The Project

We dive into the San Francisco improv scene with Miles and Rainie in their pursuit to win an elite improv competition series while trying to maintain a degree of sanity — and truth — in their lives off stage.

The Inspiration

Spending the last ten years embedded in the San Francisco creative scene, we’ve met so many incredible artists — and quite a few improvisers. Marcus Sams from Moment Improv was one of the first as he auditioned spontaneously for one of our first short films (read about that in the Nobody’s Laughing). The improv world he lives in inspired Making It Up.

Making it Up is a show that explores the often misunderstood world of improvisation, where the line between stage and real-life is often blurred, and very often a way to deal with the less-funny parts of life in a humorous way.

But Making It Up is about more than just improvisation. It’s about the line we have between truth and not-quite-the-truth. From the way Rainie confuses whether she is engaged or already married, and to how Miles is one way around his father and another around everyone else, their truth is buried in reliance on improvising their way out of their real feelings. Many people can relate to this way of seeing how sometimes we all are just “making it up as we go along,” and how doing that does have consequences that are slowly boiled into all those “not-quite-the-truth” moments.

The Making

Working with the actors on this project was extraordinary for their insights into their characters. We had a mix of stage actors and improvisers, the blend built towards one of the strongest overall casts we’ve ever worked with. Adrian Deane, most notable for her stage work, inspired an additional scene that now opens the pilot, while Nicole Odell, a veteran of the improv scene, informed the world we were exploring.

A tight budget (when are our budget’s not “tight”??) and a compressed filming schedule in critical SF area locations made for long days and demanding hours of cooperation with those in front of the cameras and those behind.

The Result

We’re now in the last stages of post-production, with sound and scoring left, and we couldn’t be prouder of the story and the phenomenal job our actors did to bring it to life. We hope to see this show picked up, so we can continue to develop these amazing characters within this subculture of San Francisco that struggles to survive amid the changing nature of the city.