Guest Blog: Rosie Holden and Daniel Graham On Web Series SCRAP OF SUCCESS

"Why don't you just get a part on EastEnders?" "Why don't you make your own show?"

These are just two examples of the many dreaded questions that 'resting actors' have to deal with daily. Although the first one is rather naïve, there is certainly food for thought in the second.

At a time when followers are the new currency, when reality TV contestants become overnight celebrities and casting directors ask your social media stats in an audition room, now more than ever feels like the right time to generate your own work.

Scrap of Success is a brand-new comedy web series that follows Raz and Daz, an optimistic musical theatre couple who want to document their hopeful journey to fame via their low-budget, amateur YouTube channel.

It's almost entirely based on our own industry experience: graduating from drama school with the expectation of going straight into work, the pressures of staying fit and healthy and doing four rounds of auditions, only for the part to be offered to the producer's sister-in-law.

We decided to go down the cringe comedy route, as it never fails to make us laugh ourselves. TV shows like The Office, This Country and Alan Partridge are firm favourites in our flat. This style of comedy was one we were keen to explore, and one we felt was a perfect fit for our concept.

Like many of our performer friends, we feel hugely frustrated with how much of our career - and life - is out of our control. We're scared to book holidays, commit to weddings or even cut our hair in case it impacts on a hypothetical audition. We were desperate to seize control, to be creative in our own time, without waiting for someone else to decide that for us.

One day we said to ourselves, "We're both actors, we're both creative, we live together... let's just make something" - and that's how Scrap of Success was born. We didn't want to have to start a crowdfunding campaign, or wait for a director to be available; we wanted complete creative control, which has been exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

Although social media can be the bane of our lives, we've had to learn its powerful and mysterious ways. This has quite literally meant Googling 'How to launch a web series' and 'How to get Twitter followers'. It's been a huge learning curve and has revealed the brilliant side of social media that neither of us had seen before.

We've set up pages across three different platforms: Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We've studied the analytics of each channel, learned what time of day it's best to post, and the effectiveness of using business-specific hashtags. This has all been enormously helpful with getting our show out there.

Although we hope that our characters make you laugh with their idiotic behaviour, we also want to highlight just how tough it is for all millennials to survive in this current climate: the expectation and pressure of success, the astronomical London rent for zero square footage... Ultimately, though, we hope the series brings some joy to people's lives.

It certainly has done so for us, as we haven't stopped laughing - despite almost getting beaten up whilst filming a park-gym scene in south-east London, and getting the weirdest looks from patrons of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and London's West End!

Watch Scrap of Success here

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