Set in Britain in 1979, Mind My Brains, Darling! follows the ups and downs of family life with the Worthingtons – a typical family with a mum, dad, two kids and a grandfather. Typical that is, for a peri-apocalyptic society ravaged by war and zombies for the past 4 years. Oh, and the dad is a Zombie.
After winning an Indie Intertube Innovation Award this year we decided to release this video showing some of the reasons why we developed the BodyLine filming technique. In our early series we had a cast and crew of two – just Paul and me. We were playing with the technique of not showing faces, and after the feedback we had from ‘Goodnight Princess‘ we wanted to see how far we could take it.
We knew it would be impossible to create ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!‘ with only two people, even if we did play multiple roles. So we were delighted that our family, and Alan Douglas and Josephine Hoy were willing and able to be part of the cast. Filming was hard work, but having such a wonderful crew really helped. BodyLine is probably not going to change the world, but is certainly an arrested technique and makes the videos stand out. Of course, some people hate it with a passion, but you can’t please everyone
Here we outline four of the advantages of BodyLine for small indie productions:
Indie Intertube recently unveiled the nominees for their 2nd Annual Awards, and we were thrilled to receive three nominations! In addition to getting through to the final round of the Audience Choice Awards thanks to the amazingly dedicated voting by some wonderful people, we also received the following nominations:
Best Sidekick: Paul Higgins and Edward Higgins as Jeremy Worthington
This is a great award category, and it is fantastic to see that Jeremy really made an impression. We used the BodyLine filming technique so both Paul and Edward could play the part of Jeremy, depending on what was needed for the scene. They also both shared the part of The Colonel/Granddad, something many people were surprised to find out Congratulations to both of you!
Best Set Design
After all the work we put into the set design – and the fact that so many people thought that the set was, in fact, our house! – it is a real thrill to be nominated in this category. We are up against some really tough competition, so fingers crossed.
It was also our great pleasure to help with the Nominations video by announcing the Best Drama category nominees, and you can watch the whole video here:
Congratulations to all the nominees, including fellow VCONers Border Guardians of Ackernon and Standard Action for their multiple nominations. We can’t wait to watch April and Amanda host the Award show live this Sunday (March 11th) on Mingle Media TV.
Josephine Hoy starred as Dr Feyrer in two episodes of ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!’
We posted Behind The Scenes Part 2 video on our YouTube Channel last night which features Josephine Hoy as Dr Feyrer, and also her moonlighting with some robot arms…. And it also stars the unstoppable Becky, who was absolutely amazing as Scrubber. What a trooper!
We are trying to engage more over on YouTube so if you comment and subscribe we’ll be sure to reply and add you back. So please rate, comment and share!
It’s the last day to vote in the Indie Intertube Audience Choice Awards, and polls shut at 12 MIDNIGHT PST, so please remember to vote! We are so thrilled to be in the last 10 – can’t wait to see the results
Not Quite Wonderflonium – Dr Feyrer holds the special vaccine used in Episode 6!
We’ll be releasing another BTS video next week, so stay tuned for that!
The 10 finalists in the Indie Intertube Audience Choice Awards were announced live on air this evening, and ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!’ got through to this final round! That is all down to the tremendous effort of our fans and people on Friendfeed, Twitter and Google+ supporting us – THANK YOU! The voting has been intense for the 56 nominated shows, and the last few hours of voting were apparently furious. Many shows with thousands of votes just missed a spot in the top ten.
Voting for the final round is open now on IndieIntertube.tv. There is a different system for this round. Voting is limited to ONE VOTE PER IP ADDRESS PER DAY. So don’t waste time – get your vote in for today!
The full list of finalists are:
Border Guardians of Ackernon
Troy Butcher vs The World
Bandwagon
Whole Day Down
Mind My Brains, Darling
Hot Mess
Adventures of Super 7
Girl Parts
Devanity
Haywire
To everyone that voted for us – THANK YOU! It is fantastic to think that you care enough about our show to get us this far and we really appreciate it. We are up against some amazing shows and it will be exciting to see who wins. The winners will be announced live at the Indie Intertube Awards – more details soon!
Last year the 2010 Indie Intertube Awards were the only award show I watched all the way through, and I loved it. Unfortunately we didn’t have and episodes of ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!‘ released so we weren’t eligible for an award, but we loved the show! The 2011 Indie Intertube Awards are now underway, and you have a couple of days left to get your nomination in for the Audience Choice Award. You can nominate as many webseries as you want, and I’m sure you can think of at least one* or two deserving shows…
All the details are on indieintetube.tv and the rules are really simple. So what are you waiting for?
