When a clip from the Showtime series Weeds went viral, it inspired the cable network's digital content department. In the original clip, Andy Botwin (Justin Kirk) lectures his nephew on the finer points of autoeroticism. "The clip got so many hits that we decided we'd love to create more [scenes] like this one on a whole variety of different topics," says Trevor Noren, creative director for the digital content department at Showtime.

So his department worked with the series staff to create a small season of Webisodes called University of Andy. "We didn't want the Webisodes to rely on what's going on on the show," Noren explains. "The idea was to create a world that Andy exists in that can live independent of the show."

Noren's department initially produced 12 Webisodes that started appearing last summer on Showtime's Sho.com as well as on YouTube and iTunes. Based around the (obviously) fictitious University of Andy, viewers can go through the process of "enrolling," receiving an education in various subjects from the institution's eponymous founder and even receiving a degree. The first batch was so well received that they went back and created 11 more, which continue to roll out, Noren reports. "A community has built up around it. It's pretty cool!"

Webisode scripts, which come from Weeds writers Dave Holstein and Brendan Kelly, essentially involve Andy in a classroom situation espousing his particular brand of wisdom to the camera. The first season was shot on a classroom set, complete with bookshelves a blackboard, but Noren notes that the production took a different approach for the current season. "We wanted more flexibility," he says, "so everything for the current season was shot on a greenscreen stage."

Filming for the Webisodes takes place at Production Central in New York. "It's a turnkey greenscreen stage," Noren says. "It's lit and ready to go. We bring in just two pieces of furniture. When Andy's in the classroom, he stands in front of a podium, and in his office we gave him a leather chair to sit in. Otherwise, everything else is added later in post. The look is different. It's new territory. But we just don't have time to break sets and move to different locations. This gives us a very flexible way to work."

The actual "lectures" are covered by two stationary Sony HDW-F900 HDCAM cameras, with one getting a tight shot, the other wide. Kirk is able to work from a teleprompter. "We shoot all his dialogue first," Noren says, "then go in for some cutaways."

Editors for University of Andy come from Noren's department, the promotional arm of Showtime, rather than from the editorial staff of the series. Material is digitized into Apple Final Cut Pro systems and edited, retaining all the resolution of the HDCAM.

"The editors cut the greenscreen version to a timeline," Noren says, "and when that's locked, our internal graphics department creates and composites in the backgrounds using [Adobe] After Effects." These backgrounds of an office and a classroom, he adds, begin as photographic assets that they either own or purchased from a photographic stock house.

When Noren's team and their liaisons with the main series have signed off, the projects are then output back to HDCAM format. Though the University of Andy series lives primarily in compressed forms on various players for the Internet, Noren explains the importance of shooting and posting in HD, not simply to retain the 1920x1080 image for possible broadcast or Blu-ray distribution but also to have a robust enough image to crop into where necessary without having it fall completely apart.

"We push in and out and pan across the frame in post quite a bit," Noren says. "We really can't do much camera movement at all during the shoot. We don't have time and we can't really move the lights, and, of course, if we move the camera, it would make it a more difficult process to composite in the backgrounds. So we do the camera movement entirely in post."

The Web projects have been very successful. "We got about 11 million views total for the first series, and we were very happy with that number," Noren says.