After the Wedding

Tomorrow is our last day of shooting After the Wedding! The feeling is completely surreal and bittersweet. While we can’t wait to edit this baby, it’s also going to be so sad saying goodbye to all of our cast and crew. Working on a set is akin to going to summer camp. The first day is always a bit scary as you examine your surroundings and warm up to people. By the end of the second day, you’re at ease and already making private jokes with everyone as if you’re old friends. And by the last day… well, let’s just say that if it actually were camp, there would be lots of goodbye tears and bear hugs.

It is currently past 3am as I write this, so my entry will be brief. But I did want to write a quick post to acknowledge how grateful we are to have had this experience. We have never before felt this much love and admiration for every single person that has crossed our path this last month. And we mean everyone from the ladies at David’s Cafe in Miami for making us the strongest Cuban coffee everyday, the amazing staff at the Dorchester Hotel for going out of their way to make our production as smooth as possible, our new friend Raj for letting us use his sweet vintage Lincoln Continental, our insanely talented friend Christie for making the prettiest wedding decor, everyone at Wood Tavern and Electric Pickle, to ALL of our awesome extras… the list goes on and on and that’s not even including the people who have helped us out here in New York. Naming everyone right now would be too much of a challenge for my sleep deprived brain, but lots of thank you emails are coming soon!

We will try to post some more in the next few days to catch everyone up on how production went, but for now, we are wrapped with Day 13 and are truly loving life. And of course, loving YOU! For supporting us throughout this whole process, whether it was on Kickstarter, by sending us positive emails, helping us out out and even just reading this blog. We are so happy and grateful to have had this experience.Thank you

Hey guys!

Day 2 is almost wrapped and we’re off to a great start.

Now we need your help! We are shooting a few scenes in the next two weeks and need extras. It means a lot to us to have real Miami people in the scenes, so please come out and support!

Below are the days and times we will need you. If you’d like to get involved, please email me at lisa@pinkforestfilms.com and let me know what days work best for you.

As you can see, we are still finalizing the times, but we’d like to get a sense of who is interested for now so we can keep you updated. If any of the above times work for you, let me know! We’d love to have you.

Hello, After the Wedding family!

We are just hours away from our first day of shooting. Call time is at 6:45am tomorrow morning and instead of getting some shut eye, the crew is furiously finishing up some last minute runs and tasks. And although we have quite a bit to do tonight, we did get a nice break earlier this evening with a fun welcome dinner.

Luckily for us, our parents live down here in Miami, so instead of the usual craft services (pizza), our mom brought us an amazing dinner of salmon, sweet potato, brown rice, and a beet and avocado salad. And to top it off, she made a Tres Leches for dessert! The dessert was actually birthday cake for our DP, Juan, because his birthday was yesterday and Karina, whose is coming up next Sunday. It was the perfect kick -off to our first week of shooting.

Which brings us to tomorrow. Eeps! It feels like we are juggling a lot of balls in the air and at any moment, they can all come crashing down. Sounds fun, right? To be honest, as stressful as this feeling is, it’s also why I love production. There’s an energy in the air and a sense of urgency that just doesn’t exist in any other area of “real life.” It only lasts while we shoot and soon as it’s in the can, you feel like you can breathe again. It’s wonderful and terrible all at the same time. At least for me it is.

I’ll wrap this up because we have a huge day tomorrow and still a lot to finish tonight. Hoping we can rest for at least a few hours before the alarms go off. And although our shoot has a lot of early mornings planned (brutal!), at least we are sleeping in a beautiful condo, right next to the ocean. It truly is the nicest view to wake up to and it sure beats shooting in the winter.

Buenas noches!

Claudia and our parents 

This week has been a long time coming. Over a year ago, Claudia approached me and Karina about writing a story, something small scale and low budget that we could realistically produce ourselves. A few weeks after that, we had scripts in hand and a plan to shoot the film that very summer.

Needless to say, things don’t always go as planned, but after many rewrites, meetings, budgets, revisions, weekend scouting trips, a gazillion emails, attempts to secure financing, more emails, and a whole two crowdsourcing campaigns(!!), here we are. Finally. In Miami. To be honest, it feels pretty surreal. And amazing, of course.

I arrived yesterday, Claudia a few days before, and Karina will get in on Friday. We are also incredibly lucky to have with us, Alex Martinez. Alex reached out to us many moons ago about wanting to get involved and over the course of the last year, we have become good email buddies. It is really awesome having him on board!

So now that we are here, you may be wondering what exactly we are doing. Well, first of all, we have two out of our three main actors arriving on Sunday. We start shooting on Tuesday. So this means we need to finalize our schedule, lock down all of our locations, secure all of our rentals, permits and insurance requirements, and confirm details with our extras. Not to mention communicate and coordinate with our supporting cast, who happen to be good friends and non-actors. It’s all very exciting. And as we go from pre-production to actually shooting, I know it will get even better.

As we continue on this filmmaking journey, we’ll be posting on here regularly to keep you updated. We know that this whole thing wouldn’t even be possible without you. You. The person reading this right now. Because of your interest in what we are doing, this is all possible. You dream maker, you.

And for other filmmakers out there, we hope our posts can shed some insight on our journey (we’ll definitely be sharing mistakes made and lessons learned). For those in the non-film world, we hope to keep you entertained. Also be sure to check out our cast diaries! Nick, Edy and Kandis’ posts are sure to be well worth reading.

That’s it for today! Tomorrow we have a big day starting early, so Claudia and I are going to maybe squeeze in some Olympics viewing before passing out. As I type this, she is working on the schedule and I can hear waves crashing outside our window. Despite being pretty sleepy, all feels right.

Hey friends! Please excuse the radio silence! We’ve been hard at work prepping to enter production. Today was the first official day of location scouting in Miami Beach! It was a really successful (and scorching) day! We can’t wait to share our finds with you! So stay tuned as we report from the sunny trenches!