Inala’s Karla Gamero Gomez works by day as a cleaner.
By night, the 36-year-old swaps the feather duster for a pen to pursue her passion of writing.
Her latest project is currently being developed into a mystery-thriller series that will be launched exclusively on social media.
The series, shot by a local crew in locations across the area, will be published in short, five-minute episodes to TikTok and YouTube, two online platforms that draw in audiences in the hundreds of millions.
Producer Michelle Kenney said short-form webseries were becoming increasingly more popular.
“Instead of trying to pitch to various places, which is extremely hard, we made the decision to go straight online,” she said.
“The vertical series on TikTok are becoming very popular – the same as YouTube Shorts. Because those platforms are popular, that shorter content is what people tend to gravitate towards.”
With the rise and fall of video stores and DVDs, Ms Kenney said the industry was now completely different to 20 years ago.
Ms Gomez said she wrote the script a few years ago. It follows a group of friends who witness a murder in their small, unsuspecting town.
“It’s them trying to solve it without getting anyone else involved. Of course things start going wrong from the start,” Ms Gomez said.
“The inspiration for the story came from the 2010 film ‘Tomorrow when the War Began’. I must have had it in my mind, and I had a dream of a similar group of friends who witness a murder on a bridge and have to try and avoid suspicion that they had seen anything.
“I wrote it the first chance I could and sent it off to Michelle.”
Ms Gomez said she always had a passion for writing, which stemmed from her love of reading.
“I read such a variety of books growing up that I thought I’d either become a librarian or a writer,” she said.
“So it was always something that I wanted to be surrounded by. It wasn’t until I did a course in screen and media that I fell in love with screenwriting and found it surprisingly easy to progress into it.
“I grew up watching a lot of movies and television my sisters and we grew up quoting scenes to one another, which we still do. I think that initial interest in sharing our interest in movies and TV shows really is an inspiration for me to want to write scripts that we would have liked growing up.”
The webseries is expected to arrive on TikTok and YouTube towards the end of 2025.
