Baronettes. Από τους Shook Yang Kids.

Baronettes Webisodes is an effort by two young artists who deviate from the typical “route” of establishing their work, do exactly what they want on a very tight budget and promote their work on a worldwide basis with no official support by the mass media, during an unfavorable period for the dreams of the generation of their country.

Baronettes always lived inside our minds. They just happened to surface on May of 2011. By randomly describing these ladies who until then had no name or exact look we realised that they were surprisingly familiar to us. From the first moment we started making up stories about these ladies, that made us laugh, but also realize their depressing and miserable side.

These stories gave birth to the idea of creating Baronettes. They are wealthy; they have a big house full of trinkets, numerous clothes and live trapped inside their fake universe/house. 

They live today but choose to be held onto notions, mentalities, beliefs and settings of preceding decades. They delude their selves into thinking that anything deviating from social acceptance does not exist, be it about themselves or others. They are two ladies we all have met.

In the series the two ladies rebel and misbehave, “dragging” with them this part of society that shares the same notions with them. Imagine a repressed Baronette you have met doing everything the two ladies do. How much happier would she and the people around her be? 

When discussing the way they could star in a project, we decided that the best way would be a series of episodes which would include parts from their everyday life. Without any experience on acting we decided that these ladies would be impersonated by us considering we know them so well that it would be useless to direct professional actors or even drag artists. We decided to do drag since these ladies are so exaggerated they could be drag queens.

Selling our scripts to a channel seemed impossible. Not because we did not know who to approach or we didn’t have the guts to do it, but because no channel would air exactly what we wanted to. Therefore we decided to create a series of episodes which could be watched by anyone in Greece or anywhere in the world without any artistic limit. One of the first web series in Greece and the craziest of all came true!

We wrote the first six episodes (First season - five episodes aired) in a few hours and decided to shoot them directly, in a barely organized production, almost without a script within a few hours. In our first attempt the following super talented friends helped us: Stavros Kirimlidis did the photography with two 1,000W lamps from the 70’s and his GH2 Panasonic digital camera, Marina Stat did the make up and Alex Scissors did the hair styling. The characters were complete, the episodes were shot and editing began…

We created the profiles of Beatrice and Savannah on facebook so we can keep our friends updated on the webisodes. The first webisode hit 1,000 views in less that 12hrs. By the end of the first season there was wide acceptance. We had many proposals for help, famous people volunteered to star in the series and we also had the first fans of the webisodes. We were sure that there was more to come.

When we returned from our summer holidays we started working on the second season. We wrote 16 episodes from which we selected 11 to shoot. We created everything from scratch, we made all the props and the scenery, we found the right clothes from the never ending personal collection of grandma Voula –a true Baronette- and after 2.5 months we shot all 11 episodes in 3 days. 

Shooting was harder than we imagined, the production was huge compared to the first season and the excitement of everyone in the crew and of all the guests was thrilling. We worked really hard with great stress but in the end it was an unforgettable experience.

In 2012 we plan to shoot 6 to 8 new webisodes (Season 4). Shook Yang Kids are very proud of the Baronettes Webisodes and really hope that you will enjoy them too.