'Dirk Snowglobe' Promises Indie Film Noir Comedy in High Definition

The Murder of Dirk Snowglobe, a new comedy web series slated to debut in April of 2009, promises a lot of things. As creator Jon Fairhurst explained to Tubefilter, “The story is a comedy set in Borderton, a corrupt noir-esqe city where murders are common.” Dirk Snowglobe is a delusional detective who seems to think he’s actually dead too, and is trying to solve his own murder while his partner Chet Candles (Jeff Drovdahl) leads him along as they “investigate murders as a series of twists and turns lead them to the ridiculous.

Plenty of cheaply made web series (in Fairhurst’s words, “our budget for each episode is the cost of pizza”) tend to have one shortcoming – they look cheap. One of the biggest tell-tale signs that you’re watching a series made for little or no money is that the camera quality is bad, sometimes worse than YouTube quality, the sound is barely audible, and you can tell it was filmed on a street corner with pedestrians staring at the camera quizzically.

It says something about Snowglobe when I’m excited about its production value before it’s even started production. Fairhurst sets the show up to be impressively edited, saying that it will “present the urban decay of our modern world with the feel of black and white… [while] musically we will combine the urban sounds of be-bop and hip hop, along with an orchestral underscore.” Technically, these guys know what they’re talking about when it comes to cameras, as evidenced by the fact that the two latest posts on the Snowglobe blog are about the sensor size

and shutter speed of their new digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Fairhurst also promised some seriously impressive technical details for the show, telling us that it “will be shot at 1080p using 35mm lenses.”

Snowglobe is the latest project from Bellingham, Washington-based Fairhurst and his son Nathan who together make up Poorly Projected Pictures. Their last online project was the long-running Colonel Crush: Films of Action, which dates back to late 2006. For Snowglobe, the pair are hoping to have a trailer out by February, premier the 12 minute pilot at the Seattle International Film Festival, and in April release the first seasons 8 six-minute episodes weekly. If the series is successful, they’ll break to produce the next 8 episodes, and release them weekly again. The new series will most likely either be self-hosted or released through Revver.

All in all, The Murder of Dirk Snowglobe promises to have strong film noir elements and a proper musical accompaniment, while telling a complicated story with a comedy twist on it. And it’s all shot in high definition on a low budget. Fairhurst himself summed it up best- “With so many entertainment options available, we wanted to present something new and different.” After talking to him, I think they just might pull it off. The Snowglobe site is already live, with a number of “clues” already in place for over eager sleuths.