The transitions of these scenes are elaborate and elevate the story. Boland and Osberns first episodic project Red Bird was distributed by Amazon and was nominated for four Daytime Emmys. Boland has worked on many other projects as a production designer and art director and has created many shorts, which have screened in many festivals, winning awards such as Best of Fest and Audience award. Osbern is a writer, director and Emmy award winning cinematographer. We asked creators Misti Boland and Jeremy Osbern a few questions about their series:

Misti Boland © Osbern Films, Jeremy Osbern © Osbern Film

Seriale: First of all – what is the meaning behind the name of the series?

Jeremy Osbern: Each episode focuses on a different character and each episode takes place in that split second in which they’re making a decision that will change their lives from that point on. So, each episode examines all the points in time that led them to that decision, so the Square Root is sort of a reference to going down to the basic start of what led that chain of events to happen.

Seriale: How did you come up with the concept of the series? Was it the actual story, the characters and their lives that headed the production or the concept of making an artful series with the special jumps and transitions?

Misti Boland: I think we definitely had a story idea to start with but then we also really wanted to experiment – this is our second time experimenting with short episodic writing. So then as we were writing, Jeremy had a lot of strong visuals while doing so. It kind of all melted together simultaneously.

Seriale: What was the most challenging thing you came across while making and filming this series?

Jeremy Osbern: One of the most unique challenges was when filming in Kansas. While we were filming a tornado came through a huge swath of the area where we were filming and the tornado actually past by the house we were filming in, just three quarters of a mile away. But luckily, we were planning on filming in the basement in a tiny enclosed space anyway… So, we just went down there and kept filming! But our actress was from Los Angeles and had never experienced a tornado before in her life. Sirens were going off; clouds were turning dark above us… She was a little freaked out, but she kept filming anyway and we were in the safest place we could be in that area! But one of the crazy things: the tornado actually destroyed the location we were going to use the next day. So thankfully no one was hurt, but we had to scramble to come up with a new location for the next day. That was definitely a unique challenge that I haven’t faced before!

Seriale: So is that what you’re most proud of or is there another aspect?

Misti Boland: For this project I think that’s one of the things we’re most proud of, because we had a set that overlooked a large portion of land. So to find such a specific location on that short notice was really hard to do – but we did it. There were also just a lot of challenges where we crammed a lot into a tiny amount of time with a really small crew so I think the thing we’re most proud of is that we were able to pull it off with a small crew, a small amount of money and a limited amount of time.

Seriale: Now about the compositions of the scenes. How did you go about planning the specific scenes and also the transitions? Did you draw it out or put it in the screenplay?

Jeremy Osbern: Definitely all the transitions were written in the script. That was from the page; planning that out. In the script we tried to be as visual as possible about how things should look and how one scene should flow to the next. So obviously the script was our blueprint and then for complicated things we’d draw it out on crappy storyboards (laughs) so we could communicate it to the crew, aside from the script.

Still The Square Root, Image courtesy of Osbern Films

Seriale: About the cast – have you worked with them before?

Misti Boland: The lead actress Alexandra Goodman and Ian Stark – we have worked with them before. We did another episodic web series starring them. So we wanted to work with them again because they’re always a lot of fun and then we did work with a lot of local Kansas city based actors. And it was the first time that we worked with our son! He played the young boy. He was in an animated project we did, but this was a first for live action. He told us that he wanted to be in another project… We could have cast someone from wherever and brought in a child to play that role but he really wanted to do it and we already had a great rapport with our son, so we were able to do that. And then we ended up bringing in three actors from Los Angeles. Two of them were originally from this area and are now out in Los Angeles.

Seriale: Could you tell us more about the artful transitions and compositions of the scenes? Where did that creativity come from and how did you come up with the specific ideas?

Jeremy Osbern: I think we’re both film fans and also fans of art in general, so we draw a lot of inspiration from art. We’ve always admired surrealism and trying to show one thing that maybe means something else, so it becomes open to the viewers imagination. It can open doors, as oppose to more straightforward scenes – maybe they wouldn’t think about it as much later. It was definitely trying to find visuals that represented what was going through that character’s mind at the time while throwing a little surrealism into it. And I think the movement of all the episodes moves beautifully because Jeremy as a cinematographer sees camera work as dance so there’s a lot of beautiful movement. So when you tie all of those elements together that’s kind of what makes up the end product.

Seriale: Are there already any plans or ideas for a new series?

Jeremy Osbern: Yeah, we have ideas for additional series that we could do, and we have scripts to further this story. So we’ll just see… Once we’re able to go into production again we’ll see where we can go from here.

Interview by Natalie Purdak

The Square Root (2019)
Country: USA
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 4 x 4 min
Director: Misti Boland, Jeremy Osbern
Writer: Misti Boland, Jeremy Osbern
Producer: Chris Blunk, Patty Ann Dillon
Cast: Alexandra Goodman, Ian Stark, Joseph Lee Anderson