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PROVO — A clean, comedic Web series created by a Utah County couple won the Best Series award at the first Workman Productions Online Awards Film Festival earlier this month.
“The Socialist,” an 11-episode Web series available on YouTube, was one of more than one hundred projects to enter the film festival, which occurred Jan. 17 as a way to kick off the Sundance Film Festival by sharing a variety of local talent, according to Warren Workman with Workman Productions.
The series follows recent college graduate Laurie Timple, who knows nothing about technology or social media, yet finds herself landing a job at a social media marketing company, according to the series’ writer and lead actress Olivia Ostler.
“I’ve always been interested in the world we have created over the past five or six years in social media and how it’s become all-consuming,” said Olivia Ostler, who won Best Actress at the festival. “I thought it would be really fun to have a character who didn’t know it at all.”
Olivia Ostler, who graduated from the University of Utah in the Actor Training Program, came up with the idea for “The Socialist,” and her husband, Skyler, who recently finished working on “The Giver” as part of the camera and electrical department, directed the series.
Another local couple, Josh and Kiya Hall, helped write and produce the series.
“I started writing it and my husband was like ‘Let’s just do it,’ so we held casting and found some people through networking to work as crew,” Olivia Ostler said. “(We) ending up doing a kickstarter and raising some money to finish off the season and it’s kind of just snowballed from there.”
I've always been interested in the world we have created over the past five or six years in social media and how it's become all-consuming.
–Olivia Ostler
Each episode of “The Socialist” was filmed in Salt Lake or Utah County and is three to eight minutes long. The first season started Nov. 11 and concluded Tuesday.
The second season will hopefully premiere in the summer, and it will feature several YouTube-famous Utahns, Olivia Ostler said.
“It’s a clean comedy,” Olivia Ostler said. “People always say ‘family friendly’ but I think it’s people friendly and it’s work friendly. You’re not going to have to turn it off if an F-bomb goes off or something.”
Working as a married couple on the project has been fun and exhausting, Olivia Ostler said.
“There’s so much that goes into filming,” Olivia Ostler said. “I am a stay-at-home mom, I have a 2 year old, but being a mom and working on ‘The Socialist’ has become my full-time job.”
Soon, the Ostler’s plan to combine their Web series into one cohesive, hour-long video.
