Tag: Beneath the Black Moon

Three Questions with Nicole Witte Solomon

Nicole on the set of Meme in January 2015

Three questions is a new thing I decided to do because I like the people I work with and want to share more about them and what they do and what they care about. These brief interviews appear in my monthly newsletter (which you can subscribe to here) and I am republishing them to the blog. The following interview with filmmaker Nicole Witte Solomon was originally published in the December 2015 edition of the newsletter.

Nicole served as our Art Director for Meme, helped me produce Beneath the Black Moon, I frequently work with as an instructor at the I Was There Film Workshops, and we are now business partners in 4MileCircus offering Social Media Management and Consulting Services. Here’s what she has to say about herself.

What do you do?

I write things–screenplays, essays, short stories, reported articles, cook books, but mostly emails–as well as direct films and videos. I’m moving more into producing more as well.

I also freelance as an editor and consultant. My primary client right now is I WAS THERE Film Workshops, where I serve as the Communications Director. I Was There provides free, therapeutic filmmaking workshops to veterans, active duty service members and military families coping with Posttraumatic Stress. I also am also a film instructor at these workshops.

Why do you do it?

I work with I Was There because it’s rare to be able to get paid to do something you actually believe in. I have personally found filmmaking to be tremendously therapeutic, and I love sharing that with other people, and seeing the very real, dramatic shift that occurs within people who have been seriously wounded once they’ve been empowered with the tools to tell their own stories, on their own terms.

I write/direct/produce things that I would like to see that don’t yet exist. I’m generally interested in amplifying less-heard perspectives and narratives, whether my own or other people’s. Also I have always just have a compulsion to create and share stories.

What do you want to share?

You can learn more about I Was There at http://iwastherefilms.org. My short horror film, Small Talk, is currently in festivals and should be available for home viewing in 2016–we’re on facebook, twitter and tumblr as SmallTalkMovie, and the website is smalltalkmovie.com. The “Joan of Arc” segment I directed for the anthology Bring Us Your Women will be made publicly available in the latter half of the year. You can watch it and the rest of the film on demand now, though.

Also keep an eye out in 2016 new projects–a feature I wrote that will be produced/directed by Flavio Alves and is in preproduction, a short I co-wrote with Jeanette Sears called Happenstance that’s in post, a short I’m line producing for Christina Raia, a couple video projects for The Shondes that I’m directing, and several scripts I’m currently writing. Also a comic book that I’m writing with my friend Che Broadnax, about which I’m extremely excited but probably should bite my tongue for now. You can visit NicoleWitteSolomon.com for more.

March 2, 2016
Wotan Lager Commercials

Meme has a couple of videos or films that are intercut with the main narrative. There is the film-within-a-film Beneath the Black Moon. There is also the Meme videotape, which the film is named after. Then, there are the beer commercials for our fake brand: Wotan Brewing. Unlike the first two these weren’t conceived with the rest of the story, but rather came out of making props for the film.

Throughout the film our main character, Jennifer, drinks quite a bit. For production reasons it was easiest to make this a bottled beer and it seemed advisable to do it with a fake brand. So, I invented Wotan Brewing Co. If you’ve watched any of my projects since 2012, you may recognize the ouroboros encircling the tree of life design, which I have slipped into a lot of projects along with references to Norse mythology.

After creating the beer bottles for the shoot it occurred to me it would be interesting to shoot a couple of commercials for the beer to intersperse throughout the film or put on TVs people are watching. The ideas for what the commercials would be like developed over the course of shooting Meme and finally in October 2015, following the end of principal photography for Meme, we shot the commercials at a bar in Brooklyn.

Among the cast for the project are fellow filmmaker Lars Fuchs whose film Honk! I recently edited, Myles Tyrer-Vassell the director of photography for Maybe Sunshine, and the very funny Jeff H. Davis as the brand’s mascot Wotan. I also slipped in Ginny Leise, the heroine of Beneath the Black Moon, just as a fun little connection between the two videos and to help cement a larger world beyond the story in Meme. It’s just a little thing, but something that makes me happy, even if no one else ever notices it.

We shot what amounts to six commercials for the beer. Two basic commercials: one involving a man at a bar being encouraged to try the superior Wotan brand and the second being essentially a “beer will make you a fun party person” commercial. For each of these two commercials we shot three versions: one in English, one in German, and one in Spanish. I won’t go into the exact reasons why we did three versions but I will say that it was a fun experiment.

Over much of the last month we’ve been teasing clips of the first of these commercials on the Meme Facebook Page. Last Friday we shared the first full commercial. We start teasing the second commercial this Friday. Like Meme on Facebook to keep up with that and other news and fun things from our project.

January 27, 2016
Beneath the Black Moon: A Film Within a Film

Beneath the Black Moon is our film-within-the-film for Meme. It’s not our main video in the film but it serves some important plot points. It was referenced in some earlier versions of the script and ultimately became a bigger part of the story as rewrites progressed. No scenes were explicitly referenced but the tone and style was. So, after we’d begun shooting Meme, I needed to write this project to shoot during the process of shooting Meme.

As we were shooting Meme on no budget we needed to work around everyone’s schedules. That stretched production out a bit and by June we had only a day or two left of principal photography but availabilities put us on hiatus until August. So, I decided to pull together the shoot for Beneath the Black Moon. We shot with a different cast and crew but still a wonderful group to work with.

For Beneath the Black Moon I tagged my friends Lisa Hammer and Levi Wilson, co-creators of the web series I’ve been producing Maybe Sunshine. I wanted them both to be on camera for this project. I also grabbed Jeanette Sears to shoot the project, who I work with sometimes as an instructor for the I Was There Film Workshops. Nicole Solomon, Art Director for Meme, joined to help me produce and do the practical special effects. The cast except for Lisa and Levi had to be newly recruited as I was using most of the actors I like to work with in the main storyline for Meme.

Beneath the Black Moon is very different from Meme in that it is pretty much a parody. It’s purposely cheesy and hastily put together. The film is supposed to be a homage to low budget straight to VHS horror of the 80s and 90s. I think we pulled it off. I think we made something fun that people have appreciated over the last few months since we released it. It’s not a wink and a look how bad this is style parody. It’s earnest in its way. We’re not trying to draw attention to what’s bad or cheesy. None of the instruction I gave actors on set was about doing something for a joke about the film. It was all about playing the characters they were playing, who were all already pretty absurd from the start. I think that allowed us to have a lot of fun shooting and makes the project more fun to watch on its own.

While you can watch Beneath the Black Moon now on YouTube not all of what you see is likely to make it into Meme.Beneath the Black Moon will show up on TV screens in Meme and certain scenes will be used to parallel the events of Meme and help make or contrast the point of those scenes. That’s what the film was primarily written for. How much will ultimately make it into Meme remains to be seen as we are still editing. I’m looking forward to seeing how much we keep and how much we cut and how effective it is as part of this feature. In the meantime, if you haven’t watched it again recently, take a look at Beneath the Black Moon again. Do you recognize the final scene from anywhere? It’s a recreation of the final scene from a classic mind-blowing film of the 1980s. How did we do in recreating it?

January 13, 2016