Making Meme Part 16: Day 17 and the End of Principal Photography

After our extended break and shooting the film-within-the-film it was time to come back together to get the final scenes of Meme. We decided to return to Nicole Solomon’s apartment, where we’d shot most of Beneath the Black Moon to use it for 3 separate locations. The quote of the day for Day 17 of production was: “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. — Frank Herbert” With turning Nicole Solomon’s apartment into two different characters’ apartments and faking a white cyc studio Day 17 became the final day of principal photography. We […]

Making Meme Part 15: Shooting the Film Within the Film

There are two parallel searches happening in Meme, Jennifer’s search for the creator of the surreal “Meme” mashup tape and her boyfriend Tommy’s search for a rare horror VHS: Beneath the Black Moon. The search for Beneath the Black Moon became part of the core of the film after the crowdfunding campaign was unsuccessful. I had dug more into the actual VHS collecting community and decided that while I probably wouldn’t properly reflect that community in the film, I could be much much closer than the original version of the script, which didn’t do a very good job of that. […]

Making Meme Part 13: Production Days 12 and 13

As I mentioned in Part 11 there was some intersection between what was happening in my life at that moment and the story. Jennifer, our lead character, was drinking to self-medicate. I was doing the same thing. There’s lots of reasons for it. I was stressed over a lot of things personal and professional and making a film was piling onto that a fair bit. Many people on the shoot were doing as much as they could to reduce my stress and make the film go as smoothly as possible, but in the end I was still stressed and still […]

Making Meme Part 9: Production Day 5

The quote of the day for our fifth day of production was: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.― Nora Ephron” When you’ve primarily made short films or web videos that only end up being 20 minutes long at the very most you have moments early in the production of a feature where you marvel at how much you’ve done already. You’ve already shot enough of the film that you almost have the whole arc of the story. The end feels so within reach. There’s still a long way to go you remind yourself, but look how […]

Making Meme Part 8: Production Days 3 and 4

The quote of the day for the third day of production was: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” ―John Maynard Keynes As discussed in the previous post we had a delay between Day Two and Days Three and Four. Day Three was January 17th 2015 and Day Four was the 18th. We had two long days of relatively short scenes. We chose to focus our next block of shooting after the office scenes on scenes that took place in Jennifer and Tommy’s apartment. The apartment belonged to a long-time friend of […]