Desperate to find the man of her dreams, sweet and plain Ava tries a last ditch effort, speed dating. But the absurd cast of characters she encounters makes her wonder if being single is not so bad after all.
Dating can often become a complicated thing, and when things become desperate you often try to speed things off. Filmmaker Meghann Artes wanted to make a film that people were able to relate to, and what better relations can people have than failed relationship. Like with almost any good idea, Speed Dating started with a glass of wine, conversation and a lot of laughter. Meghann was at a point where work was keeping me very busy and hadn’t had time to make a film in a while.
Looking for inspiration, I opened some wine, called up one of my best friends and began to reminisce on the time we both went speed dating. We moved on to the subject of dating in general and memories of dates that went less than perfectly. Almost everyone has had an experience like that. I compiled some of our most off the wall stories and then began to put my spin on them. I have a tendency to lean toward the absurd, so my mind just let loose on all the crazy things that people encounter when looking for love.
Charmed by a character that has the same poise as Amélie Poulain, Speed Dating is an invigorating film with a life of its own, and like many pixelated films, the opportunity is given to amplify reality with some great imagination.
I wanted to make something entertaining and relatable but I also wanted it be different and bigger than my last few films. I had been doing a lot of copy stand-style stop motion animation by myself, and I felt the need to scale up and spread my wings so to speak. On Speed Dating I got to work with a large cast, including over thirty extras, and a full film crew.
Speed Dating was shot entirely frame by frame using Dragonframe software on two iMac desktops with multiple Canon 6D and 7D DSLR cameras. While the shoot took about 12 days, the entire film from concept to output took about 2 years. Meghann just finished another pixelated short film called Sleepy Steve that has just started its film festival run and has played at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival. Following her love for what pixilation allows her to achieve, Meghann is currently in the concept stage for a new film that she says is going to be different in tone and style than her previous work.
Meanwhile I will start training my beard to do some of the stuff that guy was doing.