My friend, Sage Suppa, is always creative and passionate.
He appears in this site repeatedly due to many great creative collaborations over the years. Sage and I know each other from middle school, growing up in the same town, Stamford, CT. We casually kept in touch over the years. I was living in Stamford again in 2008, and by the spring of 2009 I was into Photography and looking to build a portfolio. Sage was living in Manhattan at the time and asked if I was interested in photographing his performance in a small play. Ever since, we have had a great creative relationship, encouraging and inspiring each other to keep chasing our dreams until we catch them. And we will both catch them.
In late 2009, Sage got in touch with me again. He was starting a new web-based series called, “Copying Life.” The series was about "twenty-somethings living in Manhattan, trying to figure it all out;” a plot similar to Friends or HIMYM, but it was a single camera format and it had it’s own unique tone and quirks. I liked how deeply Sage dove into the project. The full breadth of the production included:
- A custom show intro and theme song.
- A website and Twitter page.
- Full episodes that would contain the show's main narrative and it's three main characters.
- Vlog posts which would be one on one time with one of the show's characters. The character may voice a thought or two relating to the show's main narrative or it would be a sidebar, a random moment in the life the character.
- Facebook profiles for each of the characters including their hometown, birthday, as well as high school and college photographs (I'm still friends with Sid Sorrel, Kaily Kraus and Aaron Karp on FB).
He also included many behind the scenes, and production videos showing his creative process. It was incredible and he put a lot of work into it. All of the Copying Life material can still be found on YouTube.
Sage asked me to come into NYC and shoot some stills/portraits that he would later use for the show’s promo material. We began by meeting up in Harlem. At that point, Sage knew what the show was going to be about. He wanted to capture the essence of being young, alive, and living in Manhattan. It was equal parts playful joy and uncertain angst. We captured portraits of the three main characters and we started with Sage’s character, Sid Sorrel, the everyman looking for love.
We then met up with Nikki Frangakis to capture images for her character, Kaily Kraus, the bartender/aspiring actress. And lastly it was back to Sage's apartment to work with, K'Idar Miller who played the frustrated playwright and video game junkie, Aaron Karp. We finished by going up to the roof of Nikki's apartment to get a few images of the group together.
Included below are a few extras and outtakes. There’s nothing better than playing in Manhattan with a DSLR. Also included are the promo posters that Sage eventually created using the photographs.
