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

How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Favorite Halloween Webseries 🎃👻🍫

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

Dorm Life - Halloween (ep 108)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN Y’ALL

Some to add to this: 

Four Pals & A Dog - mystery webseries

Better With You - a halloween romance webseries 

Jack Marshall Can’t Do This - Fall-themed webseries (more Thanksgiving than Halloween but eh) 

More creepy additions: 

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

Sam Dates - a love story between Sam and the Grim Reaper

Happy Halloween month!!

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

Same writer as Brains!

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

Subscribe here

brain platter 🧠

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

We’ll start: “Macedonian Quinquereme.”

“M……P…….G”

“People who are too clean can’t be trusted”

Angiogram Art

- by DROPINDROP

NeuroArt by MimiPrints

Medical Art

by Cocomilla

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 !!

Reality Z : Give it a chance please, I need a season 2.

Might we recommend.... Brains, a web series?

Part of the reason I want to see a straight-up college setting magical girl show is that I legitimately think a lot of the standard storylines would work better that way, but another part of it is that I just want to witness the drama of trying to balance magical girl antics with a full courseload. All staggering into Calculus 200 looking like hell because they were fighting zombie squid all night. Striking up a friendship with another girl based on a mutual misunderstanding where they think she’s a fellow magical girl, but she thinks they’re just really into the party scene, which eventually arouses her suspicions because they’re rolling up every morning totally wrecked from the night before, but she never sees them at any of the same parties.

“On the prowl again last night?”

“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.”

“Don’t even! Give it your all, girl, you inspire me to push myself just as hard.”

and then they decide to go out together some night, but before they can commit to either clubbing (wherein magical girl is hella surprised) or monsterfighting (in which party girl is hella surprised), some zombie squid attack and magical girl does the transformation thing and party girl doesn’t even notice because she’s beating zombie squid away with a sidewalk sandwich-board sign, and once the zombie squid are taken care of they’re eyeing each other in utter shock because 1) party girl can fight pretty good without transforming (”my sister was really into karate and I had to keep up”) and 2) magical girl looks AMAZEBALLS in her sudden magical superhero outfit (“WHAT THE FUCK SHOW ME HOW”) and, yeah, they end up partners-in-crime and also girlfriends

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

Anyways. Just sayin’. 

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.

Because the rolling sound of the skateboard thing would have given away the fact that Bri was not, in fact, scooting backwards on her butt, and because Andrew (the director) had to sometimes call out actions during the stunt, every single bit of sound from the moment of the first whip cut to Greta was recorded after the fact. It was a mix of cast and crew ADR and stock sounds from various sound libraries (a mix of YouTube and Final Cut Pro). Pretty cool, huh?

I regret to inform you I’m #brains webseries trash.

Ain’t nothing to be sorry for! Welcome to the party friends!

r.i.p. more like R.I.P.PED *zombie bursts out of ground and flexes his sick ass muscles*

x

i got brain bookends and i’m feelin’ good

Calling aces who want better representation!

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.

We made a super short survey and we’d love for you to chime in.