Who we are & What we're gonna do
We're apartment G26-2, six hardworking and driven Ithaca College students who are ready to get back to working and being creative after nine long months away. We can't wait to finally be back on set, but we're not willing to sacrifice safety to get there.
So how do we make a show while in lockdown? By stretching the limits of what our six-person apartment can accomplish and transforming ourselves into an incredibly hard-working skeleton crew for a brand-new comedy series! Everyone's pulling double, triple, even quadruple duty! Not opening our set up to anyone from outside the apartment will certainly be a challenge, but it's one we're more than up to!
Designed around these restrictions, and created by Joel Liss and Joshua Stein, Wormhole is an irreverent, Twilight-Zone-inspired, take on the Covid lockdown experience.
Quarantined in an apartment that happens to be the center of the universe, best friends Joel and Josh (played, naturally, by Joel and Josh) find themselves in increasingly confounding scenarios that break the laws of the natural world and threaten their friendship.
Our goal is to produce six short-form episodes over the course of our spring semester to be distributed over various digital platforms including Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram TV. We have the cast, we have the crew, and we've got the scripts. Now all we need is a little support from you to get this show up and running!
To see some of our prior work, check out our page's video gallery!
What We Need & What You Get
We're looking to raise $2000 over Indiegogo for our six-episode first season. After taxes and fees, this will give us a budget of approximately $300 an episode. How will we spend that money to ensure it all translates into quality onscreen?
What we will be spending money on:
- The majority of each episode's budget will be spent on props and other production design considerations. The pilot, for example, sees Joel throw a sugar glass vase at Josh.
- Some money will go to ensure the cast and crew (us) receive hot meals while shooting, and assistant editors get food covered during post-production. These 14-hour days aren't going to power themselves.
- The rest will be set aside for incidentals, on a per-case basis at our discretion.
What we will NOT be spending money on:
- Paying ourselves a salary of any kind.
- Pricey licensing fees for content made by a third party, such as music or FX packages.
- New Camera/Lighting/Sound gear.
- A presidential pardon for Gilbert, the extraterrestrial sock puppet.
What YOU get:
We know we're no one special, just a couple of kids trying to make something cool, so we're not going to waste anyone's time offering "meet and greets with the cast and crew" or "signed copies of such-and-such." What we are offering as our perks are various ways that we can say "thank you for supporting our student project" in a way that we think will make everyone feel warm and cozy. Your support really will mean the world to us, and we hope these various perks will provide a fun way for us to show you that.
The Risks
What happens if we don't reach our goal?
We're still student creators, and the honest truth is that we could do this show for less. But it'll look a heck of a lot better with a little bit of spending behind it. At $300 an episode, we're still firmly in the scrappy microbudget territory of filmmaking, but even that will give us a huge boost toward accomplishing this challenge we've set for ourselves. But rest assured, no matter how much money we raise, this show is getting made.
What happens if Ithaca transitions to online learning?
Because the show will be shot in an on-campus apartment, its production is at least semi-contingent on the college maintaining its plan for on-campus living in the spring. Though we feel it's unlikely, were Ithaca College to announce a transition to a fully online spring semester, we have a couple of different contingency plans in place.
If the college announces the transitions before the return to campus:
- The members of apartment G26-2 will likely be searching for different living accommodations in Ithaca during the semester, and the show would be produced there instead.
- We may also apply for an exception allowing us to move in to the apartment anyway.
- Barring that, if we haven't started rolling, we'll likely be able to issue partial refunds to all of our donors.
If the college transitions online during the semester:
- Our first step will be to apply for exceptions allowing us to remain on-campus.
- We may attempt to secure alternate accommodations while remaining in Ithaca, producing the remaining episodes there.
- Barring that, we will invest the remaining budget into a reworked, remotely-produced version of the concept or a similar concept.
Why Wormhole?
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Wormhole is a unique solution to a very strange, new problem: how to create something collaborative during a global pandemic without sacrificing safety? Not only will the show provide a creative outlet for the six residents of apartment G26-2, we'll also be working with a wide variety of student writers, composers, voice actors, and post-production artists to make this dream a reality.
- We also believe that the show taps into the oftentimes discomforting experience of lockdown, quarantine, and isolation in a fun, weird, and exciting way. With this next year still looking as murky as it does, this is the perfect time for this concept to come to fruition.
Thank You! Remember: Separately we are but singular worms. Together we are a wormwhole.
