Weekend Web Series: “I Ship It”

When your love life sucks, sometimes the only thing to do is rock it out with some catchy musical numbers and try not to hook up with your roommate.

After douchey musician Chris dumps his girlfriend Ella (Helen Highfield), an adorkable writer-turned-office-drone, she vows to get back at him by forming her own band and taking him down with the power of song, which is how all bad relationships should end, really. She teams up with her roommate/best friend Tim (Riley Neldam) and two summer interns, Denver (Jacqui Calloway) and Sasha (Yasmine Al-Bustami), and pushes them all to master the world of Nerd Rock before the upcoming Battle of the Bands. But her journey toward rediscovering her creative spark keeps getting derailed by her obsession with getting revenge, and the romantic feelings that keep inconveniently popping up between herself and Tim, and Denver and Sasha.

Filmmaker and director Yulin Kuang adapted the series for New Form Digital and CW Seed from her original short film of the same name, starring Mary Kate Wiles, Sean Persaud and Joey Richter, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015.

The series drops the video blogging angle and the “Scott Pilgrim” quirkiness of the film for a more classic romantic comedy style, with a full soundtrack of nerd rock songs by Kirstyn Hippe and Brian Grider. A new team of singing, dancing actors makes up the main cast (I was delighted to recognize Helen Highfield from a local parody production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”), but web series fans will notice fun cameo appearances from a bunch of our favorites, including Joey Richter, Mitchell Davis, Maxwell Glick, Daniel Vincent Gordh, Dayenne Hutton and more.

Episodes and web extras are streaming for free on the CW Seed website.