Today we’d like to introduce you to Julia Miller.
Julia, please share your story with us.
MANUAL CINEMA is a performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Kyle Vegter, and I. We all met in Chicago working on different projects in theatre and music. Drew and Sarah are partners and have backgrounds in performance, Ben and Kyle are musicians who are also composers and I studied theatre as well. We got together in 2010 to make a very simple shadow show on one overhead projector called The Ballad of Lula del Ray.
The show went well and people asked us to perform in different places all over the city from bars to lofts and storefronts. We decided to keep working together in this way and came up with the name Manual Cinema. We started out all working our day jobs and working on Manual Cinema in any between the time we had. We kept making work and getting opportunities to perform in the city, and then expanded to touring the work in the U.S.
Now we have grown into a touring company that travels the world! We also do video design work with other organizations and have clients that include the Poetry Foundation, NPR’s Invisibilia and the New York Times.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Running a company in the arts is hard. You can’t always anticipate or guarantee you will have income in the next three months. The five of us worked part-time jobs for years while we also worked on Manual Cinema 20-40 hours a week. We really had to put in the time to make the work good but also to hustle it and get it seen by the right people so we could have more opportunities.
We are all still working more than full-time hours, splitting our days between creative work and admin to keep the company running. That is one of the biggest challenges of running your own company in that if you don’t get your work done, there is no one else to do it! But Manual Cinema has also given us opportunities to travel the world and share our work with thousands of people.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Manual Cinema – what should we know?
Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive visual stories for stage and screen. We use vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble to transform the experience of attending the cinema and imbue it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. We aim to create an immersive and engaging experience for our audiences that gives the viewer more agency to ask how the work is being made as well as seeing the final product.
To date Manual Cinema has created seven original feature length live cinematic shadow puppet shows (Lula Del Ray, ADA/ AVA, Mementos Mori, My Soul’s Shaodow, The Magic City, The End of TV, No Blue Memories); a live cinematic contemporary dance show created for family audiences in collaboration with Hubbard Street Dance and the choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams (Mariko’s Magical Mix); an original site-specific installation at the Met (La Celestina); an original adaptation of Hansel & Gretel created for the Belgian Royal Opera; music videos for Sony Masterworks, Gabriel Kahane, three time GRAMMY Award-winning eighth blackbird, and NYTimes Best Selling author Reif Larson; a live non-fiction piece for Pop-Up Magazine; a self-produced short film (CHICAGOLAND); a museum exhibit created in collaboration with the Chicago History Museum (The Secret Lives of Objects ) a collection of cinematic shorts in collaboration with poet Zachary Schomburg and string quartet Chicago Q Ensemble (FJORDS ); live cinematic puppet adaptations of StoryCorps stories (Show & Tell), and several video adaptation collaborations with the Poetry Foundation (We Real Cool, Poem)
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
The Chicago performance community has been a huge support. We are so lucky to be in a city of ensemble oriented artists that are excited to try new things. Other cities have very closed communities but the Chicago theatre scene thrives on collaboration and experimentation. We had so many people invite us to share our work across the city, curating us at their film festival, salons, or loft shows.
Those opportunities helped us grow the work and our audience. Early on High Concept Laboratories gave us a residency that provided studio space so we no longer had to work in our living rooms, and Theatre on the Lake was our first professional production that helped us get our business structure underway.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.manualcinema.com
- Email: manualcinema@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/manual_cinema/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/manualcinema/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ManualCinema
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
