Making of Memoria
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Memoria’s Fundraiser for the Alzheimer Society of Toronto
Memoria held it’s live event in conjunction with the Augmented Cinema Film Festival, which took place at The Royal Cinema on April.25th.
The REDUX Trailer and SPEECHLESS scene were screened as part of the program, giving new audiences a taste of the project, and letting them know about the Cinecoup.
Along with promoting the film, we also took the opportunity to make something more of the event, holding a fundraiser that would benefit people living with Alzheimer’s. We turned to the Alzheimer Society of Toronto, a prominent organization that dedicates itself to raising awareness and bettering the lives of people who live with Alzheimer’s.
Although it was a bit of a scramble on our end to get things moving, the Alzheimer Society of Toronto were on board and totally prepared for the night! It was a great pleasure having them as a part of our event, and we are very happy that we were able to contribute to them through the fundraiser.
Thank you to all who came out to support the event! It was a great success!
We look forward to working more with the Alzheimer Society of Toronto.
Team Memoria -
CineCoup: Flashback Mission 4: Speechless While poster promotion for Off the Wall was in full force, teams were presented with their next challenge. Mission 4 saw filmmakers creating a purely cinematic sequence. For Speechless teams produced a 90-second, dialogue free narrative snapshot of their film. Working under…
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Poster Design for Memoria by Jeff Royiwsky
Hey, I’m Jeff Royiwsky and I’m a producer on Memoria. But I’m also an illustrator/painter/graphic designer/I-can-use-adobe-suite-er, and I’ll be going through the process behind creating the illustrated Memoria Poster.
Early on, we really weren’t sure what kind of direction we we’re gonna go in. How much can you really tell about a movie just from the poster? In a lot of cases, movies are marketed with the giant faces of the lead actors, and that makes sense because people pay to see those people in movies. When you don’t have that star power, you have to spark some kind interest about the concept of the film in a visually stimulating way.
I looked at a lot of international poster design as research and found that they were these amazing, sometimes weird things that, almost in a matter-of-fact way, presented the material in a more abstract way. We couldn’t afford to be too “out-there” with the poster, but because we were submitting 2 designs, we decided one should be a more standard poster and the other should be bit more expressive, a little less concerned on with getting everything across.
I made about 16 (big) thumbnail sketches, and this is really to just get the idea across. The development of the film is an ongoing thing; we don’t have everything mapped out yet. So at this point, I’m pretty much allowed to do whatever I want. Just throw anything at the wall and see what sticks.
Eventually, I get the okay from the director/client/best friend to pursue the “unraveling” design. It stemmed from the idea of something slowly coming undone, but that was something that could be very intricate visually as well. People in general have the attention span of about 4 seconds (maybe less?) when it comes to advertising of any kind, so its important to have an immediacy with the image
The linear above took a lot of work to get to. Many of the early designs couldn’t quite look good. I’m having trouble remembering my specific problems with them, but honestly, they just sucked. They lacked “oomph.” so I was very glad when I got to the linear above. the piece was always meant to be more of a flat graphic, but that line work really gave the piece a certain quality, which is something I added on later down the road.
In terms of reference, I wanted a little bit of vintage sci-fi book cover kind quality (and a little bit of penguin books as well, in hindsight). They typically have a sense of the “unknown” in it, and in lot of cases, a sense of space is usually used to evoke that kind of feeling.
However, the really big artist that influenced the piece is Jean Giraud, whose pen name for his sci-fi art is Moebius. I especially looked at what he called “non-figurative” paintings. Just know that this man is amazing. He’s unrestricted. A visionary! I could blab about this guy all day and how soul crushing it is to know that I will never be that good. But, uh, you just kinda press forward with these things, and I urge everyone reading this to check out The Airtight Garage, a super great archive of his work.
This is getting lengthy but I’m almost done!
This is the piece about halfway through. No, I didn’t compress the file to have safe-for-web colours so it wasn’t quite like this when I sent it to director/client/friend Maikol Pinto to show him the progress I was making, but needless to say, he was not crazy about it, and understandably so. There was still a lot left to be realized. Is a gradient gonna work? What about the lines? Why is he a smurf? Helvetica, seriously? Actually, that last one was more self-imposed. Its just really easy to throw helvetica with something because it can got with a lot, but I really felt it worked with the piece. There may be a better font the describes what we’re looking for, but I’m happy for now.
Even the colours on this version are a bit muted, but file compression can be weird sometimes. However, everyone on the team was very pleased with the end result and we think its get an interesting idea across, even if its not the whole idea (which was sort of the point). If we ever go to print there are some things I’d like to change, but even before we uploaded the image there were so many small things I was trying. Different colour backgrounds, a couple extra shapes here and there, nearly all is possible and easy to try out if you plan your image the right way.
We’re still early on in the development of Memoria, and the word we kept (and keep) throwing around “sentiment.” We each have a different kind of technical vocabulary but that’s one area where we all are on neutral ground. Art school kids talking about feelings to make art? Whodda thunk it. Thanks for reading!
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Antes Memoria ( Before Memoria ) This short film was made 6 years ago, during my first year of studies at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. The assigment was to make a short film using elements of a character sketch that was given to us randomly by another student. From what I recall, the character sketch that was given to me was about an elderly man who would yell and throw things like tennis balls at innoncent passerby’s.
Basing it off that, I decided to create a story and explore the reasons as to why a man would spend his time doing such things. Naturally, as most young filmmakers do, I got my grandfather, Washington Pinto, to help me out in the project.
