by New York Guest Blogger: Carey Van Driest
These days, everyone is talking about ‘making
your own work.’ It’s a valuable conversation to have, but I never thought I
would be doing it under the auspices of a ’production company.’ Especially one
that I owned.
My partner Ronan Jorah and I had had
careers in the arts for years - me as an actor and Ronan as a director and
post-production supervisor, but work had been project-specific, and mostly
dictated by other people’s initiatives. Creating our production company, Mania Studio, Inc., combined our forces to set a trajectory for long-term
success instead of the short-term scrambles we had been doing.
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Mania Studio’s logo |
Get clear about your goals
Filmmaking is hard work, so if we were going
to put time and sweat and money into this, it needed to pay off. We wanted to
make more than one film, so for us taking the creative leap meant a
full-fledged studio where we could control the quality and choose our projects
and who we work with. Creating a structure that was scaleable as Mania Studio grew was also imperative.
We chose Scratch as our first film
and set a fundraising goal. A friend who runs large-scale kickstarter campaigns
advised us that for a new company, developing personal connections that would
carry over from project to project was the best use of our time. So we reached
out to people we called our ‘angels’ instead of crowd-sourcing.
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Ronan Jorah, directing Scratch on location at the Bendix Diner |
Know your strengths and weaknesses
Once funding was in place, we could have
attempted to push the film up a hill ourselves. But I’m not a cinematographer,
and Ronan is at best a second-rate costume designer. Our energy was better
spent focusing on what we did best and putting together a talented team of
craftspeople who would be the foundation of the creative network we would
continue to rely and call on.
Fast, good, and cheap. You can only pick
two
No one wants to hear it, but it’s true. You
can do something fast and good, but it won’t be cheap, or cheap and fast, but
it won’t be good. Something always has to give, so pick your two carefully. We
had some money, but not a lot, so for us taking our time putting the right
pieces together and planning every detail was important. If we’d had a
multi-million dollar budget, planning would still be important, but larger
budget equals more boots on the ground, and an engine that can move faster.
Even though there were many days and nights during pre-production when we
wondered if we’d ever get to set, sharing Scratch with our cast and crew
and seeing their proud reactions reminded us that we did it the right way.
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Carey Van Driest on set as producer and “Elise” in Scratch |
Scratch is what we intended it to be: a strong calling card for Mania Studio and an example of the kind of quality storytelling we can do as a small in-house operation. The response has been fantastic, and we’re gearing up for the online release in early Spring to get the word out about Scratch and Mania Studio.
We have a second short film ready for production and
several in development. I’m producing, writing and acting, and Ronan directs,
writes, and supervises post-production. We continue to balance being both
business and romantic partners and check in with each other as Mania Studio
grows. Starting a production company isn’t for everyone, and sometimes we think
“what are we doing?” But most of the time we look at what we’ve created
together and it reminds us why we wanted to be artists and filmmakers in the
first place. To make things. And this is the way we choose to make them.
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Ronan Jorah as 'Scratch' |
Instagram: @maniastudioinc
Facebook: @maniastudioinc
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