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Cinema & Spice: Original Yahoo Web Series

By Meredith Alloway · June 4, 2013

It seems that every online website is hopping on the original content bandwagon. With Hulu, AOL and YouTube launching their own shows this past year, Yahoo is the latest to join the bunch. After announcing their line up at the Digital NewFronts in April, a series of presentations by leading digital media companies, it’s hard not to be excited about their content. There’s Tiny Commando, a comedy from Ed Helms (The Office), Losing Your Virginity With John Stamos, and Jack Black’s Ghost Girls.

But if anything proves you don’t have to have a big name to win over a network, it’s the cooking web series Cinema & Spice. Rounding out Yahoo’s line up is the scrumptious show from creators Julianna Strickland and Natasha Feldman. The girls self-produced their series, combining delectable recipes all fashioned upon film, until meeting a Yahoo employee at a USC panel. Since then, Cinema & Spice has proven that launching your own web series can prove profitable.

ATW: Where did the initial idea for Cinema & Spice all began? It must have been in one of your kitchens…

S: Natasha and I had started living together. My boyfriend is a cinematographer, and he was like if ya’ll want to make a show together I’ll shoot it! I went to film school and Natasha was in culinary school. We both love to cook!

ATW: The design and cinematography of the show is professional and also extremely cute and clever. How do you guys actually produce each episode?

F: It really depends on the particular episode that we’re doing. Julianna knows way more about the movies and from there we come up with what food might pair well with the film. Then we decide aesthetically how it will appear, and we shoot it and that’s a lot of fun! We also do post-production.

S: Our team is extremely small, Natasha and I do almost everything ourselves. I used to edit them and then we found someone who’s a little better than me. We have my boyfriend who’s the cinematographer and his brother does lighting, sound. Natasha’s mom is our PA. We were having continuity errors and we found Robert, our production designer, who is this genius! He was on Martha Stewart years ago! We type up the call sheets, get the forms together and decide the whole look of it.

ATW: Social media is so important right now for web series. Did you guys use certain platforms to get the word out?

F: Basic forms of social media, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. The most successful practice was YouTube and posting consistently. When people discover that you can come back week to week they do and also use word of mouth. For each episode, we would reach out to AMC or blogs on Mad Men; people who enjoy the original product that our episode is based on.

S: We also did a Kickstarter and we were getting lots of great feedback from it. People would call us and say can we do an interview with you or an article? That really helped with a lot of our views on YouTube. We raised a little over $11,000! People we had never met! One guy that worked with my dad 20 years ago donated $1000!

F: People from all over the world!

ATW: Now, how did Yahoo get involved?

F: They came in about a year ago. We met a really amazing guy who works for Yahoo at a web series comedy convention. He was there talking about the content they were producing and what it meant to be in comedy online.

ATW: Convention?

S: It was something at USC and was one sort of afternoon of it and lots of different people as part of a panel on web series. There were 6 people on the panel and they all showed some of their content and we loved the Yahoo content! It was quickly after that they wanted to work with us.

ATW: Yahoo’s Digital NewFronts has you guys paired with some other incredible shows from John Stamos, Ed Helms and even Jack Black. How has it been having Cinema & Spice in the mix?

F: We’re just excited to be a part of it! They invited us to the conference and we got to witness some of the amazing shows! A lot of the lifestyle programs will be airing next week! We got to see little bits of I Need Help; It’s hysterical. The content is all TV worthy!

ATW: How has working with a larger network like Yahoo aided or hindered your vision for the show?

S: I don’t think we know yet. We just released our second episode of 12 today. It’s not like YouTube where you can see views; we’ll get reports from Yahoo. We’ve got positive feedback from our mailing list and fans. Having the menu at the end of each video, we lost that, but we haven’t lost the idea of it. The way our Yahoo homepage is set up, we’re doing two or three videos per episode, so it’s more visually understandable than the YouTube one where we were making 5 and 8 videos per episode to try to stretch our money.  It’s almost better because we have a real hub and now we have a different episode every week for three months.

ATW: Have their been difficulties along the way? Have you had to sacrifice content for corporate demands?

F: We have been incredibly fortunate because Yahoo liked us having fun in the kitchen and they wanted to keep that feeling alive and keep it organic. We took what we wanted to do, we submitted it, and they gave us a few suggestions and we worked together to find the 12 movies and TV shows we liked best. They gave us a few guidelines on food, what their viewers tend to be excited about. In addition to that, they have amazing ideas but we’ve been able to integrate our ideas with their team. It’s a small team we work with and we’re all friends now.

S: It’s a great creative collaborative experience. We’re still the executive producers on it! 

ATW: I’m curious about the process now and how it’s evolved. You’ve got an idea for a show and what’s next?

S: We’ve always had a dream list of movies. When we had a more limited budget we would choose movies we really wanted to do and like with The Hunger Games, we wanted to get our name out. More popular things would help us be recognized on YouTube. With Yahoo we’re doing movies coming out but also checking off the list. We’ll be doing Pulp Fiction next week.

ATW: Amazing! What are some things you’ll be cooking?

S: The Big Kahuna burger and the five-dollar shake!

ATW: You did a Dark Knight episode. What would you cook for Man of Steel?

F: We already filmed a Man of Steel episode! It’ll be released the week the film is coming out. We’re doing a Super Dad brunch! You make brunch then take him to the movie. There are very few ingredients; smashed potatoes and a fried egg and we also show a really easy way to get restaurant quality bacon.

S: Using a plain white mug and sharpies we’ll also show you how to do a Superman logo mug with your dad’s name on it.

ATW: Will there be a special appearance by Henry Cavill perhaps?

N: There’s a special appearance from…my dad.

The girls then offered to have me over for dinner, where they test out all their new recipes. How could I refuse? Check out their show at Cinema & Spice The latest episode is “I Carried a Watermelon” Salad with none other than Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey. At Yahoo's Original Programming there’s a full line up of all original shows!