot, and the actors run a take. It’s not there yet. ”Lots more volume, lots more energy, lots more everything,” he tells them. They run the scene a half-dozen more times, the energy and pace increasing with each shot. An hour later, Mr. Shields is satisfied, and the actors break as he sends for pizzas.In the final scene of the evening, a sultry Republican ingénue crosses enemy lines to attempt seduction of a cute Democrat in Clark Kent glasses.By 1 a.m. the scene is wrapped. Microphones are packed and sound cables coiled while Amanda Charlton, a capable and levelheaded 30-year-old who has signed on as assistant director, starts washing cocktail glasses in the sink. ”My glamorous life,” she cracks.

Mr. Shields doles out cab fare to the actors and tries to schedule the next shoot. There are problems: one actor is going out of town and another is in a play and can shoot only late at night. Plus, Mr. Shields hasn’t actually written the scene yet. Not that he’s worried; he has a few weeks to figure it out. In the meantime, there is other work to be done.”Tomorrow I’m a window washer again,” he says.’I’m going to have to drop out of ‘The New Guard.’ The collaborative spirit of the project requires a great deal more energy and time than I am able to give.”PAT SHIELDS can pinpoint the exact moment he decided he wanted to be in the entertainment business. Growing up in Cleveland with eight siblings, he planned to take after his lawyer father, and he went off to nearby Kenyon College with a pre-law major in mind. Then one night he went to see a friend perform in a drama about an oil company polluting a Peruvian fishing village.”I sat in my seat and looked around, and the entire audience was rapt,” recalled Mr. Shields, pacing in his compact Bedford Street apartment the week after the bar shoot, still wearing blue coveralls after a day of window cleaning. ”To think of having 500 or 1,000 people listening to something that you believe in was extraordinary.”

He decided to become an actor, and after graduation, he moved to New York to make the rounds. But he soon realized he wanted to be the one writing the words. And after spending some time in Hollywood trying to pitch a feature film titled ”White Flight,” based on the sweeping racial change in the neighborhood where he grew up, he also realized that waiting for others to greenlight his ideas wasn’t for him. ”I realized I wasn’t cut from the cloth that allowed me to be condescended to by people who read less than I do,” he explained.Sign up for the New York Today Newsletter Each morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more. Get it sent to your inbox.He decided that his future lay in the Internet, where streaming video technology was generating booming interest. In 1996, he registered the domain Digital Cinema.com, and was convinced he’d found an outlet for the ideas bubbling over in his imagination.”The day I got that name, I just said, this is it. For the rest of my life I’m going to be able to write a story, pick up a camera, shoot it, put it out there, and someone can look at it, whether it’s 10 people or 800.”He found a kindred soul in Alex Westerman, an energetic former art director who on an impulse had quit a job working for a children’s television show to found a Web site called Radical Zoo. Mr. Westerman, 32, envisioned the site as a kind of ”artists’ commune in cyberspace,” a home for filmmakers and musicians who ”wouldn’t necessarily be heard in mainstream media.”

Mr. Westerman needed content. Mr. Shields needed a venue. When they met at a party in 1998, a partnership formed quickly. Mr. Shields had an idea for a show for the Spanish-language market about a Queens-based Latino political club, but when Mr. Westerman decided Radical Zoo needed a teenage-based series, that show morphed into ”The New Guard.” Mr. Shields, a political buff himself, saw the show as an opportunity to present a positive image of young people exerting political influence ”in a series that also has all the other things that they’re interested in — having sex, romance and some cute guys and some cute girls.””Just looked at the tapes again. We forgot to have you identify your party when you got up to speak at the Soapbox. When we shoot the master scene add, ‘Dolly Malone . . . I’m a Democrat.’ ”SEARCHING for young talent hungry for experience and video clips, Mr. Shields posted signs at drama schools, tapped friends of friends and spent a month scouting downtown theater productions in search of actors to match his characters, an eclectic group that included Tara Snowden (”button-down veteran politico of a babe who doesn’t flinch”), Garrison Gordon (”strait-laced but sexy”) and Randall Watkins (”conservative, casual, bookworm, policy wonk”).Despite Mr. Shields’s inability to pay, the novelty of working on a Webcast was a lure, as was the show’s content.’

