The Lab Web Series Serves Up Fun With Time Travel, Needs Kickstarter Support
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Time travel is a tricky beast. You have to decide how the “rules” of your story work: can you travel forward in time, back, or both? Can you change past events or are they somehow locked in place, no matter how hard you try? If you can change the past, does it result in a new tangent universe, like in Back to the Future 2, for instance? Even if you specify your rules and stick to them, you’re probably still going to end up with a paradox or two — it just goes with the territory. But still, the notion of changing history, of fixing things that went wrong, is viscerally intriguing. The folks behind the Kickstarter project The Lab want to serve up their take on the subject, but they need some help and they’ve only got 14 hours left to meet their funding goal.
Here’s the first completed episode for your amusement, then we’ll talk more below.
The Lab is a planned web series about two scientists and a student who discover a plant in the rain forest that allows you to travel back in time. Already that’s an interesting twist — usually with this sort of thing you’re going to need an actual time machine, or a time portal, or at least a special hot tub. I honestly can’t recall a time a plant has served as the MacGuffin in a time travel story, so already I have to give them props for thinking outside the box.
I think the first episode of The Lab is a solid foundation on which to build. The actors are okay, director Hector Jimenez has a nice eye for visual storytelling, and the ep does a great job tackling a well-worn but still necessary time travel cliché: the believer having to convince the skeptics that yes, they really can travel in time.
I’m definitely interested in seeing more of The Lab, and if you are too you can donate to support the series on their Kickstarter page. Their goal is to hit $6,000 and they’re currently at $2,869 as of this writing. Their funding deadline is 13 hours from now, so they’ve got a ways to go, but it’s still feasible they could make it if they can win more people over…maybe some GFR people!
As with all Kickstarter projects, your donations will earn you rewards of varying types. Ten bucks will let you download every “director’s cut” of the episodes before the finished versions post to YouTube. Twenty-five dollars will get you a DVD copy of the series once it’s done, complete with bonus features. And if you’ve got $3,000 to drop, you’ll get an executive producer credit (and single-handedly solve their current funding problem, so they may kiss you full on the mouth).
What do you think of The Lab? Do you want to see more? Sound off in the comments below!
