September 27th, 2018

I was terrified to play The PsyBorgs at GenreBlast. Braden, Nick and I descended on the festival as a trio of hot shots ready to take on the world. But then, as the actual moment drew closer, I kinda lost it. I was freaking out about all the possible technical difficulties that were definitely going to happen, and how I was going to flub the Q&A afterwards, and how the audience was definitely going to hate the movie. But, as luck would have it, there were no technical difficulties, the Q&A went fine, and most importantly, the audience liked it. Some people even loved it.

The night we received the invitation to play at GenreBlast was a total cloud 9 moment for me. All of the stress and struggle and sleepless nights and relationship stress and anxiety about the project washed away the second Braden got the email from Nathan asking for our World Premiere. And how could we say no? It’s a great festival run by some cool people at the Alamo frickin Drafthouse. We went the entire time and met some cool people and saw some great movies and learned first-hand that people like this thing we made. Our very own John Carbon himself, Pat MacEachern, was even awarded Best Hero, and our cast won Best Ensemble. It was a serious honour.

10 days later we played in the Web and New Media Block at FilmQuest in Provo, Utah. Once again, the audience liked the episode we showed. FilmQuest is another dangerously cool festival, taking place at a wicked music venue, Velour. Jonathan runs a tight ship, and has a real way of making filmmakers feel special, even us nobodies from Canada. We were nominated for best web series, but that award went to Michael Krehan for his incredible series, Pushing Skills. If you ever have the opportunity to check it out, you really should. It was terrific. Congrats on your win, Mike!

On behalf of my team and I, I’d like to thank Nathan Ludwig and the team at GenreBlast and Jonathan Martin and the team at FilmQuest for taking a chance on The PsyBorgs. After all the hard work and blood, sweat and tears that went into producing the show, it was unbelievably cathartic to show it to a real audience and hear first-hand that the audience loved it. If our luck continues, we’ll be playing some more festivals over the next couple of months, and then we’ll unleash this beast on the world sometime in the spring. I can’t wait for you all to see it.

Dave Hiatt
Director