Mina Murray’s Journal: James Moran unveils Dracula web series
David Farnor | On 28, Jul 2016
Update: Episode 1 premieres on Thursday 29th September. Here it is:
Writer-director James Moran is bringing Dracula to the web this September in a brand new series based on Bram Stoker’s classic novel.
Mina Murray’s Journal will tell the spine-tingling tale through vlogs, with multiplatform strands and in-character, interactive social media accounts filling out the story as it unfolds.
In a departure from the novel, the story is driven by Mina, a young woman just discovering that real life, work, and bills are a lot scarier than she expected. But all that pales in comparison when she comes across an ancient evil, which will put her and everyone she loves in danger.
Mina is 23, funny, warm, ambitious, but stuck in a boring job that doesn’t challenge her, and not particularly enjoying her current relationship either. Openly and proudly bisexual, she’s happy in her own skin, but has no idea that her housemate Lucy is secretly in love with her. Fiercely loyal, Mina would go through hell to help her friends and family and she’s about to. Because she’s on a collision course with an ancient vampire.
The series stars up and coming standup comedian Rosie Holt as Mina Murray, Kate Soulsby as Lucy West, Scottish YouTuber Liam Dryden as John Harker and Eddsworld series regular Matt Hargreaves as Jack Seward.
Rosie Holt burst onto the comedy scene when she won So You Think You Write Funny: The Sitcom Trials with her hapless alter ego, Hayley. She went on to write and star in Fall Girl at the prestigious comedy venue The Gilded Balloon, has since moved into stand-up and written for The Huffington Post and Alain De Botton’s School of Life.
Soulsby trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and has since enjoyed success as an actor, writer and stand-up comedian. Dryden, a Scottish internet personality, is best known as a part of the band Chameleon Circuit, whose music is entirely inspired by BBC television series Doctor Who, as Kairan “Kai” Fisher in sci-fi webseries “Chronicles of Syntax, and as a founding organiser of Summer in the City, the UK’s largest YouTube community event.
Moran and producer Elisar Cabrera announced today the completion of principal photography on Season 1 of the web series, promising “plenty of self-referential laughs” as well as scary moments. Season 1 will arrive in September, with 15 episodes, including a live-stream and a finale.
“Because this is a modernised, vlog adaptation, and fans of writer-director James Moran will know how he likes to invert genre conventions, you may *think* you know the story but we’ve got plenty of surprises along the way,” teases Cabrera. “This is the first British produced V-Lit (Vlog Literary) series so I am immensely proud that we are adapting such an iconic British novel.”
Cabrera, of London-based Capital City Entertainment, has produced feature films, television and digital series. His web series, 3some, won two Indie Series Awards in 2014 and his latest feature film, Ibiza Undead, is set to have its world premiere at FrightFest 2016. One of the best known faces in the UK independent web series community, Elisar also founded the Raindance Web Fest, the UK’s first web series festival, and produces VidfestUK, as part of the MCM London Comic Con.
Moran, meanwhile, will already be familiar to many fans of the horror and fantasy genre through his writing on movies Severance, Cockneys vs Zombies and Tower Block, as well as on TV’s Doctor Who and Torchwood. His 2009 web series, Girl Number 9, was the first British series to make it into the Streamy Awards with five nominations in 2010.
Joining them on the creative team is Emmy and Streamy winning Transmedia Producer, Alexandra Edwards, who previously has worked on the transmedia of the multi award-winning web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as well as Welcome to Sanditon and Emma Approved.
James Moran says: “I am extremely excited to be working with the super-talented Alexandra Edwards whose work I have admired so much on Lizzie Bennet and Emma Approved. To be able to tell a story across multi-platforms and draw in a new audience to a classic story like Dracula through both YouTube and social media is a wonderful challenge. The original novel was written in epistolary format, so technically it was already one of the first fictional blogs!”
Moranic Productions today released the first teaser trailer for the series exclusively on the Mina Murray’s Journal YouTube channel. Watch it here:
