Where do you find lesbian speed dating, two brothers living together as the odd couple and a kleptomaniac mother-daughter team?
Look no further than Willard Beach, Maine-or, more specifically, WillardBeach.tv.
Gitgo Productions, the creative vehicle of Maine filmmakers Kate Kaminski and Betsy Carson, have launched the premiere of their new ongoing comedic web series, “Willard Beach, The Real Story 2.8.”
The weekly episodes explore the lives of fifteen interconnected characters in small town Maine. The show mixes equal parts soap opera, satire and improv experiment in a condensed, web friendly length of about three minutes apiece.
Some of the topics explored in the series are the search for love, infidelity, work and class issues, sexual orientation, loneliness, and how to cope with it all.
“It’s a revolving cast of characters that reflects, in a lot of ways, all of our experiences of living in this community, which is small,” Kaminski, a film professor at USM says.
“Everyone’s connected. And that’s the type of feeling we’re trying to evoke.”
Kaminski and Carson have been making features together for years. Some of their recent projects have been “Tripp,” a darkly comic surrealist hitchhiker film and 21st Century LP, a short documentary about Portland’s Enterprise Records.
A bout of winter boredom coupled with a strong desire to “get in on the action” of free online programming led to the idea of making something short, challenging and most importantly, funny.
“Our focus is always on wrenching as much funny out of every situation as we can,” Kaminski says.
The premier episode, “Speeding Toward Love,” debuted online last Wednesday. It features two middle-aged women played by Denise Poirier and Toni Fiore at a lesbian speed-dating event. The scene quickly becomes awkward when one woman realizes that the other is married to a man and only there to check out the occasion.
“Willard Beach” features an ensemble cast of fifteen actors from around the Greater Portland community including Brent Askari, Keith Anctil, Braden Biddings, Harris Cooley, Franklin McMahon and Michael Best. Kaminski and Carson drew from a crop of talent they have worked with on previous projects, as well as a number of theater actors who are comfortable in an improvisational setting. The shorts’ loose, genuine dialogue provides for a very naturalistic feel.
Kaminski says they are using the phrase “real story” with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks.
“A lot of people have a clichéd idea about what Maine is,” she says. “The outsider view is that it’s very straight, white, middle class, working class.”
“Willard Beach,” which features characters that are straight and gay, black and white and employed and unemployed, challenges the popular misconception that all Mainers are “boring L.L. Bean” types.
Kaminski says they intend on keeping “Willard Beach” going as long as they can by avoiding embedding hard-lined narratives into the episodes.
“One thing we noticed about most web series is that they’re very engaged in plot. And what that does is make it finite. And we didn’t want to do that,” Kaminski says.
Currently, there are ten episodes in the pipeline and plans to produce another batch in May and June.
Watch “Willard Beach, The Real Story 2.8” at 2point8.tv, willardbeach.tv, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, and everywhere video is playing online.