“The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes,” directed by Nancy Andrews won Breakthrough Series – Short Form at the IFP Gotham Awards 2017.
Can you tell us a little bit about your show?
Michole Briana White: So it’s about a scientist who believes she can change the world by attaching insects or animals to her person and something goes terribly wrong.
What inspired the series?
Nancy Andrews: Yeah, it’s a web series. It’s an eight part web series that was based on a feature film which is based on a short film. So, it’s been a long project.
What inspired you to tackle this?
Nancy Andrews: I wanted to reach a bigger audience. I was making experimental films and that has a limited audience so we wanted to just try to reach out to other people then just the people that would go to art museums.
Anything particular about science that interests you as a filmmaker?
Nancy Andrews: One of the main ideas is sort of a Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde idea or Frankenstein idea which is that people can’t always predict what science is going to effect and they may have very good intentions but those can go wrong.
What’s next for each of you?
Michole Briana White: I just worked on an HBO show called Room 104 and also The Quad for BET and independent film as well.
Nancy Andrews: Michole and I are writing a follow up. Season two for The Strange Eyes.
Where can people see it?
Michole Briana White: https://thestrangeeyesofdrmyes.com/about/
And tell us a little bit about your vision for the production design.
Drew Colbert: My vision was to follow Nancy very closely but we’ve been working together for a number of years so I had a sense of her sensibility in the film and things were a little quirky, a little off and color played a huge role. We went from very subdued colors to the point when Michole, as Doctor Myes makes the transition into her super self as an insect animal highly sensitized creature to very exaggerated color and that played out in the costumes and the sets and all of that. It was a challenge, we used very local resources for the set so we kind of had to do a lot of makeovers in very mundane settings. It was cool.
The 2017 IFP Gotham Awards was presented by Fiji Water, The New York Times, Landmark Vineyards and Lindt Chocolate at Cipriani Wall Street on Monday evening.