At the time, I was only partially aware of what my grandfather was going through in terms of his health, and that his memory was only beginning to fail. It was never my intenton at first to make a film related to such things, and truthfully, I had a different outcome in my mind at that time in terms of the film.Looking back at this though, it’s rather haunting to see what the short film’s story can be interpreted as, just at a time when my grandfather was beginning to be affected by Alzheimer’s. Seeing this now, and having seen the health of my grandfather slowly give way, really made a huge impact on me.
It is because of this, that before his passing I started to think of the possibilities surrounding Alzheimer’s and memory loss, and it is because of this, I had felt that it was important to pursue this story now. I want to tell a story that will spark the imagination. A story that pursues different options, maybe not to cure, but different ways to deal with the disease. A story that will ultimately give hope to those who have friends and family suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Short Film - ‘My Name Is…’
Maikol Pinto, 2007, OCAD University http://maikolpinto.com/my_name_is.htmlIn Memoriam Washington Pinto
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I knew the instant I was going to enter the Cinecoup Film Accelerator that I would go to Alexander Mann ( AKA People In The Clouds ) to help out on the project and compose original music for Memoria’s trailer.
We originally met at a Raindance Networking party, almost a year ago now. This was the first time we really got to collaborate.
We had talked briefly about what I wanted in terms of tonality and emotion for this particular project. It was within a day or two of asking him if he could do the music for Memoria, that he came back to me with what was the finished product that you now hear in the trailer, which I feel turned out to be amazing. Although he might have taken a relatively short time to come up with some great sounds, I feel like we’ve been working towards it for a long time through all the conversations about film and music that we’ve had.
I am very proud to have the score he created in the trailer for Memoria, because he was able to capture the drama, power, and emotions of the story. His work on the trailer is getting a lot of great reactions and solid ratings. It is great to see that people have commented in their reviews about his haunting and beautiful musical score.Alexander and I also plan on collaborating for a future project called “Cerebro”, another feature I have written. I honestly can’t wait to hear what he does for that film in the future. I look forward to working with him again.
Feel free to check out the rest of Alexander Mann’s work on his SoundCloud:Alexander Mann - People In The Clouds: https://soundcloud.com/people-in-the-clouds
Alexander is an extremely talented composer and musician, and a lot of his work on SoundCloud gets a lot of good feedback and attention, because of his unique style in sound.
Please take a moment to support his great work in Memoria, by going to:
http://coup.cc/YaetPlease register to RATE and VOTE, every little bit counts! Please SHARE with your friends!
Only you, the supporters and fans, can help Memoria get made into a feature film!Thank you
Maikol Pinto and team Memoria -
Another big shout out…
On the first shoot day of MEMORIA, we found that we needed an extra hand to help out on set. Thankfully, our friend Mario Arnone came by to help us out in anyway he could. Although he could only stay for an hour and a half, we made good use of his time.
Having him their was great, because it’s always helpful to have another mind work things out and give suggestions during the production. Seeing as to how Mario studied at the same school we did, OCAD University, we had no problem feeding off each others thoughts and suggestions as we worked with the actors in fleshing out the scenes.
To yet another person who went uncredited on the official project page for MEMORIA, we’d like to take this moment to thank Mario Arnone. A good friend of ours in every way. We’ve worked with Mario on many projects in the past, and many more to come.
Maikol Pinto - Producer, Writer, Director
Jamie McMillan - Producer
Jeffrey Royiwsky - Producer
MEMORIACheck out the the trailer at cinecoup.com/memoria
PLS watch / rate / and vote for us! -
The laptop had open browser windows scattered about it’s screen. I was on Craigslist, Mandy, and various other talent websites looking for actors to help out with the upcoming project that I needed to get done in time for the Cinecoup Film Accelerator. There was about 2 weeks left at this point.
Having just recovered from a bout with a bad sickness, I was slightly flustered thinking about the task that lay ahead of me. I had been writing and brainstorming the trailer itself for weeks, so I was confident I knew what it was going to look like. The major factor that was stopping me from actually finishing it, was the lack of actors.Many of the actors aren’t credited in their respective Cinecoup trailers. Especially because most of them aren’t part of the three member filmmaking team. They never really allot space that allowed the projects to enter that kind of information on the website sadly. ( I partly feel responsible thinking back on it now because I should have squeezed them into the written synopsis, but again, the website gave us a very limited amount of space to write in. )
What we wanted to do here, is to give them a big big big shout out and thank you/them for putting time aside on 2 days to show up and make this trailer a reality. It was a fun day of shooting, and it was great getting to know them.It’s thanks to them that Memoria is what it is right now, and it is thanks to them that Memoria is growing into something big, getting quite a bit of attention, earning some of the highest ratings in the competition and receiving spectacular feedback amongst all the other Cinecoup trailers across Canada
I hope everyone gives a round of applause to the actors that made it happen.
Thank you
Dennis Brooks - Old Man / Father
Artjom Gilz - Doctor / Husband
Vanessa Pereira - Daughter / WifeThanks for reading,
Team MEMORIA -
Please check out the MEMORIA ‘concept trailer’ at cinecoup.com/memoria
Please register to rate and voteA visionary film about unexplored ways to deal with Alzheimer’s and memory.
Toronto based team.
Written and Directed by Maikol Pinto
Produced by Maikol Pinto, Jamie McMillan, and Jeffrey Royiswky
Original music composed by Alexander Mann
Starring Dennis Brooks, Artjom Gilz, and Vanessa Pereira
Production consultant: Mario Arnone -
“Memoria” concept trailer is now online. Help us out by checking out the website!
www.cinecoup.com/registration.
