StoneStreet Cinema was founded in 2016 by Andrew K. Meyer and Christopher Plunkett as an outlet to create short narrative cinema. Creative Director and FLOBEL young Advisor Evan Daves says, StoneStreet Cinema zeros in the short form mainly as a means of creating work that is accessible from a production standpoint. “Let’s tell stories, let’s put stuff out there and focus on the short form so that we can build to do more long form stuff in the future”. Nectar News sat down with Evan to discuss his work with StoneStreet Cinema and learn more about his innovative “moving product” approach; developing effective and intriguing social media content for brands and products.
NN: Can you tell us more about the inception of the company and some of your earlier works?
ED: Right out of the gate we produced a whole bunch of short form stuff as quickly as we could; I <3 New York, Egg , The Nativitreeand then we partnered with another company called Little Blondies Film to create a film called Like Glass , one of our most ambitious projects to date. Like Glass is a short film centered around gender fluidity and gender roles in society. That film has done really well, it was accepted into the SCAD Film Festival this year, the NITEHAWK Shorts Festival amongst many others.
NN: When did you begin developing your commercial portfolio?
ED: In the midst of all of the narrative work we recognized we needed to figure out what our next angle would be and we ventured into commercial productions. Our main objective with commercial production has been that we want to create moving pictures for brands. We don’t want to sacrifice any cinematic quality, we want to create pieces that tell stories and are visually engaging. No matter the size of the screen we want our visuals and stories to be important. We strongly believe that moving pictures move people and they move products. Harnessing that power is something that we specialize in and we have done a lot of work for market brands, social media content for corporations, non profit organizations and real estate companies. We’ve been given the opportunity to work for a lot of different companies taking on varying styles and we are excited for more. Recently we did a big push for more social media based clients and we are in the process of furthering our engagement and building community around this concept of the moving product.
NN: Are there projects that you haven’t been able to do in the past that you are aiming to create in the future? What are some of the dreams of the company?
ED: We really want to strengthen our capacity for narrative filmmaking side of our work. At this point, all the projects that we’ve worked on in house have been driven by the people who exist in house. Andrew K. Myers, Christopher Plunkett and I, have been working together on these projects developing them internally and our goal on the narrative side is to support the development of other writers and directors, giving them the opportunity to bring their work and ideas to us. We want to take our resources and ideally give other people support, whether it be our time, our efforts, our gear, and eventually funds to develop new content under the StoneStreet name. On the commercial side, our goal would be to continue to create compelling moving imagery associated with brands that we like and that we feel are in line with our aesthetic, brand and theme. Music videos are something we also do a lot of which brings in another level of collaboration that is important to all of us as we seek to engage in this collaborative medium. Working with as many people as we can, building that community, finding different channels to tell stories whether they are very script heavy narratives or very visual driven are all facets of our mission. We are just excited to keep telling stories.
NN: What challenges are you up against as you attempt to scale your business?
ED: As we are trying to scale the business, capital is something that we are always working towards. We’ve been working on a gig to gig basis and it has been fun, but I think we want to be able to try stuff like developing a new sales pitch for our commercial and branding clients. We want to be able to have that wiggle room where we can brainstorm about bringing new people in the door and collaborating with new brands. That’s the main challenge in the arts, it’s always art versus commerce.
On the narrative side I’d say this is a field where you take all the help you can get. We are always interested in hearing what other people are up to and we are always seeking new networking opportunities. I want to continue that exchange of goods and services amongst collaborators to try and bolster this new generation of filmmakers.
NN: As an artist yourself, what led you to working in filmmaking?
ED: When you are working as an actor there are certain pieces you have to put into place to meet your basic needs between acting gigs. At first it was a very financial motivation that brought me to film production as a PA and eventually as a Production Coordinator. Working as a Creative Director has been the most rewarding type of work in between gigs because I’ve learned a lot being on this side of the camera and seeing how much goes into making films. What led me to it, was that I’d rather be on set than in restaurant. It helps me to continue to build community as an actor as well, everyone knows you have to create opportunities for yourself. I now have a really strong network of people that I can call upon to get involved in projects of my own. This helps me as an actor, director and writer. Filmmaking is a very well rounded world to exist in as a creative person.
StoneStreet Cinema is a boutique film production company that specializes in narrative cinema and commercial production, specifically for branded social media content. The company seeks to provide brands with resources to kind of keep up with the demand of remaining at the top of people’s feeds and not getting lost in the scroll. The creative team of four takes the vision of their client and interprets it, finding ways to provide them with monthly social media content, video and imagery so they can roll it out on their social media feeds easily. Although there is content that drives people to social media channels, StoneStreet Cinema contributes to customer retention and loyalty by making content that keeps people there.
