About Burning Brigid

A few weeks ago I wrote about representation and fiction, and last week I recalled my experiences casting a web-series pilot gender-blind. Both of those posts touch upon the same issues that I have with a lot of entertainment media: women, minorities, and LGBT characters are not given a fair representation.

For years this has been due to economic misconceptions held by the business interests that control creative production. The producers, the publishers, the old predominantly-white men in boardrooms perpetuated the myth that the vast majority of paying audiences weren’t interested in well-written women or protagonists of color.

That’s been changing, though, slowly but surely. The internet and social media have given a powerful voice to the previously disenfranchized, and as they make their opinions known, it’s been harder and harder to ignore the simple truths that these markets are hungry for diversity in the media they consume.

Hence, Burning Brigid

For almost two years actor Kat O’Connor and I have been shopping our Sleep Study pilot around to different production companies, trying to find a new home for the series to get it produced, without much luck. We’d get offers from companies willing to make it if we financed it, but nobody wanted to take it on as an in-house project.

So we decided to do it ourselves. I took some classes in production, and we’re going to form our own production company.

But we just don’t want to make films. We want to make the world a better place. Here’s our mission statement:

We seek to contribute to a cultural shift through narratives that normalize stories about the traditionally marginalized: women, minority, and LGBT characters presented as people rather than genres.

That last is important. I don’t want to make “Black film” or “LGBT movies” or “Chick Flicks”, I want to make movies that include people of diverse race, gender, and sexual orientation and identity without making a big deal out of it. Characters who happen to be gay or Asian or transsexual without making them stereotypes, or without those identities being the movie’s crux.

I want my characters to represent the world’s natural diversity, because that’s the nature of the world, and the nature of the characters.

Why? Because it’s honest, and it’s real, and it’s the world we live in.

Back To Sleep Study

Our first project is going to be the first season of Sleep Study. It’s already written, so the script break-down went quickly, and we’re looking at six days of shooting. We’re in talks with different industry professionals and entertainment lawyers so we can finalize it, but after that we’ll do some crowdsourced fundraising.

We have a few more ideas in development after that. If you’re a fan of my fiction, you know what sort of stories I like to tell.

If you’re interested in following Burning Brigid and want to be kept up to date with what we’re doing, you can check out our Facebook page and give us a Like, or subscribe to our mailing list. I recommend both; Facebook isn’t so great about showing everyone a page’s content, but it’s a public way to show your support.

Sign up for Michael Coorlim's mailing list for advanced notification of new releases, or go check out some of his free fiction while it's there for the taking.

The post About Burning Brigid appeared first on Michael Coorlim.