Web Series ‘Broken Toy’ Looks Promising

There are a lot of independent film makers in the world and most of them never get a chance to have their materials shown to a wide audience. That is until the Internet and YouTube came along and completely changed the rules of the movie game. It used to be that if you were lucky enough to attend an entire film festival, then you could watch one or two short films or low budget films that were very good but no distributor wanted to pick up.

That is not the case anymore because student and indie film makers can just put their stuff up for streaming and downloading for cheap or free and allow viral marketing to take over. I’m not knocking big budget films, but with only a few exceptions many of them are all budget and no substance.

We get a lot of requests here at Screen Rant to help pitch or review smaller projects, but most of them aren’t really a fit for our site or aren’t something we’re interested in covering -- so we reply politely and wish the film maker luck. However, enter Forewarned Films and their web series Broken Toy.  They just released their first episode and while being very low budget, it sure doesn’t look like it. It also piqued our interest enough to let you know about it.

It’s only five minutes long but in that five minutes you get a real sense of what direction the story will or could go. Check it out:

I think this series has the potential to be very interesting and entertaining. They use a simple set, interesting dialog and solid performances to deliver the information required to tell a story without spoon feeding the plot to their audience. I personally find it insulting when directors and writers deem it necessary to throw in the description of a plot as if viewers aren’t smart enough to figure it out themselves.

From this beginning we can’t tell if it’s going to be a horror, sci-fi or action story but we know something violent is going on because of the blood-covered fellow. The only name we are given is that of Sgt. Emerson (David Westberg) but we get the impression that he is very familiar with the young man cooking, covered in blood, talking about conspiracies. What “procedure” is he referring to? It obviously sped up the young man’s metabolism along with his reflexes and coordination.

Forewarned Films is a fledging indie group made up of Matt Clouston (the young man), Letia Miller-Clouston (director), Chris Burgon (cinematography). Matt wrote the script and Brian Luna helped work on the story.  Matt sent me this statement:

“We have ten episodes lined up, each one designed to push us a little more.  Bigger casts, bigger effects, etc.  Which is hard to live up to but I believe it was Winston Churchill who said, ‘Bite off more than you can chew and then chew it’.”

What is Forewarned Films’ motivation behind making this series and what are their expectations?

“We made BROKEN TOY for little to no budget and are expecting no money back.  We’re not trying to sell it or spin it into something huge… our one and only goal right now is to entertain people.”

Consider me entertained. Of course I’m sure another goal is to get their names out there in hopes of scoring a paying project.

The 2^nd episode has already been shot and the finishing touches are being done now with hopes of putting out a new one every 3 to 4 weeks. Episode 3 is lined up to film November 8^th and 9^th. I plan on watching the entire series, unless the story starts to fall off the tracks, but so far that doesn’t seem likely to happen.  Look to Screen Rant every 3 – 4 weeks for new episodes to be posted.

What did you think of Broken Toy? Did you find it worth watching -- and will you watch more episodes?