Today I got the chance to watch a rather brief, three episode (three more on the way), series in Cc:’d. Cc:’d is an amusing look into the world of advertising, a field ran by right brained executives deploying left brained creatives. The series follows the daily lives of Jason and Lawrence, a designer and copywriter team at a mid-sized New York City ad firm. Together they navigate an office filled with a high strung boss, uninspired clients and contradictory management.

Perhaps my favorite aspect behind the production of “Cc:’d” – written and directed by Henry Rembert – is that it is a story written about a day job, and filmed at work at night, and on weekends. After experiencing the contradictory world of advertising agencies, Rembert felt that his experiences would make for an entertaining show, something I’m sure many of us have felt before. Of course who better to make the show than himself? While not having any real film experience Rembert had been fortunate enough to come into to contact with many photographers, directors and creatives through his time in advertising, taking advantage of every opportunity he had to pick their brains. And what better place to film the show than at work!?

Having watched a ton of web series at this point I have to say that most series are simply a sequence of video clips bookended by fancy title and credits sequences. Rembert appears to have used his advertising background to his advantage creatively as a director spicing up what could have been rather mundane visuals. A lot of the story is told through characters interactions with each other through technology, be it texting, phone calls, twitter, facebook, or other methods. The most logical way to show these moments would’ve been by showing the device screens while in use, but “Cc:’d” takes a much better, far less literal approach.

Rembert described this aspect of the show as “living in the cloud.” Most electronic communications are displayed as visual effects floating and existing in the world – albeit unnoticed by the characters. I say they are existing in the real world because our perception of that world affects how these communiqués are displayed. If the messages are sent between two people, we see the message displayed between them, if that space is in focus, the message is in focus, if it’s out of focus it’s out of focus. It’s a clever stylistic choice that makes generic communication visually interesting in ways that a logical presentation wouldn’t.

The production process is also worth mentioning. The team shot six episodes in four days, with just one weekend and a couple of weeknights thrown in. The last day was an epic 7 AM to 11 PM marathon, whose success Rembert attributes to storyboarding and being highly organized. Overall writing the series took the biggest chunk of time, with post production a close second. ‘Living in the cloud’ is great style but a little time intensive, and short of working in a writers group, writing scripts is not a process that can be, or should be sped up.

Overall “Cc:’d” has an interesting premise, with a creative visual style that I was a big fan of. It’s still a little too soon to grade the series out on character, story, and as a whole but I like the direction it’s going. Jason and Lawrence’ resourcefulness and surprising lack of indignation is a good base that will hopefully lead to a little more depth by the end. I’d also like to see if the whole social media theme ties in character and story wise.

“Cc:’d” can be found on the YouTubes or at the official web site http://copymeonthat.com/