The Adventures of Thomas Brin began as a 3-minute experiment between friends that won an award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a 2005 DVinfo.net contest. When the next contest was announced, children’s author, naturalist, and entrepreneur Jeff Sayre of Sayre Media and the rest of the Thomas Brin team decided to make a second installment of their sci-fi serial and continue the series over time. This was because of the show’s large fanbase, which was sizeable and vocal even in its early days. While previous ventures like Sayre’s show Ahem!TV fell to the wayside, Thomas Brin maintained Sayre’s interest because it allowed him and his team to improve their craft by learning about green screens, soundstages, cinematography, fictional screenwriting, and software completely different from Sayre Media’s previous projects.
ince the series began as a one-off, 3-minute competition piece, the first episode contains such a surplus of amateur special effects that you might mistake it for being intentionally campy. Shot mostly on green screen, the show follows Thomas Brin as he initiates a mission to destroy “The Biotics” (humans) and ends with a mysterious injection. But the second episode answers the pilot’s cliffhangers and takes the plot on a new course: Brin is actually one of the Biotics he was trying to kill, having been brainwashed into thinking he was a machine.
