Crispy Green's 2018 Social Media Content Campaign

by Andrew K. Meyer // Co-Founder, StoneStreet Cinema

Published on www.stonestreetcinema.com - May 31, 2019

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SHOOTING THE SMALL STUFF

Chris and I work well with people. We get along with them. We enjoy spending time with them. And, most importantly, we are good at filming them.

Fruit, on the other hand… well that’s a bit more of a complicated relationship.

When StoneStreet was commissioned by Crispy Green, Inc. to produce over eight videos featuring their freeze-dried fruit product, I hadn’t quite registered the reality that the roles of the fruits would be played by themselves. This would be an endeavor that we hadn’t quite accomplished before.

As our business was growing, things were about to get REAL… small.

THE 7 FLAVORS AND THEIR 7 VIDEOS

We had one day in our Montclair NJ studio space to accomplish eight videos. Seven of them were to each showcase one of the Crispy Green fruit flavors, and they all had to be very, very short.

Somewhere along the way in our pre-production process, we were faced with the burden of trying to make seven templated videos unique, and someone had the idea of giving each video a theme. An environment.

A TABLESCAPE.

For one of our first times ever, we contracted an Art Designer, the incomparable Ana-Miren San Millan, who also brought on an assistant, Bahar Baharloo. We told Ana our assignment and our idea, and before we knew it, she had already found a perfect variety of props and design elements for seven different themes, hand-picked across the tri-state area from small shops in Brooklyn to a prop rental farmhouse in “rural” New Jersey.

From scratch, Ana designed seven unique tablescapes: Classroom, Kitchen, Nursery, Beach, Campground, Office and Gym. She built seven worlds purely out of stuff, and those stuffs entirely influenced the little stop-motion narratives that we were ideating as we were shooting.

THE FREEZE/DRY ONE-TAKE

The eighth video was an original concept that I came up with, one that sounded much easier in my head than it was on set. Go figure.

The concept was a whimsical play on the freeze-drying process that Crispy Green fruit snacks endure:

A person places down a pineapple and walks away, uninterested. Enter some cardboard mountains and fake snow- the freezing. Then, the sun pops out, the backdrop changes to a warm color and a hair dryer blows all of the fake snow away- the drying. The pineapple then bursts into a bag of Crispy Green, the person re-enters and exits with the snack, satisfied.

Besides that last sentence, we shot the rest in a good old one-r.

Ana and Bahar stood on one side of the table, Evan Daves and I on the other. In one concise and smooth take, we had to accomplish the elaborate sequences of both the freezing and the drying. It’s funny looking back, for as you can see in the final video, we end up punching in and out of that same one-take, just to add some energy to the rhythm, thus negating the need to get it all in one take.

Regardless, we got it and we were proud. It took a couple of tries. It was very hot and very messy and very late at this point, the end of our day.

But we got it.

The Crispy Green 2018 Content Campaign was the first of what would be many more in-studio product shoots. We learned a solid zillion things on all sorts of subjects, from animating stop-motion to the correct ways of slicing fruit. But the most significant lesson we learned was The Importance, Necessity and Sanctity of a Production Designer, no matter the scale.

Hire a Production Designer, always. Hire Ana.

What We're Watching - Gaspar Noé’s "Climax"

by Andrew K. Meyer // Co-Founder, StoneStreet Cinema

Published on www.stonestreetcinema.com - April 10, 2019

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It was 1:20pm at the Nitehawk Theater in Williamsburg when I sat down to finally watch Gaspar Noé’s Climax. I feel it important to point out that I was a tad hungover and my stomach was completely empty. It was the most effective time to experience this most affective film, this hour-and-a-half bottle episode of my most sexy and horrible nightmares.

Sofia Boutella (right of center) and her co-stars.

Climax (distributed by A24) is a psychological horror film directed, written and co-edited by Gaspar Noé and co-produced between France and Belgium (although make no mistake, this film insists on being utterly French). Starring Sofia Boutella and a score of dancers with no previous acting experience, Climax holds a very simple premise. A French dance troupe is about to embark on a tour of America, and they celebrate with an after-party in the remote lodge where they rehearse. It is 1996. It is snowing heavily. The bass is heavy. And the sangria has been spiked with LSD.

The LSD starts to hit almost every one of them halfway through the film, thus splitting the narrative into two pieces: the heavenly pre-LSD jubilation and the hellish post-LSD inferno. The end credits play at the film’s beginning, the production logo cards appear 15 minutes in, and the opening credits split the middle. It sounds pretentious, but it’s very exciting.

