Origin: Beyond the Impact

Just finished watching the first three installments of Origin: Beyond the Impact. From the information to be gathered, it appears this is the first release from Etched Motion Productions and Director Jeff Patton.

Origin: Beyond the Impact (BTI) is a web series and is available to watch on Vimeo. The most recent installment (Episode 3) was released on May 18, 2015, with future episodes available this Fall. Each episode runs 15+ minutes, just enough to whet your appetite. The nature of the series is tagged as sci-fi, but I would also add suspenseful drama in my description. As far as I am concerned it has something for everybody in those categories.

BTI is set in current day Southern California and has its origin (wink) in a space object (alien?) impact in 1962. The first few minutes are the set up for the series, interspersed with some impressive credits, along with music that seems very "Hans Zimmer-ish" in places and "Daft Punk-ish" in other places in the series. We are introduced to a number of characters in the first episode but given no real background other than some kind of secret is being kept (hence the intrigue) and it appears everyone wants to know what that secret is. The plot thickens when a Russian operative is introduced and sent to the U.S. As each episode progresses we are given very tiny glimpses into the characters personalities and what may be at the heart of this big secret. The secret is so secret even elements the U.S. government are kept in the dark. I could go on with my description but then I would be in spoiler territory.

I like the writing and the pace of the episodes, although I wish they were longer and we could have been given more answers. I will say, however, that this is no Lost (don't get me started). They do give just enough in the way of clues to be exciting and to keep me coming back. I don't know how many episodes are planned but they could stretch this out for a while at 15+ minutes a pop.

The acting was solid, although one of the actors made me want to pinch his head off at first, but then I realized it was the way his character was written. It will be interesting to see the actors grow into their characters as the series progresses.

I really like some of the filming and cinematography techniques used for BTI, especially at the beginning for the 1962 sequence where they employed a classic sepia tone to depict that era, and then flowed into what could be referred to as a blue-sepia or maybe a cyanotype sequence; whatever you call it, I loved it for the artistic expression. The color palette for this series is somewhat muted, with hints of deeper color (primarily blue), allowing for scenes that appear underexposed as well as scenes that are extremely overexposed giving an ethereal feel to the series.

All in all I liked Origin: Beyond the Impact web series and can't wait for more because I want to know the secret.

The web series is off to a very slow start. In episode one, there's many slow minutes of rolling credits, with no story development at all. The pseudo-German accent in the trailer and episode one does not intrigue me; It's just hard to understand. I work with real Germans, and they sound like the BBC, except that they say "d" for "th". There's a bunch of unexplained vignettes that don't go anywhere or mean anything. Some are in artistic low-contrast B&W with saturated contrast that might work better if it weren't hosted so badly. The characters are interesting, but we have so little screen time with them that I'm not sure why the producers bothered.

I tried to watch episode 2. After ten minutes, I've seen less than 10 seconds of it, and what I saw is the worst sort of jerky, four- frame-per-second near-video. This is outrageous, because Netflix, YouTube and Hulu Plus all work fine at my site on the same computers and ROKU (yes, I tried to watch it on several systems, including one with wired Ethernet); I don't think it's on my end. In this case, the story, cinema, sound, etc. looks OK (from what I can see in ten seconds!), but the mechanics of delivering it is terrible.

That said, I saw the presentation at Westercon (the Western Regional science-fiction convention), and I was intrigued enough to try to watch it.

You mileage may vary, but it's not worth my time unless it shows up somewhere else.