I liked the freshness of the ideas,” said Chad Hoeppner, an aspiring actor with wholesome good looks who was tapped to play William (Junior) Whitney III, the preppy heir to a Republican dynasty. ”There’s not a lot of political stuff written for young people.”Haskell King, 24, who plays the hotheaded activist Jeremiah Walden, added: ”It seemed exciting to work on an Internet show. And I can turn it on at any time. I can tell my dad, ‘Hey, check this site out.’ ”To run sound, Mr. Shields tapped his 29-year-old cousin Jim Oakar, a classical guitarist and composer who also writes the theme music (and plays a bartender for good measure).Mr. Shields began writing scripts. A typical snippet of conversation, in which the Democrats size up the Republicans:Renny Driscoll: ”God forbid they find out we think they’re cute.”Dolly Malone: ”Actually, yesterday? Before I knew he was a Republican? The tall one moving in the furniture was kinda Jeremiah Walden: ”That hot young Republican wants you to get paid less than me.”The director also began boning up on lighting and other fine points of digital cinematography, and finding places to shoot. Through a college friend who was part owner of Madame X, he landed the upstairs room for a few nights in exchange for some window washing. Another friend had a backyard Jacuzzi in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where on St. Patrick’s Day Mr. Shields and Mr. Oakar completed a PG-13 hot-tub scene that represents a concession to his 18-to-25 target demographic.That left a handful of office scenes, which were planned for 2 Columbus Circle, a vacant city-owned building where filmmakers can shoot free of charge. There was a catch; Mr. Shields needed $3,000 worth of liability insurance. By the end of March he had raised the money, and on a Friday afternoon he and Mr. Oakar headed uptown to prepare for the shoot.Up on the sixth floor there was a clammy chill in the air, and a maze of abandoned offices painted in a disorienting array of oranges, greens and beiges, with acoustical tile ceilings and stained carpeting. To spruce things up, Mr. Shields brought a bucket of paint and a handful of props — a bulletin board, office supplies, a wall map of Manhattan. He obtained ragtag office chairs from the basement and harvested an old typewriter and a filing cabinet from stray corners of the building. After lugging them to the office, he used a marker and stencils to inscribe Village Democratic Youth on the bright orange door.”I could use a beer tonight,” he said, sighing, to Mr. Oakar.It was not just the shoot that was on Mr. Shields’s mind. He had just been hit with an eviction notice because he was behind on his rent, in part because of a series of knee injuries that left him unable to work for months at a time. The accidents are among several setbacks Mr. Shields has faced in the past decade, the most serious being the death of his wife, who, suffering from chronic depression, killed herself in 1991. Mr. Shields was so devastated he was sometimes unable to get out of bed.

The lost years add an urgency to his already considerable drive to be heard.His 15-year-old window-washing business finances his production company, Clear Window Productions, but it keeps him away from the typewriter. It’s a trade-off he is acutely conscious of every time he heads for the subway with his bucket, chamois cloths and brass squeegees. ”Every minute that I’m cleaning windows I’m going nuts,” he said. ”I’ve got 20 stories I want to tell. It’s like, my brain hurts.””Your first-ever mission as a production assistant: On Page 28, there is a bell as a prop. You must find this bell before the Sunday shoot. . . Preferably one that gets rung with forearm up in the air. Think ‘hear ye, hear ye.’ ”THE office scenes were finished on schedule; then the raw footage had to be assembled into finished episodes. After three days in the chilly building, both Mr. Shields and Ms. Charlton became sick, but there was little time to recuperate. It was the middle of the spring window-cleaning rush, and the target date for getting the first episode online was only weeks away.On a beautiful late April afternoon, the pair holed up in Mr. Shields’s living room with the shades drawn, reviewing the Columbus Circle footage. Any number of problems surfaced — muffled lines, out-of-focus shots — but they found enough good material to work with. First, however, Mr. Shields needed to master the editing software, and to that end he began spending every spare hour wrestling with a 500-page

Meanwhile, Mr. Oakar went to work on the theme music. Mr. Shields had envisioned a trumpet fanfare topped by a blast of electric guitar. So, working from his East Village apartment, where a corner was dominated by an electric keyboard and an array of recording gear, Mr. Oakar assembled a hard-charging 15-second theme that, he said, ”merges trumpets from circa 1640 and hard-rock guitar circa 1975.”As the first episode crept toward completion, a question remained: would anybody watch? Issues of merit aside, ”The New Guard” amounted to a drop in a wide ocean; Billy Pidgeon, an analyst for the Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, estimates that ”hundreds if not thousands of people are picking up cameras and trying to become digital filmmakers.”While Mr. Shields is well aware of the competition, he is confident that the best stuff will rise to the surface, in large part through word of mouth. While he believes in the Web’s potential as an entertainment medium, he also hopes to make headway in more traditional channels, such as network television. In the meantime, he is spinning out an endless stream of ideas for other ventures — a digital-video résumé service for actors, a digital cinema production center on the Hudson River, even a soapbox derby down West End Avenue.Days from his deadline, Mr. Shields was punchy and wired from an editing all-nighter as he sat on Mr. Oakar’s couch listening to the theme play over the computer. Dogged by technical problems, he was still trying to finish the final edit, but a ”software epiphany” that morning had him in good

Of course, he hadn’t actually shot the opening sequence yet; he had in mind footage of a graduation ceremony, if one could be found a couple of days. If not, he was not exactly sure what he would do, but he had no shortage of ideas.Rather than being daunted by the deadline pressure, Mr. Shields admitted to getting a charge from being forced to solve problems on the fly.”I’d be a good survivalist,” he said. ”I’d be able to last in the woods in a snowstorm. I just know it.”The window-cleaning business, which calls for regular defiance of gravity and constant schedule juggling, is good training, he says.”It’s 90 percent problem solving,” he explained. ”There’s some obstacle in front of the window, and you have to figure out, how can I do this without risking my life? There’s always a way.”

(A version of this article appears in print on May 6, 2001, Section 14, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: A Wing, a Prayer And Presto, It’s Web TV.)

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