It began when Geoffrey Boothby and Cullen Thomas, two aspiring filmmakers, decided create a steampunk version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Then end result is a nine-part Web Video Series later compiled into a feature-length movie and sold on the same website it originally aired on.
Loosely based off the Shakespeare story, it takes place in an underground city filled with a mysterious substance called wormy or wormtooth gas. If inhaled, the gas takes all your memories away. The characters call this getting nixed, and treat it as a regular occurrence. So many people get nixed, it appears that no one remembers how long they have lived in the city or how to get back to the surface. The city, under the leadership of Baron O'Brien continues running, but only barely. There is tension between the official leadership of the Baron and the Union (membership mandatory) as well as the followers of the Graffiti Artist, a revolutionary who leaves messages of hope and finding the surface on the walls.
This series provides examples of:
- Easy Amnesia: The title might as well be Easy Amnesia: The Series. The titular wormtooth gas will "nix" anyone who breathes it in, and pockets of it are everywhere in the underground city.
- Evil Overlord: Baron O'Brien is set up to look like one, but it's later subverted: he's just trying to hold the dying city together. Not that he's a nice guy, but he's far from evil. This makes since, since he was based on the character of Oberon from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- In Medias Res: The story opens with Sam in the middle of a mission of some sort, but he's just been nixed and has no more idea of what's going on than the audience does.
- Large Ham: Bottom hams it up in every scene. This is understandable since he is based on the character of the same name from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Minimalism: It was filmed on a shoestring college student budget, and all the sets are warehouses located in the city the writer lives in. The actors are all local drama students.
- The Reveal: What else does wormtooth gas, an invisible odorless gas that causes permanent Easy Amnesia and has caused numerous problems for the protagonists, do? It causes people to live forever in small doses. The entire population of the City moved down to the subterranean world in order to gain immortality, but after an unknown but presumably very long period of time everyone had been "nixed" so often that no one remembers this fact, nor the way back to the surface.