Thea Carla Schott (center) and ensemble perform the opening dance sequence.

An opening aerial of a bloody woman crawling through deep snow (cue end credits), ten minutes of audition tapes, and we dive into the production company logos (from Wild Bunch to Vice Films). A loud siren suddenly blares, as does the beginning of “Supernature” by Cerrone, and I am immediately smiling ear-to-ear. We land on a disco-spangled French flag, tilt down to Ms. Boutella putting out her cigarette, and witness an elaborate group dance number in one intoxicating long take. They krump, they vogue, they leap, they fall- swaying and gyrating in a crimson turbulent Busby Berkeley paradise.

...That is, until the LSD kicks in.

The strange thing is, that’s when I started feeling sick too. By this point, the Nitehawk iced coffee and veggie burger startled to bubble in my stomach. So you might call it the symptoms of a slight hangover, but at the time I called it an acid flashforward.

I was for some reason expecting an amount of witchcraft and spiritual horrors, like Suspiria or Neon Demon kinds of scares. But the reason this film frightened me more than both of those films was because its execution made it feel so eerily plausible, like a documentary shot by Hades himself. The lack of kosher narrative structure builds an anxious fear of the unknown. The takes get longer, the lights get dimmer, the camera floats upside down & leftside right, and the DJ never ceases.

Gaspar Noé - Director, Writer & Co-Editor

What blows me away is how quickly this production was put together. Gaspar Noé conceived the premise at the end of 2017 after a night in a vogue ballroom. Pre-Production and casting were accomplished in January 2018. Production in an abandoned Parisian school was completed after 15 vigorous days in February. And by May 13, 2018, it had won the Art Cinema Award at Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight, the top prize. Now it’s April 2019, five weeks after its US theatrical release. If you’re near New York City, you can still find screenings of it at Village Cinema East.

To be clear, this film is not for everyone, and that was to be expected from Mr. Noé. When about six or seven audience members walked out of his film at Cannes, Noé reacted: “Aw man, no, no, no! I usually have 25% of the audience walking out.” He has a long history of making provocative and alienating films that disturb in both content and imagery, which you can find in Love (2015), Enter the Void (2009), and Irréversible (2002). “I must be doing something wrong,” Mr. Noé continued. “I have to take a long holiday and rethink my career.”

When I left the theater, I said immediately that it was one of the greatest movies I’ll never see again. But since that day, I have watched the opening dance number over twenty times and don’t go a day without listening to “Supernature” (at least thrice). I have nothing to compare Climax to. The experience is singular and spectacular. If you’ve got the stomach for it, sip the sangria. The trip may be wonderful.

The Origin Story

by Andrew K. Meyer // Co-Founder, StoneStreet Cinema

Published on www.stonestreetcinema.com - April 10, 2019

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Pier A Harbor House

ONE NIGHT, ON STONE STREET…

StoneStreet Cinema was conceived on a night of writer’s block and one too many gin & tonics, not the most uncommon cause of conception. Chris and myself met up at the Pier A Harbor House in Downtown Manhattan to celebrate our final draft of a 12-page script that we spent too many months working on. We were also there to come up with our next one.

Looking back in our notepads, our ideas were a bunch of incomplete premises that felt more like sketches than short films. Two of my favorite worst ideas were the parodies “Project Project Greenlight” and “Full Blown House”. You can probably figure them out by their title and I will sell the rights to either of those for a reasonable cost upwards of $1.00.

But as the drinks went down, the enthusiasm went up. After landing on one decent idea (I <3 NY), we conjured one much larger idea. Why not build an entire production company? We already got this far! We proceeded to Stone Street for some nightcaps to congratulate ourselves on our big idea.

Stone Street, Downtown Manhattan

Chris is a cinematographer, I am a director, and we both write. So all that we needed to convincingly tell people that we had a real company was a camera, and luckily one of us knew how to use one. But once we bought that camera (a SONY Fs7, or “Roger”), we quickly realized the need to share a bank account and form an LLC.

And just like that, we were married.

This was all in March of 2016, and we wouldn’t publicly announce our company until July 14, 2016. We wanted to wait until our first short film was finished. We wanted to prove immediately that we were more than just a Facebook page.

