It’s 2012: Maine has plunged into a post-apocalyptic future. Along with five other states, Maine has been cut off from the rest of the U.S. when Congress passes the “Emergency Energy Conservation Act.” Within several months, what remaining oil the U.S. has left is shuttled to the core states, leaving Mainers lawless, without resources, the Internet or emergency supplies.

But, we’ve still got guns, ancestral knowledge of living off our abundant natural resources and a hell of a lot of self-reliance.

This is the premise of a new Maine-written and Maine-acted web miniseries called Vacationlanders: The Unorganized Territories of Maine, c. 2015-2016. It almost doesn’t even feel like a show, more like something close to the way many people in Maine are already living now. Vacationlanders works this uneasy feeling throughout each episode like some existentialist nightmare world of alienated mankind. Filmmakers Jeff Day and his husband-and-wife partners, Marc and Gina Bartholomew, created this six-part miniseries to be released on the Internet as free webisodes nearly a year ago. Operating with a micro budget, they’re currently up to five episodes and the series has already been nominated for Best Looking Show (cinematography), Best Ensemble Cast and Best Drama in the Second Annual Indie Intertube Awards.

OK, so the story starts out featuring a documentary crew of a couple of guys and one girl from Boston in the year 2015. Using the World War Z and Blair Witch Project journalism style of “finding” lost footage three years later and stitching the mysterious footage back together to tell the story, the series opens with the original documentary crew piling all of their worldly goods into a Suburu and driving up to the “border” of The Unorganized Territories of Maine. (Crazy to think you’d need a passport to get in and out of Maine, but that’s the fun of it.) Once up over the border, the crew intends to learn and document Maine survivalists and why they’ve made the decision to stay and rough it out. These people are known as Vacationlanders.

Well here, it’s best if I let them tell it:

The Vacationlanders are meant to instruct viewers about an alternative lifestyle, each episode covering how-to’s about water, food, electricity, birth, death, health, shelter, transportation, entertainment, self-defense, and common law. But things don’t go as planned in a land where everything is different.

It’s not your typical post-apocalypse story; our characters are not the victims of worldwide collapse due to a virus or an instant climate shift. Instead, it’s an optimistic, promising spin on what the world is facing with the potential for peak oil hysteria. Vacationlanders is about a handful of brave, principled, (or crazy) people who have chosen to live by a different, more sustainable standard, before the lethal hammer comes down, before there is nothing left.

Anyone who has been a fan of The X-Files or Jericho, the TV series about the small town survivalists, will not only appreciate the plot twists and sly humor, but also the familiarity of Maine scenes and people. The more you watch the series, the more you’ll start to realize it becomes a bit of an “Exit Through The Gift Shop” type of documentary. In other words, who is documenting whom? And will the documentary crew be able to keep up with their subjects when they don’t know how to find food, can’t keep themselves warm and can’t figure out how to generate their own electricity? The Vacationlanders (the rag-tag group of Maine survivalists) not only know how to do all of this and more. At this point in the series, the documentary takes on a mirror-within-a-mirror quality. Is this an entertaining web series about a bunch of outlaw Mainers? Or are the viewers of the web series Vactionlanders actually learning from each episode what it really takes to create a hardscrabble, but sustainable small community in the aftermath of a complete societal breakdown?

We turn to the filmmakers themselves to answer more questions:

How did this fictional idea of Vacationlanders come about between the three of you? Was it a late night kitchen table conversation? A long-held dream?

Jeff: Marc, Gina and I collaborated and made a couple of award-winning films for the local and national 48 Hour Film Festivals in 2010 and decided that we worked well together and shared similar tastes. All three of us pounced on the opportunity and challenge of locally creating a web series and began the arduous task of creating a long-lasting story arc roughly based on Star Wars.

Marc: For me, it was the thrill of making short films. I wanted to do something where we kept making them together on a more regular basis than once a year for the short film constests, so a web series made sense. We can make them at our own pace, write whatever story we want, and have instant distribution. We’ve included a lot of nods to the independent filmmakers out there in our show.

Gina: The three of us had been making shorts together and shared the same enthusiasm about film making. This project seemed like the perfect way to keep our skills sharp and our learning process ongoing.

Quick: list movies, TV shows and books in the apocalyptic genre that fascinate you and from which you drew inspiration?

Gina: Death Wish, is that apocalyptic? Because that movie is spot on. The Melancholia premise was end of the world chilling and on that note Antichrist was complete mental chaos.

Marc: Anything by Douglas Adams, SCTV, all zombie movies, The Quiet Earth, Ran, Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice.

Jeff: I draw more relevant and human inspiration from such books as Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (Man’s purpose in the post-industrial age); Alexander Irvine’s Buyout (a prescient scheme that aims to privatize capital punishment in the near future); Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang (a group of eco- terrorists challenge the strip-mining behemoth; and Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” (classic absurdist theater reminding me of the current political theater).

Are any of you currently living an alternative sustainable lifestyle now? If so, what do you know how to do that is portrayed in the series?

Marc and Gina: We have been living in an RV year round the last few years in Maine, after moving out of the "big city" of Portland and heading for the countryside. Living small (80 square feet) has taught us a lot about what is needed to live comfortably, and in all honesty, we are looking to build an even smaller permanent residence in the coming years, once we find our own little plot of land. We’ve also been volunteering at the New Gloucester Community Garden and raiding our own chickens for eggs. Not quite alternative or sustainable all around, but moving in that direction.

Jeff: I am not personally living an alternative sustainable lifestyle. It’s too expensive and ultimately unrealistic. I can’t say that I don’t go grocery shopping, that instead I go “foraging.” There are industries I want no part of, ideologies I shudder at, and personal behaviors I have modified in an effort to make my own life and immediate surroundings “sustainable.” I think the “idea” of what Vacationlanders are doing gets people excited the most, much in the same way a science fiction novel about space travel or the futuristic Wild West does.

Was any of this microbudget funded or is it scraped up from your personal savings?

Jeff: An early failed Kickstarter campaign tempered our resolve to think further outside the production/resource box. Vacationlanders, at this point, is purely out of pocket. Marc, Gina, and I do whatever we are capable of to keep funding this endeavor. Nothing is wasted. Our very talented cast keep us motivated and continually striving to provide a worthwhile show that will highlight their efforts. Marc and Gina are incredibly resourceful. Early on, family and friends donated enough money for us to get a couple pieces of needed equipment, secure a few consultations with an expert media attorney, and obtain, ironically enough, a website domain name, and fuel for traveling actors and crew. We are a skeleton crew.

What’s the reaction from your viewing audience been so far in Maine?

Jeff: Viewers in Maine have enjoyed the show. We have been given some great press by Dispatch Magazine, Portland Press Herald, Bangor Daily News, Indie Intertube, and Good Day Maine. We have a healthy following on Facebook and Twitter. The biggest reaction we have is “When is the next episode coming out?”

Marc and Gina: We’ve had some great turnouts at our episode premiers and a lot of positive feedback. Maine rules!

Can you give us a sneak peek on what happens to the documentary crew in the next few episodes? Any teasers?

Gina: Mayhem, Thievery and some “next level” sh**.

Marc: Kidnapping!

Jeff: Who is documenting whom?

Link to webisodes