Haphead

Amazing how blasé we have become. If a film doesn't have the look and feel of a hundred million dollar movie we rate it low. In fact, this series should be rated as the low budget, high ambition film it is.

Let's start with the bad: some actors are not really all there and the production values are low. However, the story shows a dystopian future where people work in a more capitalist environment (wage slaves) but enjoy the benefits of technology like personal drones, instant food microwave heaters, screenless phones that transmit images directly into your eyes and - the main focus of the show - cables that can make you feel virtual reality and connect into your muscle memory, allowing you to learn new skills. Not "I know Kung-fu" style, but through accelerating learning in virtual environments. Add to this pervasive drone surveillance by insurance companies, young people who get amazing physical skills from the "hap" interface, bounty hunters, biohacking and you get an interesting universe, described just through story, acting and a 3D rabbit game.

I didn't expect much, so probably that is why I was impressed, but at the same time I can appreciate the effect of a film relative to the budget and I liked Haphead and I will be waiting for the second season.

I backed this project on Kickstarter and have to say, I think it was money well spent.

The story is, without spoilers, about a young woman trying to find herself, in the process who turns to a game world enabled by Haptic technology (the users of which are known as Hapheads (per the title) to escape the dull monotonous life that she finds herself trapped in. (if only it was that easy....) But, then, her life becomes far too much like one of the games she had tried to escape into... But, in the real world, you can't simply log off.

I liked this production. It's been noted that this is 'season 1' of the web series, and if that's the case, I'm definitely looking forward to Season 2. As an amateur writer myself, I like seeing these kind of independent projects move forward.

Downsides: As this was an extremely shoe-string budget, the online game perspective could definitely have been done better. Although the texturing seemed good on the 'digital avatars', I found the overall movement of the characters in the game engine the production team used for their 'online game world FX' to be fairly rudimentary. Yet, they did a pretty darn good job with the little flying drone (the design seemed fairly basic, but honestly, I could see it being the kind of thing that i-robot might try to use to make personal service drones to be 'non-threatening'). Makeup team did a good job on post-fight makeup and everything else seemed very believable.

Hapheads is about a young woman, working in a haptic cable factory situated in a special economic zone. Even tough the cables aren't released yet she manages to steal one, eventually entangling her story the hapheads and a bio-hacker...

Rating and reviewing this for what it is, a low-budget web series, this is amazing. It is incredibly well shot given the budget, the environments are well-chosen and the story is interesting and has an originality you don't find often The only downside is that even tough the story itself is great, the storytelling isn't. Sometimes things just don't come over very realistically.

In the end it is not perfect, but surely worth watching!