Brains, an original web series

Merry [almost] Christmas!! This is my absolute favorite time of year, despite now living in Los Angeles and not getting the experience the best part of the season (aka chunky sweaters and snow), so of course I have been reading plenty of holiday romances to try and make up for that. It may be sunny outside my window, but in my heart and on the page, it’s a winter wonderland, baybee! Read the full reviews in the link above!

In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren. The supernatural element? A time loop. The setting? A cabin where heroine Maelyn Jones, her family, and their close-knit group of family friends gather every year for Christmas. The situation? After hooking up with the wrong family friend (Theo) despite her long-standing crush on Andrew (his brother) and discovering that the beloved Christmas cabin is being sold after this season, she’s given a surprise second chance when, upon driving away after the holiday, time resets, and she’s back at the beginning of the trip.

Rating: 5/5

How hot? 🔥🔥🔥

Loving the Mountain Man by Adriana Anders. After a near-death experience followed by a daring rescue, our lovebirds Christa (a city girl marketing professional) and Micah (a disabled vet living off the grid) are stuck in Micah’s tiny mountain cabin until a massive Christmas storm clears enough for Christa to make it back into town. There’s immediate attraction, because she’s adorable and he’s a ripped survivalist, but both are hesitant to act on it.

Rating: 4.5/5

How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Mangos and Mistletoe by Adriana Herrera. When two queer Dominican bakers with very different relationships to kitchen skills and their culture end up paired off during a holiday televised baking competition in Edinburgh, they must learn to find common ground in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds. It doesn’t help that there’s an instant attraction neither of them is ready for or hopeful about the future of.

Rating: 4/5

CREEPY WEBSERIES:

Edgar Allen Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner

The Late Nell Avery

Brains

Misspelled

Carmilla

High Spirits (Tufts University)

The Goreys

Hamlet The Dame

Four Pals and A Dog

School Spirit: An Unlikely Webseries

Weird Sisters

Social Medium

HALLOWEEN EPISODES:

Muggled - Deathly Hallow’s Eve Special

Northbound - A Very Vampy Halloween

TAJWASH - Sherlock Holmes Struts Her Stuff

Four Pals & A Dog - mystery webseries

Better With You - a halloween romance webseries 

DEAD FRIENDS - depicts a friendship between a girl and a ghost

The Moonstone - sequel to Jack Marshall Can’t Do This

Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye - a mystery investigation series about a town with a werewolf problem

Hey indie filmmakers!

Need a brainstorming workbook for your next screenplay, a simple script breakdown template, a budgeting template plus tips to stretch it further than expected, or a shot list template to make shooting easier?

I made a lil Etsy shop! Nothing's more than $6, and all of it can be used multiple times (especially the spreadsheet templates!). Everything comes with a bonus doc or bonus pages of just advice and guidance.

Check it out!

Happy International Asexuality Day from the Ace and Anxious team to you <3

A preview of some upcoming infographics and educational resources I’ve made as companion content for my podcast Breaking Out of Breaking In that’ll be rolling out soon. For $5/month you can get full access to all of these plus all future resources we create, and you’ll be supporting a podcast we work really really hard on to have as much value as possible for you, fellow aspiring creators. I’d be honored if you considered subscribing

New Sam and Pat episode! Enjoy, and reblog for all your friends with your favorite quote from the episode

Angiogram Art

Medical Art

I’ve been binge watching Reality Z (Brazilian remake of Dead Set) with the comments I had read in mind saying that all characters were stupid. And yes they are but the show is so realistic because in the case that we have to survive a zombie apocalypse, I don’t think we’ll act better than them. They just want to survive in a place that seems to be safe. Moreover, the series shows something that is rare in other shows, people that we’re supposed to be attached to can die. Like I know the GOT thing, that we can’t attached to any characters but here ??? Way worst. It’s the first time I watch a zombie show that kills so many characters. The Walking Dead or Fear The Walking Dead were precursors of the genre. But Since Z Nation we can talk about a new way to deal with zombies. Z Nation was funny and show what we can call the worst side of zombies : they can run, very fast. And it creats a little fear because we don’t really know if they will survive to this. Zombies are way smarter and that’s why characters can die faster. With TWD and FTWD we can talk of a classic genre, but with Z Nation and Reality Z I think that’s more about a new way to deal with zombies maybe because the episodes last less so the action has to be more effective.

