What do you get when you mix song and dance with prison-orange pants?

Writer and director Romeo Candido is about to find out as he heads into production on Prison Dancer, a transmedia project that promises to bemuse and possibly bewilder audiences of both stage and screen.

Production on the series has begun in Toronto and will continue through Dec. 4.

Written and created by Romeo Candido (Ang Pamana: The Inheritance, Lolo’s Child) and Carmen De Jesus (Ang Pamana: The Inheritance), the project is a multi-platform experiment inspired by a 2007 Youtube viral video of inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Candido also directs and composed the original music. Ana Serrano (Late Fragment) is producing the 12-ep web series.

Created as a musical mockumentary, the web series follows Matt Wells, a pop-culture journalist who investigates the viral phenomenon behind the dancing inmates video and uncovers the inmates’ stories as the series progresses. The inmates in the series are ’ played by well-known Youtube personalities, such as Mikey Bustos, creator of the YouTube viral sensation “Filipino Accent Tutorial.”

What’s so transmedia about that, you say?

We haven’t gotten to the Broadway part of it yet.

“We are developing this property to be a web-interactive musical web series first, with a bunch of social media extensions attached to it, but with the intent of turning it into a stage play,” Serrano tells Playback Daily.

The social media extensions, says Serrano, will be blogs created and updated by the inmates as the 12-episode series progresses, in addition to other extensions on Facebook and online.

It’s all designed to bring Prison Dancer to the Broadway stage, an idea which was hatched after they workshopped the play at the fu-GEN Potluck Theatre Festival and at Summerworks Theatre Festival “to very, very eager audiences.”

“We thought, ‘we need to build an audience first,’ so that’s really why the web series became a critical component of the launch,” says Serrano. “Because we’re using real YouTube stars and our characters are [inspired by] YouTube stars, then we can mine already existing audiences to gravitate towards our own web series channel.”

The series is currently backed by the Independent Production Fund Web Series Program, and Serrano says they’re also in talks with several Asian-American brands in the U.S. for partnerships to target the Asian market.

The cast features Catherine Ricafort (Mamma Mia, The Sing-Off), Jeigh Madjus (Alter Boyz, La Cage Aux Folles), Mikey Bustos (Canadian Idol), Matt Wells (Host, Muchmore), Nicco Lorenzo (Degrassi: The Next Generation, Ang Pamana: The Inheritance), Norman Alconcel (MuchMusic VJ Search), Pierre Bayuga (Rent), Joseph Sevillo (Beauty and the Beast, Shall We Dance) and Ron Josol (Video on Trial, Comedy Now!).

The series is slated to launch in March 2012 at the San Francisco International Film Festival.