Anyone got time for a game of the road trip classic carpicky? You know, the one where you have to guess the colour and make of the next car before it drives by? Ever wonder what it would be like being stuck in an eternal game of it? UBC Film alumnus Chris Lorenz, Joaquin Cardoner and Ricardo Carneiro’s Telus Storyhive project Roadside Deadguys gives audiences insight into the depressingly hilarious world of a roadside afterlife, and a really long game of carpicky.
Car games aside, Roadside Deadguys, which was originally shown as Lorenz’s fourth year film at UBC's POV Film Festival, tells the story of Robbie and Patrick. They are two “deadguys,” who were unfortunate enough to have crashed and died in the same spot on a lonely road 25 years apart.
Their spirits stuck in the same spot forever, the two disparate souls must learn how to put up with one another and stave off the boredom of eternity. With clashing personalities, grumpy Robbie and optimistic Patrick are a match made in Hell but it bodes for a loveable yet dark, existentialist comedy.
"I wanted to make a comedy but keep it grim and depressing at the same time. Where I grew up in Saskatchewan, I used to drive from our farm to town everyday and I would pass these two crosses on the side of the road that are right beside each other, so I guess that image kind of just stuck with me. It was like that would be the worst place to be stuck for an eternity," says Lorenz on conceiving the concept for his short.
After rave reviews from POV, the three thought they stood a shot at getting their project picked up with Storyhive, which is a Telus-funded organization that awards production grants to aspiring creators in Western Canada. The Deadguys-Storyhive process started with the team submitting a pitch video to the competition. From there a panel of judges and some community voting helped push Lorenz's project to the next round where he and his two collaborators, Ricardo Carneiro and Joaquin Cardoner, created a pilot episode for ten thousand dollars.
“We realized that [getting the pilot funded] was within our reach, and I think we started getting excited about actually making this story and web series, so we pushed it really hard on social media. Our families, friends, and former classmates really rallied around us, and it was really cool to hear that we were actually funded," says Cardoner. “It was also really exciting to let the people who voted for us, and are supporting the project know that we’d be making a pilot. It was definitely very relieving.”
The final round of voting, which will determine whether or not Roadside Deadguys will be fully funded for the web series, starts on Monday, August 8 at 12 p.m. when the pilots for each of the fifteen projects are released.
The Roadside Deadguys pilot episode will be available on the Storyhive website, on their Facebook page, and on TELUS Optik TV On Demand. All voting has to be done on the Storyhive website, which is the key to getting this project funded.
"We think this opportunity has really been a testament to the Film Production program at UBC, and we think that’s why people should be interested in our project. We’ve been apart of the community there for four years, and we want to be able to represent this amazing program that we’ve come from," said Lorenz. "Obviously, we’d love it if people would vote for us because we’re UBC alumni, but we hope that they’re also voting because they’re genuinely interested in Roadside Deadguys."
You can check out their Storyhive page, here. Watch their trailer here. Find them on Facebook here.
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