The Portal (film)
| The Portal | |
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Penikett on the set of The Portal
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| Directed by | Jonathan Williams |
| Produced by | Andrew Nicholas McCann Smith, Laura Perlmutter |
| Written by | Jonathan Williams |
| Starring |
Tahmoh Penikett Erin Karpluk |
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Production
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First Love Films
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Release date
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Running time
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11 minutes |
| Language | English |
The Portal is a Canadian sci-fi, fantasy, comedy short film directed and written by Jonathan Williams. The short film stars Tahmoh Penikett and Erin Karpluk. The short film has been adapted into an ongoing web series titled Riftworld Chronicles (see below), which has won numerous awards.
A dimension-traveling wizard gets stuck in 21st century Toronto because cell phone radiation interferes with his magic. With his home world on the brink of war, he seeks help from Kim, a travel agent who he mistakes for a great sorceress. Without his powers to prove his identity, she has trouble taking him seriously, but finally agrees to reveal the secrets of our world in exchange for a lunch date.
The Portal is a short film, but will be turned into a web series which will be shot in the fall of 2014. On June 20, 2014 the Independent Production Fund announced that they would fund The Portal along with 16 other digital drama series.
The webseries that has been spun off the short is titled Riftworld Chronicles. As of July 2015, 8 episodes of circa 5–10 minutes each have been published, all of which were uploaded to the YouTube channel CBC Punchline owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (which is where the official website to both the short and the series links to for each new episode), on 13 July 2015. New episodes will be produced based upon number of clicks on YouTube and/or on the official website.
There are a few notable differences between the short film and the series, the latter of which does not simply take off from where the short film ends. Rather, both are different takes on the same premise. The short covers circa 10 minutes more or less in real time, at the end of which Kim decides to follow Alar to his homeworld for a timespan that in our world appears as just her lunchtime, but when she returns as a learned sorceress from Alar's world, she has obviously lived there for a number of years and has a child circa aged 10 to whom she shows her homeworld. In the series, however, as of episode 8, she has never left our world and, while some intimate tension has occurred between them, still thinks of Alar as a harmless lunatic.
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