We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Meg Darbourne and Sonali Chugani. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Meg and Sonali below.

Meg and Sonali, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

During the pandemic through peak covid zoom film school, the two of us were neighbors in the SDSU college area. Itching to create more than the basic zoom assignments we’d been receiving, Meg and I would go to each other’s houses and get our little sony cameras out, filming anything we could – friends bday parties, friends eating cereal, friends smoking weed etc. Meg was the idea machine and director, and I was on the technical side, filming and editing our projects, so we had a good rhythm there.

Through our tiny little video pursuits, we noticed a common thread in our workflow – the consistent lack of storage across all devices. Whether it be trying to export a video, or simply film a pickup shot on an iPhone, there was never storage. We’d made too many videos to keep up (and were kind of disorganized)

One beautiful night we were high and editing another one of our video pursuits, when the frustration of no storage peaked. Meg screamed, “Damn it not this again. If I had a production company, I would call it no storage productions.” To which I replied, “you little genius.”

Naturally it started as a joke, as most things do. However we soon realized we had something cool going – a portfolio to put all of our videos, knowing we could look back on it as we grew. With each video we created, we continued to learn something from our mistakes, one of the biggest things being the need for a crew besides just the two of us.

Over the past three years, we have continued to expand by adding many cool creatives to our team and working with budgets way over the $25 we had to work with on our first video.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Initially we made No Storage as a way to just keep creating, and that is what we always come back to. The feeling of getting to share our art with other people and seeing their reaction was kind of addicting. With each video we pushed ourselves to make it better than the last, like it was a challenge against ourselves to see just how good we could be.

Slowly we found our niche to be our vibrant coming of age aesthetic, and music videos adopted this really well. We were able to practice our style and work with diverse crew and artists. Meg, being a queer director, and I being a woman of color cinematographer, decided it was really important to us that we continue to empower these voices and work with primarily female crew. It’s important to us that we make these things for our younger selves and do it the right way with the right people. It’s something we’ve been able to stay true to so far and are proud to continue doing so.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

This question makes us think of one project in particular. We had always been wanting to make a spec commercial. It had been some time and we’d had enough in our bank account to fund a passion project spec. Meg and I had both worked in production for Rihanna”s savage fenty shows the past two years, and really became fans of her lingerie brand and also saw potential in getting the video seen by higher ups at the company.

We chose to make our spec for savage fenty. We rented a spot through peer space, auditioned tons of models, bought a bunch of lingerie, shotlisted a story, and then drove from San Diego to DTLA to shoot the thing. It was a really successful shoot. Until the next day when we got a call from the Peerspace that basically told us they were going to charge us double what we’d paid them for the location because one of our models brought their manager with them and that was exceeding the number of people that were allowed in the room. We took a hit in our personal savings and learned an extremely valuable lesson on following the rules no matter how silly they may seem.

Fast forward a couple months through post production, we had finished the video and were feeling super proud of what we had done, just in time for Rihanna’s show to roll around, Meg and I were both working it and were hyped to show our video to her team at the show. Gearing up for it, we finally had a moment with the CEO one day at lunch. Nervously, we walked up to her, video queued up in hand, ready to finally share our hard work of the past few months with this lady.

“Thats Cute” she said. “Ok and?” I said in my head. She was quickly summoned away for more important duties and never circled back to us. We learned that sometimes you have to make something for yourself without expecting big results. It was a learning experience for sure and somewhere we definitely did not give up. It’s why as long as were 100% happy with it nothing matters and we are going to keep doing that no matter what. No one is going to stop us.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Yea. It’s kind of tough learning how to start a business when everyone fueling the engine is on the creative side. We believe in our art and know that if we had more of a background in tactics to grow a company it would make the journey a lot smoother. There are truly not a lot of resources out there for starting this type of company, as most online sources talk about starting a company for a simple product, not necessarily production company.

Contact Info:

• Website: nostorageproductions.com
• Instagram: @nostorageproductions