The motto of Foley Marra Studios is "Make the Movie You Can Make." We are a group of highly driven filmmakers who tell stories of empowerment. Our top priority with this fundraiser is to cover the expenses of post-production and get this film into festivals.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

 

So, New Girl, The L Word, Sex and the City, and Living Single walk into a bar...

A story of female commonality, support, and wine. Lots of wine.

We’re not sure if you’ve heard, but it turns out a pandemic CHANGES EVERYTHING! Amid all the sadness and stress that people have been experiencing during this bizarre and unique time in our shared history, we have also seen people re-inventing themselves, discovering that life is too short to spend it doing what you don’t want to do. That is why Wino feels so personal to all of us involved. The story of Wino is a metaphor for what we are all dealing with as we find ourselves at a new and unexpected place on the road of life. How we got here doesn’t matter as much as where we are going from this point on. Kat embodies the spirit of embracing change amid calamity and accepting that life at its best is a team sport that gives us all the chance to shine.  The truth we see in Wino is the truth that fuels Foley Marra Studios and its collection of incredible actors and technicians.

We have gone from an acting class to a working independent production company, specializing in film, television, and podcasts. And everything we have been able to do is the result of some incredibly dedicated performers who were willing to spend hours on YouTube learning the Adobe Creative Cloud, figuring out how blood spatter works and building upper body endurance to hold a boom mic confidently.

          

The reason this particular project struck such a chord with us is that we get to see a woman on the verge of the great adventure of her life and she doesn't even know it. As filmmakers, we wanted to recreate the world that we all live in and share the stories of the women that we know. All of us involved with this project have had our world's shaken over the last few years in ways large and small. All of us were forced out of safe zones and forced to answer our own calls into the unknown. One of the things that we really wanted to explore in Kat's call to adventure is the quirky tribe of women who jumped to support Kat, encouraging her to rescue herself rather than sinking into the identity given to her by a man and all the compromises that come with that choice. 

Wino is the unique experience of a woman exiting a life that no longer serves her desires or her identity, even if it appears that she is being shot out of that life in a cannon. Kat’s journey represents the experience and possibility that we all share: adversity becomes an opportunity.

Before our story begins, Kat is a modern woman with a comfortable life; a good education, a perfect husband, a life of seeming purpose as she attended the fundraisers and luncheons engineered to help those people ‘less fortunate’ than Kat.  While she was attending to the needs of others, she was ignoring the troubling issues that were happening in her own marriage as her perfect husband kept secrets that were quietly eroding the foundations of their marriage and their financial security. In the end, Kat finds work as a waitress in a run-down wine bar, the point at which we pick up our story.

So, why this? Because we want this story to be seen! Our goal is to gain enough exposure that we can turn Wino into a television series. We want to share women's honest struggles, our real friendships, and wine. There can never be enough discussions of wine! We have seen the seeming unbreakable institutions around us crack, and while a lot of it was scary, we also realized that the entertainment industry doesn't only belong to those with the secret handshake. We're doing this because we want to join the conversation: about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a new style of an entrepreneur going up against old institutions and biases, what friendship means in this new world of possibility and finally, and most importantly, we need something to laugh about and some new friends to laugh with. We are here to prove that there is an audience for positivity and possibility. That's what we are hoping to give to everyone who comes on this adventure with us. 

 

So, why are we here if we've already finished principal photography?

Three reasons:

3. There is a lot of work to be done. Post-production - which includes editing, sound design, music licensing, color correction, and so on - can be extremely expensive.

I have many friends who were able to get through the production process only to have thrown their footage in a drawer because they had no money to complete their post-production. That's not going to be us. We're a studio that believes in getting it done. 

2.      Every project we have done up to this point has been funded by members of the studio.

We used the office and each other’s homes for locations. We cooked vats of chili and spaghetti for our craft services. We made movies that look gorgeous and expensive for the cost of a just-okay gaming computer. It’s time to go to the next level and see what we can do when we have a project fully funded.

3.       Because we want to do the thing that is so often disregarded in pursuing a completed short film, we want to pay everyone associated with our productions, including our performers.

For those who have never produced a short film before, as you lay out your budget, usually the first thing that you want is money for equipment and individuals with the knowledge to operate the equipment, then locations, office supplies, people to help the people running the equipment and then, if there's anything left, you pay the people who appear on the screen.

We want to ensure that everyone who has offered their gifts and talents to this project receives fair compensation, from our production assistants to our actors. Our actors/artists are the core of our success. For Foley Marra Studios, this is an exciting step to the next level in our evolution as The Little Studio That Could.  

 

 

Our funding goal is first and foremost to pay the professionals for the time that they are taking to produce this work. From the actors to the crew, it takes a family of dedicated people to make movies that matter.

Our initial Goal is $12,000 to cover our outstanding production and post-production costs

Stretch Goal #1 - An additional $4,000 to cast and crew salaries

Stretch Goal #2 - A final $2000 to cover  Festival Marketing.