April, Amanda, Angela, Paul and Laura in Victoria, BC, after our in-studio appearance on the Indie Intertube Podcast
Next week Amanda and April celebrate their 100th Indie Intertube Podcast on Blogtalk Radio. Congratulations to both of them for delivering so many high-quality, informative and downright fun shows – a huge achievement! Going over to Victoria for your show was certainly a highlight of 2011
If you were to nominate a certain Rom-Zom-Britcom then you might want to consider adding the fact you really liked the soundtrack by Megan Lynch, or the animation by Efehan Elbi, or the artwork by Jeremy Hodges, or the guest stars Josephine Hoy and Alan Douglas. You know, as a thought
We have been talking about the IAWTV Awards for a while now, about why we decided to nominate ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!’ and why we support the Awards and the community endeavour. We feel that not being nominated in categories that had 150+ entries is no shame and we are proud to do our bit to help promote the Awards. And that’s where we could use a little help.
Why do we do what we do?
The IAWTV is asking creators to produce 30 second videos where they talk about why they do what they do to help promote the event. That’s a great idea even though trying to distill the myriad of reason into a 30 sec video is a challenge. They are also looking for FANS of shows to produce 30 second videos to say why they WATCH the shows they watch, and there are prizes available. This gives us (you, me and everyone else) a double opportunity. We are going to do a video about why we create and we would love to put you in it! We would also LOVE you to create a video saying why you watch us
So, to clarify, this is what you can do:
Create a 2-5 second clip of yourself saying hi, waving or doing something that we can include in our video. Or a picture will do if you don’t want to do a video. Send them to higletfilms@gmail.com and please put ‘IAWTV promo’ in the subject line (if you use the link it should do it automatically for you). Because, to paraphrase Michael Champagne from ‘Pretty’, “We’re doing it for YOU!”
And/or
Make your own 30 second video about why you watch MMBD* and upload it to your YouTube channel and follow the guidelines on the IAWTV site. There are prizes to be won!
* To be honest, we’d love you to make a video talking about any of the webseries you watch, not just ours, so don’t feel obligated to mention our show. Let us know you did one and we’ll watch and comment on it anyway
*This is the final deadline. Access to the website will be disabled at 11:59 p.m. (PST) October 31, 2011.
**Only active IAWTV members in good standing can vote for the IAWTV Awards. Contactmembership@iawtv.org with any Membership questions. Only Active Members who joined the IAWTV on or before October 31, 2011 shall be allowed to vote on the IAWTV Awards. There shall be no exceptions.”
HigletFilms, represent!
After some debate about whether to enter, we decided we definitely would submit “Mind My Brains, Darling!” to the awards, and the post we did about it generated a lot of great discussion. We would have LOVED to include Megan Lynch’s album ‘Songs The Brothers Warner Taught Me‘ in the ‘Best Original Music’ category, but because the album was not written for the show we couldn’t. Here are the categories we chose along with the information:
Best Comedy Series: Episodic British romantic zombie comedy period piece set in the 1970’s. Filmed in a brand new experimental style called BodyLine where no faces are shown. Funded by crowd sourcing. With it’s own soundtrack. Packed full of nods to geek culture and more.
Best Writing (Comedy): Paul Higgins, Mary Higgins
Ep 2: How’s Your Father. The whole series is a tribute to the heritage and style of traditional British farce. In this episode we have vicars, housewives, retired colonels, tea, cucumber sandwiches and slapstick comedy. All innocently delivered in 6 minutes.
Best Directing (Comedy): Paul Higgins, Mary Higgins Season finale: Gone With The Wind. The final two thirds of the episode is essentially a silent movie. The action and characters’ interaction takes place with no dialogue at all. Nods to Star Wars, Dr Who, Buffy, Le Petomane.
Best Design (Art Direction/Production): Paul Higgins, Mary Higgins
Episode 4: Ai! Ai! Ai! Robot! Completely recreates the 1970’s era of British comedy and sci fi. Specially built set mimicking a 1970’s British bedroom, entire living and dining room and police station. Plus – a working robot!
Best Supplemental Content:http://mindmybrains.com
Accompanying website expands the universe in which ‘Mind My Brains, Darling!’ is set. Contains biographies of characters plus interviews with cast, crew and creators. Competition winners are actually featured in every episode. Behind the scenes posts about all aspects of production and beyond including the successful fundraising on IndieGoGo for Season 1.
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Mar 31, 2012 
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Alan Douglas, Josephine Hoy, video
