“From Pocket to Projector: Discover How Jamie Grefe Filmed Two Movies on His Phone!”
Jamie Grefe
All right. So if I may, let me back up a little bit. Um, about a year ago, I started working on a screenplay, just a proper screenplay for a movie called sorority girl massacre. And this was, there were talks that I was going to direct this. Hey, if you can write it, direct it. We’ll get a few girls together. We’ll get a mansion. We’ll crank it out in about three days. So, I wrote the entire screenplay and I got it to the point where I really felt for the first time in my life. And I’ve been writing for about 10 years now, but really it’s so funny actually, because you can write, write, write, write, write for years, but you might not be writing like a director because when, when, and you know this cause you’ve directed your own scripts, when it really comes down to like, well, I’m going to have to shoot this, these are going to be shots that I’m going to have to put together in three days in one location. It really changed how I thought about this script and I really refined it. I got it ready to go. Everything looked like it was going to happen. And then it didn’t, and then it didn’t, it fell through, you know, the gears, the tides shifted, so to speak. And the producer wanted to do other kinds of movies, work with some other people. Hey, that happens too. I was left with this, um, feeling though. And this would probably be around, be around December. I was just this great kind of drop, you know, I was like, I need to do something. I was so ready to direct that script. The whole thing. I could see it crystal clear. I can still see it. So what I did is I start, I said, you know what? I’ve got a phone. I’ve got a really basic phone. I’ve got access to lights, I don’t know, like a ring light. I’ve got a place I can shoot. Let me get some people over here. Let me just shoot. I just need to start shooting. So I had some friends come over. I hired some actors to come over and just run some monologues that I wrote up, just some poetry that I just had to get out. It was like the space of pure necessity. I had a lot of footage. I started to build up and what happened was that footage became, and it was all unrelated. It would just be like simple physical actions that I would have people do along with these kind of really pointed monologues that were just completely separate from the sorority girl massacre script. They were actually touching upon a lot of things that happened in my life this last year, like losing my dad, going through a divorce, you know, just losing some things. And so I had all of this creative energy that I needed to discharge. What I did was I had this idea, like, okay, I have all these little short clips. Let me take them and put them together on a timeline. And let me see how that looks. What can I make out of this? Can I pull something out of this? Because you, you probably know this actually, but a lot of people don’t. The, the requirement for a feature film, like the runtime, it’s not an hour and a half. It’s not two hours. I mean, it’s like 48 minutes. Like you could kind of technically have a feature film set for digital, like under an hour. I thought, Jamie, just do you have an hour’s worth of footage? Is there something here? And then when I put it together, something was emerging, but it wasn’t right. Because I thought I need to be in this. I need to put myself as the slasher. So, what I did is I filmed myself and I did these monologues, so on and so forth. That became black static, sorority girl massacre black static. So, if you watch the trailer, you hear this voice being spoken, this really low voice. That’s me. If you see some kind of hazy figure in like a latex mask, that’s me. And that was all shot at my apartment right here in the Valley. What happened after that was I kind of was like, wow, that was really fun. Like I put that together. I did all the sound design, you know, I quote unquote produced it. I just brought it to life where I got it to the point where I was like, this is a movie. It feels like a movie. There’s a beginning. There’s a middle. There’s an end. It’s artistic. It’s art housey, but it’s a movie.
