Tag: Maybe Sunshine

  • Three Questions with Lisa Hammer

    Three Questions with Lisa Hammer

    Three questions is all about sharing more about the fun people that I have had the pleasure of working with. 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 and musician Lisa Hammer was originally published in the January 2016 edition of the newsletter.

    I’ve been producing Lisa’s web series Maybe Sunshine and she also starred as the lead virgin hunting witch in Beneath the Black Moon. You may recognize her voice from playing the role of Triana Orpheus on Adult Swim’s the Venture Bros.

    What do you do?

    I make movies, I make music, I make acting and my voice is on the Cartoon Network. Sometimes I shoot or edit other people’s movies. I always try my best to create top shelf work that makes people laugh or cry or say “what the crap?” People called me a cult filmmaker in the 80’s, then a feminist filmmaker in the 90’s, now it’s Independent Filmmaker. I’d love to be called the lady version of John Waters. How about Mrs. Madam Filmmaker? For example, take this new musical comedy feature film I just finished with my partner Lisa Ferber called The Sisters Plotz. It’s got a technicolor “Old Hollywood” slapstick look and feel. It’s a very elegant and wacky take on guerrilla filmmaking, created by ladies who wear vintage cocktail dresses and drink champagne.

    My music was labeled as “Goth” for decades, even though we never set out to be that. I was in the bands Requiem in White, Mors Syphilitica and The N.C.S. We played with Type-O negative, Christian Death, Biohazard, Sex Gang Children and so on. Now I’m in Radiana, which has more of a New Wave, Mod, Shoegaze sound. I started it as a studio band in 2008 with my best friend Steven Deal, but then he passed away a few years later from cancer so I decided to stop playing music.

    Around 2014 my darling husband Levi Wilson urged me to start up again. This time was different: I felt too old and sad to just start a new band from scratch. Levi had the brilliant idea to instead create an original series about a fictional Lisa and her struggles to start a new band at the age of 48. Thus, Maybe Sunshine was born. We somehow found this amazing team of producers: Sean Mannion, Carolyn Maher and Myles Tyler-Vassell. With an all-star cast and crew, we are finishing up on post production for season one and will launch in the spring.

    Why do you do it?

    I know no other way to stay alive. If life doesn’t include making art and being creative, I can’t really function. It keeps me awake almost the entire night. Keeps me daydreaming so I forget where I’m going. No way out!

    What do you want to share?

    All that I do in this life is meant to be shared. My films, music, words, voice, my creativity. It’s for the world, so I have to keep going. If it helps 5 people or 500 or 5000, then it has all been worth it. I get very moving emails and messages from fans who have used my music to get through hard times and who’ve been moved by or enjoyed my films. A few of them I’ve had to talk down off a ledge. Mostly they’re just melancholy dreamy types like me with dark senses of humor. A few critics have even called my films “important” and “psychedelic”. They screen at festivals all the time. A highlight for me was a near-riot at my screening of Pus$bucket. There were chairs and beer bottles thrown across the room, and then an drunken impromptu reenactment of the film on stage while it played. I was just grinning like a Cheshire Cat. The prison mail has also been a highlight. Get a P.O. box, people! Stalkers can’t find you.

    Here’s a thought: everyone’s a filmmaker these days- make yours great. Make it something that deserves to be seen. Don’t get any sleep. Let your creativity flow out 24 hours a day. Keep a notepad with you at all times. And make your music. Do it as a hobby unless you have 24 hours a day to promote it and go on tour and do nothing else. Otherwise, get it into films, give it away. It’s most likely going to be pirated anyway. If you put it all on your own web site, sell ads to make money. Help other filmmakers out by giving it to them for free.

    Also- if you have elderly neighbors, check in on them. they are lonely and awesome and probably would love to tell you tales that will knock your socks off. Write it all down.

    Lastly, hug your loved ones and friends all the time. Brush and floss, and stop sitting all day. Get up and walk around, get a standing desk. Start lifting weights, it’s super fun. Then you can eat more chocolate.

    Goodnight!

  • Wotan Lager Commercials

    Wotan Lager Commercials

    Jeff H. Davis as Wotan

    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.

  • Maybe Sunshine is Coming

    Maybe Sunshine is a web series I’m producing starring Lisa Hammer and her band Radiana. The show was pitched to me in 2014 as being tonally like Curb Your Enthusiasm. Lisa and her husband, and show co-creator/director, Levi had some ambitious ideas about the project and I was sold on it pretty quickly. Since our initial meeting we’ve worked closely together to make the series happen. Being a low budget project shooting around schedules was necessary and with a large cast including the full band that stretched out production quite a bit. As of my writing this we are nearing the finish line, with our episodes in post-production and only a little more to pick up to finish up the project.

    I connected with Lisa and Levi while I was looking for music for my film Time Signature. I discovered Lisa’s music and the album from her band Radiana, and I knew that’s what I wanted for the film. So, I reached out to them. We didn’t connect right away, but by coincidence Carolyn Maher, my Assistant Director for Time Signature (who then became my Producer for Meme), had an exchange with Levi about the web series he and Lisa wanted to do. Remembering that I had mentioned Lisa’s music and that I had said I reached out to her, Carolyn connected me with Levi. I had brunch with Levi and Lisa and discussed using the Radiana music for Time Signature and they talked to me about Maybe Sunshine and I was immediately interested in getting on board.

    It took us a little bit of time to get off the ground and Carolyn also joined the project as a Producer. There were a few hard deadlines we had for shooting certain episodes based on certain events and availabilities. That really helped us get rolling. I brought in Director of Photography Myles Tyrer-Vassell, who I’d worked with on another web series where I served as Assistant Director. The first episode we shot was number 4. It features a showdown between our band, Radiana, and their rival, Late Cambrian (also a real band, and they’re wonderful and you should check them out). Late Cambrian was due to go on tour for several months and it was decided we wanted to shoot that episode with them before their tour. It was a bit of a crazy shoot running from a late call time to the early hours of the morning with all sorts of little issues and the team finding our pace working together, but it all came together and the results were great. The rough cut of that episode even won the Audience Choice Award at the Indie Works Web Series Month 2015 event. Soon after that we shot our other episode that had a hard deadline: the finale. I won’t get into exactly what the final episode is, but it ends pretty spectacularly. Since those initial shoot days we’ve been picking up the episodes when we can get everyone together and soon we’ll have wrapped the whole first season.

    As of now we have some level of rough cut for almost every episode of our first season. It works! The show is funny. It looks good. It sounds good. It has some meat to it. I’m really looking forward to being able to premiere the show. I’m really looking forward to being able to promote the show too as we’ve got some interesting plans for that. I’m really excited about this project and the potential it has.

    It’s been a fun series to produce and it’s been interesting for me personally to be able to sit back and take on mostly just a producer role. Most of my projects are my projects and that means that all the responsibility falls to me for those. This is a bit different in that my role is to support the vision of the creators Lisa and Levi. My role is to help them make this project what they want it to be. It’s different. It’s fun. I’m looking forward to being able to do it again on more projects.