#hplw

Kia ora koutou,

After 4 years of being on hiatus we wanted to officially acknowledge that our filmmaking collective has disbanded.

We are so proud of all the work we made, and we loved sharing it with you all. Your gifs, analysis, letters, writing, art, and comments made us feel so lucky. Creating these stories was such a special time in our lives and we can’t thank you enough for being a part of it. We could not have made our 5 webseries in 5 years without your awhi, love, and support. We will be forever grateful for the support of our Kickstarters which allowed us to continue making series, and never forget our fandles or flamangoes.

While as a collective we have gone our separate ways, we are all continuing to be creative folks and if you follow our various social media you will see what we get up to next.

Claris - @/clariskate on instagram Elsie - @/littlebollinger on instagram Minnie - @minniegraced most places Robbie - @robbienicol on instagram Sally - @/salazar.bollinger on instagram

We will continue to post as The Candle Wasters from time to time — NMTD turns 10 next year and we’ll be sure to acknowledge that!

Finally, we are releasing several videos from our YouTube Drafts as part of the final updates to the Kickstarters for Lovely Little Losers and Bright Summer Night. You will see these on your feed. After that, we will not be releasing any further original content on YouTube as The Candle Wasters, though there will be other updates from us as individuals from time to time. For more details on the Kickstarter, please see the Final Updates on each Kickstarter.

Thank you all for joining us on this journey! 

Today was the first day of my conference. 

Check out this Queer New Zealand webseries!! It's a musical rom-com!!

It's way amazing and wholesome!!

The whole series is on YouTube

web series + lgbt kisses [5/?] - billie & zara (happy playland)

*chord strum*

Endless list of webseries femslash ships: 10/? 

Billie Haare/Zara Kovacheva, Happy Playland

“And you make everything easier, Zara.” / “You make my life harder, but that’s okay.”

“What if I’m done with my plans? Does that change who I am?” Most of Happy Playland’s problems could be solved if there were simply more Happy Playland. The Candle Wasters’ newest series tells the story of Billie (Neena Dekkers-Reihana), Zara (Dani Yourukova), and Cris (Jen Smith), three employees of the soon-to-be-shuttered Wellington branch of Happy Playland, a slightly downtrodden party and play center for children. Love springs among the ball pits as Billie and Zara fall for each other, and the main story of the series is the beginning of their relationship — from first meeting to flirtation to hook-up to dating to first fight to commitment — told primarily through Billie’s perspective. Oh, and it’s a musical. There’s a lot going on here, narratively, tonally, and conceptually. Happy Playland swings between intense interpersonal and psychological drama, dry humor, and straight-up surrealism, using music to accentuate every shift. Some of the musical numbers are traditional “characters sing the action” songs, like you might see on Broadway. Some of them are kinda-sorta diegetic, in the style of Once — there’s an episode where Zara gets in an argument with a group of street musicians, and they incorporate her relationship drama into their act. Some of them take place in a featureless black room, outside of the “real” action, which functions as a place for the characters to play out their internal monologues and daydreams. (Most of the black room sequences reflect Billie’s thoughts, but one delightful episode-long example belongs to Cris.) What’s magical is how much all of those tones and conceits and narratives work together, rather than against each other. TCW have always had a deft hand with tone and humor, but with Happy Playland, they’ve gotten to the point where it really seems effortless. Why not portray Cris’ attempts to get Billie and Zara on a date as a high-wire act set in the black room, where Billie and Zara read out their text messages in affected voices while Cris pirouettes between them, dressed in a ski suit? Instead of cutting between locations like a boring normal show, why not have Billie and Cris’ long-distance video chat take place all in one room, with a slippered and bathrobed Cris running across the break room to get her room service? Why not, if it all works as well as it does? The series really is TCW’s playland, where they can try out any strange conceit or wild tonal shift that they want.