Remember Me is a live-action short about 40-year old Claire, who recently got dumped and moved back home to take care of her dying father. Claire now decides it's time for her to go out on a date.
The project was written and directed by Claire Titelman, an actor, filmmaker and comedian whose appeared in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,
Parks and Recreation and
I’ve Got Issues, as well as on
Chelsea Lately. Titleman is also the short's principal character.
Remember Me was shot by cinematographer Steve Collins, who describes the project as a "less-typical" story.
"The film was made with no crew, no script and no money as an artistic exercise to process some of the feelings director Claire Titelman was going through, having spent the past seven months moving back to her childhood home to help with her father’s dementia," Collins reveals. "She very much wanted to make a piece, but was short of money, so we conceived of something that could be handled by just the two of us.”
Collins teaches film at Wesleyan University and used the same cameras he teaches with - the Canon C200.
“They have great versatility,” he notes. “You can shoot UHD on a small SD card or raw on the larger C-Fast card. They’re light enough for a one-person crew situation, but they’re adaptable if you want to build them out into more of a professional rig."
Collins also likes the way the C200 reproduces skin tones.
In the case of Remember Me, the project began with the idea of shooting improvisations that would help Titelman figure out the shape of her story.
"We weren’t sure what it was yet, only that it would be her going out on a date, while oversharing her experience with the long goodbye of taking care of someone with dementia," he recalls. "We kept our tools very basic. I used the zoom lens that comes with the camera and shot in the UHD mode to make the workflow simpler. We had a boom on a c-stand and a wireless mic patched into the camera. The whole thing was lit with two 1x1 lite panels, and I was able to keep at the 850 ISO the camera is rated at. When Claire started improvising, the material was so riveting we immediately had more ideas about where it would go and roughed out an outline for a short film."
In hindsight, Collins notes that if they had planned to screen at Sundance, he might have pushed to get C-Fast cards and shot raw.
"Our lo-fi approach ended up contributing to the intimacy of her performance," he shares. "The film has a very confessional quality to it, and you can’t have a big crew in a confessional booth!"