In 2025, video games are so immersive that teenagers learn lethal skills just by playing. Haphead is the story of a girl who’s literally empowered by gaming.
Created by Jim Munroe, Haphead’s first season is a six episode look into Maxine’s fight as her favourite rabbit-ninja game gets a whole lot more punishing, beating lethal skills into her muscle memory.
She needs to level up quick as there are other hapheads out there, but while some of them are kindreds, one of them brings death.
What (and/or who) inspired your series?
Our writer and creator, Jim Munroe, is super-involved in the independent game-making community in Toronto, and started prognosticating about what games would be like when his daughter would be a teenager in 2025. He wrote a novella about it, which the production team adored, and we started talking about making it into a film or web series.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome making this series?
Why shoot in a bus or a car when you can rent a train. We tend to dream big when it comes to the size of the production, and typically overdo it when it comes to imagining the number of cast, locations and visual effects, so we really had to hustle to make it all happen.
How do you finance your series?
Our series was primarily funded through the Canadian IPF – the Independent Production Fund, which funds about a dozen web series a year, plus a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Please tell us a quirky and/or interesting fact about yourself or team that’s unrelated to your web series?
Our team made a movie together in 2012 called Ghosts With Shit Jobs for just over $4000. It was a lot of fun, and took us around the world on various screenings, from Beijing to London to Poland.
How did you come up with the kinds of technologies that humans will be living and interacting with in 10 years time that we see in the series?
The technologies started with the novel, and grew through a series of community-building workshops where we’d get the primary creatives together to talk shop and really dream about what technology will look like in a decade. We love dreaming about the future over beers.
Would you like to see these kinds of technologies exist in the future? Why or why not?
Whether we’d like to see them in the near-future or not, we’re not sure. I suspect they’re just around the corner. Virtual reality is taking a huge leap this year, and haptics probably won’t be far off.
Do you have any tips for creating a successful web series?
Do what you think is going to be a great story, that’s about all you can do.
Describe the ultimate fan of your series?
We had some amazing super-fans that sent our lead actor hand-crafted sculptures and paintings. One of them made a full-on rabbit-ninja sculpture which is awesome.
Haphead on the web:
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