By Jason Apuzzo. A special hat-tip goes today to my LFM colleague Joe Bendel for covering an interesting new web series called Pioneer One that just appeared on Vimeo and YouTube, and is also showing right now at the New York Television Festival. Pioneer One is essentially a crowd-funded webseries that went from concept to finished pilot in three months, on a budget of about $6000.
The premise of Pioneer One is this: a mysterious object falls from the sky, spreading radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, Homeland Security Agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that what they find there involves elements of sci-fi, contemporary anxieties associated with terrorism, and the political history of the Cold War. And while the politics of the series seem a bit murky, based on what I’ve seen thus far it’s safe to say that the series’ creators take a dim view of Soviet communism.
You can read Joe Bendel’s full review of the Pioneer One pilot episode here, and I’ve embedded that full, 30+ minute episode below. If you just have time to watch the series’ brief trailer, you can catch that here.
All summer long here at Libertas we were covering a variety of subjects – sci-fi alien invasions (see here), a return of Cold War/anti-communist themes (Salt, Mao’s Last Dancer, Farewell, etc.), and crowd-funded indie sci-fi projects (Iron Sky, The 3rd Letter, Mercury Men) – all of which categories, interestingly, Pioneer One fits into.
Having watched the full pilot episode, my feeling is that the team behind Pioneer One has a great premise they’re working from – one that only becomes clear by the end of the episode. Writer Josh Bernhard and director Bracey Smith are doing a very nice job, cleverly providing a sense of scale and suspense to the story, even if the pacing of this first episode is perhaps a bit relaxed. I hope this series takes off (it already has, to a great extent – the pilot has been downloaded and streamed over 2 million times) because if it goes where I think it’s going … it should be a great deal of fun. Bravo to the whole team behind Pioneer One.
[UPDATE: Congratulations to the team of Pioneer One for winning the “Best Drama Pilot” award at the New York Television Festival.]
Posted on September 21, 2010 at 4:34pm.
The pilot of this is a lot better than the trailer. The trailer for this looks like it was made for 2 cents and doesn’t portray what’s actually on the show. This is something that is a big issue with indie filmmakers and people who put their stuff on the web. They just don’t know how to promote. I mean, these people have cool poster and promotional art, but the trailer then has no style and looks like it’s from a completely different project.