If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray Sam Cory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.

And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.

At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?

Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.

So, I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I started looking at how we are viewed, our culture, and how the things we create are reinterpreted everywhere else. So I wanted to address that, for years, because I felt bruised by the Bush administration. In the end, I decided to intentionally write a piece that would embrace American culture, and at the same time criticize it. In embracing American culture, I used all America born genres –– the western, the musical, science fiction serials — and put them in a landscape of privatized prison systems that capitalize on their prisoners, pharmaceutical companies being irresponsible, tobacco advertisers, depletion of natural resources. I put them all together to create this one science fiction landscape. And it’s not meant to be propaganda, it’s meant to be enjoyed.

Well, propaganda would imply that you were being sort of rah-rah–

–or, anti-rah-rah. Yeah, that I was taking a side and trying to inject it into everyone else. But I was trying to do what is also a classic American thing, which is take the political landscape and make science fiction out of it. Like with The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits using the Cold War, or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers drawing from the modern political environment of its day.
What came first: writing the songs, or the conception of the Stingray Sam as a narrative?

It went both directions. Some of the songs were written first. “Mars,” in episode one, was written before the episodes were written, but it was written with the same idea in mind, and it was a perfect match. The lullaby song I wrote specifically for the scene. The song that the Quasar Kid sings was a song Crugie [guitarist for McAbee's band, The Billy Nayer Show] wrote, and I wanted him to sing something that was very natural to him, so I picked one of his songs and worked that into the screenplay. Others were written specifically for it. So it went in all different directions. A lot of the incidental music, not all of it, but some were actually songs we had recorded, and we just remixed them without vocals. When we released the soundtrack, we put them in as songs in their entirety.

At what point in the process did you come up with the release plan?

I was asked to make a film for mobile phones once, for the Sundance Film Festival, a couple of years ago. After that I was asked to go speak about making films for small devices, at functions that dealt with communication and eletronics and technology. So I learned a lot about what people were trying to move towards in those fields.

But I also watched how young people consume entertainment these days; it’s very different than it’s been before. I wanted to do something that was organic to the way people get their films. So I started writing writing Stingray Sam with the idea that it would be a multi-platform release, that it would be released on 35mm in movie theaters at the same time on different sized digital dowloads, on DVD — [Cory points to my iPhone, which is recording the conversation] you can watch it on here, if you want to. The idea was to write it, too, so that you could enjoy it on small devices. Most people watch things in transit, so I wanted it to be dense in information, for each one to be a complete piece that you could watch in ten minutes So each one has a complete beginning, middle and end; its own history, its own science, its own featured music track.

Regarding your interest in how young people are consuming media, how are you consuming media? Do you watch web series and films created for digital devices?

No, most of the things that are being created for small devices I don’t think are really…they’re like one-two-punch jokes. Not really my cup of tea. But I do watch classic films in segments on YouTube. Feature films are being sectioned up and being seen on small screens — that’s the way most people watch things. I just watched an old silent film, The Wind. I’d never seen it before, and I watched it in its entirety in ten minute segments on YouTube.

So I’m not watching things that that are created for it, but I’m watching things that end up there. And so I wanted to make a feature film that is told in complete pieces, rather than an entire thing cut into small pieces. Each piece, each segment would hold up on its own as a complete story, to create an entire story.

Stingray Sam seems to be a product of your relationship to Sundance in a couple of ways — there’s the commission to make work for small devices; John Cooper connecting you to your narrator, David Hyde Pierce; and ultimately the rush to have production completed in time for a Sundance 2009 premiere. There has been some lately discussion about how, in a climate in which indie film distribution has dried up significantly, the film festival circuit can function as an alternate distribution channel. But in a case like yours, in which a festival has so much influence over the conditions of production, can a festival also function as a sort of alternate studio?

Well, you know, you make a lot of friends. Nothing I’ve made has been created through a festival, but I’ve made a lot of friends at festivals who have been very helpful. So I wouldn’t call it a studio, but as far as it being an alternative form of distribution, it’s a way to get things seen. One of the fears people have these days, everyone’s talking about piracy, and I think that more often than not has an effect on bad films, because no one wants to buy a film they’ve seen that sucks. People are showing my films on YouTube, they’re showing them in pubs and things like that, and that only increases the popularity of the film, and increases the DVD sales. So, screening in festivals increases your own audience.

So do you see festivals and other screenings as promotion for DVD and soundtrack sales?

Enh…it depends how you run your life. To me, the main thing is — well, one of the main things, the non-financial thing. I don’t think only in terms of money. If I did, I’d live a very different life, I’m sure. But one of the things that’s most important to me about making a film is that people who might like it will have a chance to see it. That’s step number one. Making your money back is step number two, and making a profit, I guess, would be further down the line. Hopefully not too far down the line — hopefully it’ll all work fairly quickly! But the main thing is to have an audience.

What’s next for you? What about Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest?

Everyone asks about that film, because I’ve been trying to make for seven, eight years. I’m rewriting it now, and I think it’s going to be a much better film than it would have been if I had made it when I had first wrote it.

I’ve got two [other] things that I’m kind of playing with. One is another episodic piece for multi-platform release, and the other is a more regular structured feature, with Stingray Sam and the Quasar Kid.

So it would be like their continuing adventures?

Well, not in space.