Robin McCain and Leslie Streit, creators of off-beat cooking show Evil Auntie took to New York this week promoting the show and filming a few scenes of the next season. After a day of shooting in which McCain dressed up as a hot dog outside Carnegie Hall for the upcoming episode Gentlemen Prefer Kosher we caught up for a drink and a look at the future of indie web programming.
McCain and Streit have been producing content for the web since the mid-nineties when their vampire series VD2001 was one of the first web series, shot on consumer video equipment and made available as quicktime files on the web. This year Evil Auntie won honorable mention in the Experimental category and while in New York the team signed a deal with Blip.tv for distribution.
Above: Evil Auntie Roasts Afrodesiac Chicken
In 1994 the pair founded Cinematiks, run out of their San Francisco town house which operates as a new age kind of post house / Pilates studio “with Chihuahuas running around.” This day job of doing various production jobs supports the additional projects which provide an outlet for their creativity.
In addition to Evil Auntie, Cinematiks is engaged in production of The Elly Glass Project a documentary about the architect of the first solar house in America and Anarchist, a graphic novel for the internet they are considering distributing over time via Twitter. “I like the idea that the audience should be immersed” said Streit, and while the content is far from typical it does usually meet that mark.