I <3 NY (JULY 14 2016)

So off we went to shoot I <3 NY, a seven minute short film starring my best friend of 20 years, Noah Levinson. The concept was simple and to be mostly improvised: a young man living across the river from The Big Apple finally decides to face his fear and venture over for his first time. After one short scripted scene, the rest of the film takes off into a narrative that we built along the road. We spent three days and one long night following Noah through every corner of Manhattan, interacting with strangers and slowly falling in love with New York City. Think the first 10-minutes of Up meets Billy on the Street. Should be easy!

Ma’m, it was not easy. Although we had a daily plan of where we would go and the narrative beats we needed to hit, engaging strangers to be on camera was no simple task. That being said, we met some of the most New York people in all of New York. Mary Jones read poetry to passerbys in the park. Lao performed in a small band in Chinatown’s Columbus Park when they weren’t doing the same in Lincoln Center. Paul was heading home from Wall St, drunk as a skunk and not as good at acting as he told us he was. We then got my old friend Melissa Folzenlogen (of Baethoven fame) to come in and write the theme music: a 6-minute violin and piano duet that she and Noah put together on an early summer afternoon.

On July 14, StoneStreet publicized its Facebook page, Instagram and website, blasting out I <3 NY on all of them. The views were surprisingly good. The reactions were even better. Four months since that fateful night at the Harbor House and we had a camera, a bank account, an LLC, a logo and a film that we loved. And we were already preparing for our second short.

EGG (OCTOBER 12 2016)

We wanted to have three short films before the end of the year. Egg is an eight minute long surrealist dramedy about a woman coping with an egg she has laid. Chris and I teamed up with our old friend Rebi Paganini to write a full script and put together another 3-person shoot, this time with the opposite approach to I <3 NY. We cozied up in a bizarrely perfect AIRBNB in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. The living room had two large walls that were instead windows, a random egg-yolk yellow pillar in between them, and we were kept company by the owner’s cat, Pearl, the first feline I have ever loved. The three of us spent three days making a movie that was weirder than we were. It was very fun, and by October 2016 we had released our second film.

THE NATIVITREE (DECEMBER 25 2016)

We had one more short film to go before 2017, and I had nothing. I was still working full time in real estate finance and I was a bit spent. Chris and I lived a state apart, and our rent-free office was located in the backest corner of the Pilsener Haus & Biergarten in Hoboken, at least when no one else was already sitting there. We told ourselves it was the exact in-between of Astoria, Queens and Essex County, NJ. Plus, it had good wifi.

This is where we wrote The Nativitree, our first script to depend on substantial dialogue. The premise was initially conceived over two phone calls that Chris made to me.

First Call: Chris informed me that he wanted to film a sad man cutting down a Christmas tree on a Christmas tree farm.

Second Call: Chris informed me that he wanted to film the Christmas tree on fire. Standing vertically, of course.

We spent a day in Pennsylvania-esque New Jersey on a lonely tree farm and another day in Danburry, Connecticut. It was there where we lit the tree ablaze, the finale of our last short film for a long while.

The Gillis family is the bravest family I’ll ever know. They welcomed into their beautiful backyard a bushel of millenials with no firefighting experience, little paperwork, and two trees that they had no intention of leaving with.

“Wouldn’t it be a great idea to set the trees aflame at magic hour? This would look beautiful at sundown, and we will also accomplish it very quickly,” said us.

We wish us hasn’t said that. We began to light the first tree at around 4:00pm, a few weeks before Christmas. And it burned very, very slowly. We had dried out both of the trees in advance, but all the flaming newspaper in the world couldn’t get us to the great fire we were envisioning. The first tree was done for, slowly burnt bit by bit as the sun continued plummeting into evening. The ending of our story, 50% of the reason we set out to make it, was simply not going to exist. We were losing light. We were losing hope. And it was so cold.

Enter Mr. Gillis, the true hero of our film, armed with tequila in one hand and gasoline in the other. You can guess the rest from here.

It worked. It worked real good.

THE CALM BETWEEN THE STORMS

We released The Nativitree on Christmas Eve, which as it turns out is a very busy day for many people. The views were rather low, but our spirits were high. StoneStreet Cinema was in three films deep. Chris and I wished each other a merry holiday, and briefly dipped back into our personal lives of freelancing and real estate finance.

...Until 2017 struck, when the Stockholm kicked in and we began our expedition into the deep, dark and wonderous world of commercial filmmaking.

We were barely just getting started.