Celebrating 10 Years of NMTD 🦩🥭

Join the Much Ado About Nothing crew as they navigate high school in New Zealand at the height of superwholock. It's 2014 and you've got nothing much to do...

nothing takes you back to 2014 as hard as hearing the Sherlock theme played on a kazoo

Beatrice/Benedick + Text Posts (Part 1/?)

There's something so real about a lot of these early NMTD videos that even the best of other webseries never quite captured. Maybe it's the range of styles between 4-5 different vloggers (so far we've had Beatrice, Ursula, Benedick, Hero, and Dogberry/Verges). Bea is engaging, snarky, and direct, confidently ready to film herself. Hero is cheerfully sweet and feels wonderfully tuned to the camera and her own style. Ben is a bit awkward and strange and so ready to have a relationship with viewers, without much experience to back it up. Ursula is predominantly behind the camera and seeks to film art as she sees it. Dogberry and Verges have a crappy camera and no sense for filming or vlogging, but so much passion.

The episodes leading up to PROJECT II - ONE SHOT all feel remarkably distinct and unrelated. Yes, these characters are clearly interconnected (seen in VOX POPS through Ursula's storytelling, but also with the linked scenes in "Football Antics" and the Watch's video), but their vlogs are just... different and unrelated. And best of all, they have such different filming, editing, and storytelling styles. They really feel like they're coming from different characters. And there's no clear narrative! What's the story? Is it just a bunch of vlogs from some high school kids circa 2014?

I love ONE SHOT partly because of how it's shot and all (it's great!!), but also... it's just such a COOL way to show off how so many of these threads do fit together. There's an almost-effortless naturalness to how ONE SHOT shows these teens being silly, arguing, and having fun. It's lovely. It's different. It feels so real, so unscripted, so natural.

At this stage, it's so easy to question what Nothing Much to Do is even about. If you don't know the plot of Much Ado About Nothing, I don't think there's any easy way to guess how this story is playing out. And I love that the naturalness of the different filming styles can really make it seem like, no, there's no overarching narrative, there are just a bunch of kids making silly Youtube videos (as was decently common at the time) and having fun online and sharing about their lives. Drama? What drama? (We're in a Shakespeare comedy, aren't we??)

saw some nmtd playlists being shared on instagram so thought i would share these here in the spirit of getting hyped about NMTDaily (@thecandlewasters <3 <3)

 - I get the feeling we can’t flirt like normal people, would that be right?

- We’re far, far too clever.

"This is what I'm fucking talking about, Claudio. You need to be ready for anything!" --benedick hobbes, from the ground, after both he and claudio collapsed when his running tackle piggyback ride went south

low-effort nmtd post!!

Heads Up for the LIW Community

Google is updating its policy on inactive accounts. Beginning in December 2023, any account that has not been signed into for two years will be declared inactive, and it and its contents may be deleted. Since Google owns YouTube, this includes YouTube videos.

Nearly every literary-inspired web series is more than two years old, and many of them were posted to accounts that are no longer active. Many were also posted across multiple "in-universe" accounts, which are even less likely to be active.

If you are a web series creator, you should sign into the accounts associated with your web series to ensure that they are not deleted.

You should also, of course, back up any content on personal hard drives, but in the low-budget, DIY area of LIWs especially, sometimes stuff happens.

If you are a web series fan and you're worried about continued access to a series you love, I would recommend making your own physical back-up.

“TURN THAT CAMERA OFF” is a Benedick Hobbes moment that does not get enough love in this post-lolilo society

tfw your biggest fans are the au versions of yourselves

I never realised the project I video is the dramatis personae, in spite of my copy of much ado (which I sadly don't have atm) being full of notes on NMTD (particularly the dramatis personae page in fact), but I do find it a very fun way of adapting a play as a kind of intermedial text rather than purely an instruction for staging something

Beatrice/Benedick + Text Posts (Part 2/?)

no celebrity who complains about cancel culture would be able to handle the unhinged mess that the candle wasters had to face in 2015

CLAUDIO NMTD IN OFMD FINALE ALERT

[ID: A screenshot from OFMD 2.08 of Matthew J. Smith (Claudio NMTD's actor) as a British soldier followed by the episode credits, which list Matthew J. Smith as Chumsley. /end ID]