Kickstart Your Weekend: 'Texting With Gosling'

Ever agonized about a text from someone you know? How about a stranger? Now what if that stranger is one of the most famous actors on the planet? That's the spark behind a new Austin-set web series, about parsing an unexpected message from everyone's favorite baby goose (warning: Contents may not contain actual Ryan Gosling. In fact, they definitely don't.)

Texting With Gosling is the collaborative creation of four women in their first year at UT Austin's M.F.A. in Screenwriting course: Jessica Chou, Donna Hull, Rachel Kempf, and Chelsea Mahoney. Here's the basic skinny on the script:

When a twentysomething gets a text from Ryan Gosling, she and her three housemates try and navigate the world of high stakes texting.

How much time did you spend last week trying to decipher the "hey ;)" sent by some rando you met at 2am on Sixth Street? How long did you spend debating whether "hey" or "heyy" is a more appropriately casual reply?

What if the stakes had been higher? What if he wasn’t a rando, but a dreamy movie star who spouts sensitive memes and routinely saves women from hit-and-run accidents?

Much like another recent Kickstart Your Weekend pick, The Big Spoon (which made its target with $44 to spare) this is a project with an all-female writing staff, all-female cast and directors, and a majority female crew.

With 23 days to go, they're half way to their low end budget of $4,000 for this planned 10 episode series. That will cover the basics of production (equipment, costumes, props, sound and production design, and food.) But if they reach their stretch goal of $6,000, the rest will go on paying crew, and getting the show into festivals.

You can find out more about the project, including incentives and how to back it, at their Kickstarter page.

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Kickstart Your Weekend is a series intended to showcase Texas film and tech projects that are crowdfunding their way to a goal, be it distribution, a prototype, or production costs. If you have a project that we should know about, email us at filmflam@austinchronicle.com.