From Hipsters to Soul Mates

Christiann van Vuuren and Nick Boshier, whose alter egos Dom Nader and Adrian Archer are a perfect distillation of society's grievances with the hipster trope, have come along way since shooting the early episodes of Bondi Hipsters in the lounge room of their friend's apartment.

Decked out in flamboyant lycra ensembles, Boshier and van Vuuren are preparing for an afternoon shoot that will see Dom and Adrian attempt to navigate the perennial quandary of zen-seekers: the yoga fart.

Above the din of  TV  cameras rolling into position, van Vuuren's directions fly thick, fast and ridiculous across the wooden-panelled studio: "As long as the person who sees the camel toe is behind the person who has the camel toe."

As the production crew scuttle across the set, rushing to add the final touches before lunch break, a make-up artist manages to hold van Vuuren still for just long enough to seal Dom's beard to his face.

Everything looks set to roll on an upmarket episode of Bondi Hipsters. Except, not quite.

The duo are midway through filming their latest, and undoubtedly most ambitious venture yet, Soul Mates - a  6-episode comedy series commissioned by ABC2, which sees Dom and Adrian's Bondi Hipster bromance reincarnated across the time continuum.

"It's a comedy show about two dickheads who bump into each other in other lifetimes," Boshier says as he greets me on set, bespectacled in his character Adrian's signature black-framed glasses (ironically lensless of course).

After two years of refining Dom and Adrian's moral and sexual ambiguities for an internet audience, Boshier and Van Vuuren's acting talents will be tested in a fresh set of characters: as cavemen in the neanderthal era, as Kiwi assassins in the '80s and as agents in a time travel agency in the future.

"We haven't done any TV before," Boshier says, "and we haven't done anything internationally before in TV."

But this is what makes the duo's swift rise from obscurity to mainstream all the more remarkable, and a testament to the internet's power to juggernaut raw talent. Neither actor's CVs are furnished with the formal acting qualifications you might expect of stars of a major network TV series.

The two men had already staked separate claims to the title of "viral sensation" when they met at a YouTube convention in 2011. A guest speaker at the convention, Van Vuuren had garnered worldwide attention with the Fully Sick Rapper - a video web series he created while quarantined in a Sydney hospital for six months with tuberculosis in 2010.

"It was the first time that I had come across Christiaan's stuff, and I immediately thought our senses of humour were aligned," says Boshier, who had achieved internet notoriety as "Trent from Punchy", a foul-mouthed bogan from Sydney's western suburbs. He was also part of the team behind the Beached Az whale series.

The young creatives kept in contact after the convention, riffing on ideas for collaboration. Some weeks later, in a setting that could not have been more ironically suited, van Vuuren and Boshier sketched out the idea for Bondi Hipsters.

"We caught up in North Bondi and had a breakfast, and had an avocado smoothie that we both agreed had a consistency of dragon semen," says Boshier.

"That was the moment," Boshier recalls, when van Vuuren struck with comedic timing: "so I have this idea of two hipster characters we can jam on."

And so, in late 2011, Dom Nadier and Adrian Archer, the two self-absorbed fashionistas from Bondi, arrived on the internet, spruiking their nameless fashion label in their signature hipster argot.

"Why waste fahshun resources on printing labels? We're trying to minhamise our environmentahl footsie," Dom says, as he flicks his cigarette butt out the window.

From there "it started to naturally blend from a two-person thing to a three-person thing," Boshier says, with Connor van Vuuren, Christiaan's brother, joining the fold as a co-writer.

These days, the talented triumvirate are a professional outfit.  When Soul Mates hits TV screens in October, the brothers will celebrate their first co-directing TV credits under their production company, the Van Vuuren Brothers.

With Dom and Adrian, purveyors of the underground and undiscovered, now poised at the precipice of mainstream success, will the duo's TV debut bring about their ideological demise?

"Christiaan wanted to kill them off immediately," Boshier says, but hints that Dom and Adrian may well endure for as long as the millennial subculture does.

"Not to say we want to globally dominate," he says, but  "we haven't explore the lengths to which we can take these characters."

Soul Mates, ABC2, Thursday, October 23, 9.30pm