We recently connected with Megan Mead, Rachel Malasig, Gabriel Malasig and Kaylor Myers of Pranksters Ink Productions and have shared our conversation below.

Pranksters Ink, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about growing your team – how did you recruit the first few people, what was the process like, how’d you go about training and if you were to start over today would you have done anything differently?

The coolest thing about filmmaking is it’s a team effort. Pranksters Ink started in 2013 with a stop motion project made entirely by Megan. We are now a team of four creatives supporting, working and inspiring each other.

We were drawn together by a similar creative style and it wasn’t until our writer joined the group that we coined our term for it. “Absurdly Serious” We all came up through film school at the height of gritty, dark, “realism” filmmaking. But when we wanted to tell our own stories we found from our experiences that life has a silliness even in the harshest circumstances. Our team is tied together by this core mentality: tragedy plus time equals comedy, and no heartfelt moment is safe from an impending punchline.

For each live action project our first step is to “crew up” which means our team of 4 balloons very quickly to 30 or more. Our biggest focus during this process is empathy and compassion both behind and in front of the camera. We are committed to cultivating a creative environment on our film sets that is open to collaboration from everybody on the project. This means we center our crew’s safety, creativity, and mental well being, holding it as top priority so that we are able to bring our best work to the film we’re creating together. Our biggest hope is that the people who work with us feel the joy of being the little kids with camcorders we used to be.

We want our company to build and empower a community of creatives outside of us that keep experimenting and telling their own stories. Don’t wait for permission or for the elusive green light from a big studio. Create wherever you are, in the community you’re in, with the support of other like minded artists. Start however small you need to, and don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by the process.

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?

Absurdly Serious. What does that mean? What does it mean to us?

Megan: Reality and my experience of it often feels claustrophobic, and I’ve found that imagination and absurdity are some of the few things that free me from the confines of the mundane. Sure the world is fraught with peril, but I saw a little crow playing with a french fry on my way to work. I am now creating a whole backstory for said crow and his whole crow family and the crow society that they live in, which probably has their own version of bird capitalism that needs to be overthrown somehow, and suddenly, my day is significantly better. And my hope is that my stories have the same impact on people– that they feel a little less trapped by the world and a little more whimsical.

Rachel: There is something about lighthearted movies with dark moments that resonates with me. I grew up balling my eyes out at Pixar movies like Up and Inside Out. A lot of “realistic” movies forget that life is equal parts grace and absurdity. We’re all just trying to get through the day, make ends meet, and find some measure of happiness while we do it. We can easily take ourselves too seriously and I want to tell stories that remind people if nothing matters then you get to decide what matters.

Gabriel: Listen it’s brutal out here. In the face of those challenges and trauma you can either cry or laugh. Humor is not just a coping mechanism, it’s a measure of hope. We aren’t afraid to get real but we know from experience that life is equal parts profound and insane.

Kaylor: Life is absurd, but for some reason I’m still seriously trying to figure it out. To me, storytelling is a bit of a filter or a magnifying glass providing a way for me to try to experience an overwhelming array of perspectives without also being completely crushed under their emotional weight. I think all absurdly serious storytellers are tasked with the dual bravery and stupidity of slowing down enough to sink below the surface and take a long, curious look at humanity, with all our wild idiosyncrasies, fuzzy “gray areas”, total goofiness and our personal impact. To me, absurdly serious storytelling is basically translating and comparing notes from these beautiful, zany, painful, simple excursions so that hopefully we all come away feeling a little more seen and a little more connected.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Megan and Rachel were rivals in film school, deeply intimidated by each others’ skills. Then they realized they would be more powerful with their powers combined.

Gabriel wanted to join the team and Rachel asked him to “learn how to take feedback” and so he got his masters degree and won the SlamDance Screenwriting competition with his Thesis project just to prove that he could.

Kaylor was always behind the scenes acting as our casting director, script doctor and development guru. Then one day we realized she’d been here the whole time and we should make it official.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We’ll let you know when we figure it out.

In all seriousness we are actively searching for investors for our first feature film. We’re using our day jobs in the industry to try and make connections with low budget investors and producers. We create pitch packets to show the vision and potential of feature films we would like to get off the ground. But in the meantime we aren’t letting it stop us from producing our own short films to hone our craft and put the stories we want to tell out into the world in one form or another. We’re creators! It’s just what we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://prankstersink.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prankstersink/?hl=en
• Other: https://vimeo.com/prankstersink

Image Credits

Photographer Megan Mead and Kaylor Myers