The Walking Dead : Nice, some episodes are boring as hell, tried to much not to be compared to the comics but the comics are amazing. The last two seasons are great I think, more actions, more villains that we can love to hate (like when they were at the prison). Daryl = best creation of the show. I’m reading the comics and they are in prison right now, and I would like to say thank you to the showrunners not to have made the governor as in the books.

Fear The Walking Dead : Started really nice, a little slow. Watched the first part of season 3 a few times because it was incredible (Daniel Sharman saved the show).

Z Nation : Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference, put it in a blender, shit on it, vomit on it, eat it, give birth to it. BRING THE SHOW BACK YOU COWARDS !!

“Is it that obvious? It was a hell of a time.”

“I feel you, sis. Here, I have something that’ll fix you right up…. I must have just missed you, where did you end up? Not on campus for sure.”

“What? No, there’s never anything going on here. The railway yard is the current hotspot.”

“Oh damn, yeah that makes a lot more sense, I saw the lights from downtown.”

“You did? I’ll have to tone it down next time I guess.”

This is Brains, a 2 season web series set on a college campus post-post-zombie-apocalypse, featuring a protagonist who:

Got back into YouTube vlogging again now that the internet is back up

In spite of the zombies, cares more about getting a boyfriend

Solves a murder to clear her besties’ name (but mostly to also clear her crush’s)

Wants everyone to calm down a little bit and just go to class

Wears lipstick to zombie patrol

Uses her neuropsychology studies for seduction

Is unapologetically horny on main, constantly

Still kicks ass because she may be delusional but she’s not suicidal. I mean, there are ZOMBIES

HOW WE MADE THIS EPISODE!

Episode 6 was an important one for a lot of reasons. The big reason is, obviously, it’s the first time we get to see a full, real conversation between Alison and Greta, deepening their backstory and relationship with one another. The other one is that it featured the most involved sets and stunt of the season. Let’s chat about that.

PRODUCTION DESIGN:

ABOVE! A destroyed hallway. It made sense for some of this episode to take place in the more apocalyptic areas of campus, which we liked because it broadened the scope of the show and allowed us to lean into the apocalypse more than usual. Rebecca McDonald, our wardrobe person/Sophie Bricher, along with Michele Austin @micheletabelle (also the photographer for most of this post) did the above work. Fun fact: we were technically not supposed to be filming in OR destroying this hallway, since none of us are students at this school anymore and we didn’t ask. Security was weirdly more present this day as well, so it was a bit tense trying to hide this from them, but ultimately it worked out and we got some great shots. But doesn’t this look like a school hallway that went through an apocalypse??

I’m considering the above picture part of production design, because when Bri first wrote the script, this scene (and all the lab scenes for season 2) were set in the lab set from season 1. Unfortunately, we no longer had access to that space, so we had to improvise. Particularly when it came to having places to handcuff people. So we handcuffed him to “something” off screen, and that something ended up being loads of gaffer tape. Fun!

STUNT!

The stunt was hella fun, but also a pretty involved process. The final scene is actually three different camera takes meshed together with whip cuts, which are cuts hidden in camera movement to make something appear as an extended shot. The first whip cut is when Alison turns to Greta right before the zombie appears from the doorway, because we wanted to make sure we could focus on the stunt rather than the scene leading up to the stunt PLUS the stunt. The second whip cut is when Alison and the zombie fall to the ground.

The video above takes place after the second whip cut, when the zombie gets back up and Alison scoots back to get away before Greta throws the oncoming shambler into the lab. This is the only time this season that when Alison is holding her camera, it’s actually Bri holding it, since we needed a shot of Alison’s shuffling feet and Brandon (the DP and also the person whose underwear you can see) couldn’t fake that.

So we got a flat skateboard thing for Bri to propel herself backwards on while filming the oncoming Ian (our excellent zombie) ran towards her.

Hey friends! You may know us as the folks behind the short film Ace and Anxious, or perhaps from our other various works. In any case, asexual representation is really personal to us (the writer/director of Ace and Anxious, GIF’d above, is herself ace and anxious!) and we wanted to hear from YOU about asexual representation in Film and TV.