Casey Gates Frey Directs Sci-Fi Romantic Comedy Short "Crystal"

Casey Gates Frey directed and co-wrote (with Daniel Frey) this short film, Crystal. The sci-fi romantic comedy centers on a neurotic young woman who thinks she’ll never find Mr. Right--until she gets access to a top-secret, artificially-intelligent matchmaking app. It promises to use Big Data, machine-learning neural-networks, and every other tech tool that nobody really understands, in order to find her perfect man...if such a thing actually exists. The film explores the difficulty of finding love in the age of Instagram, and poses the question: Does our technology know us better than we know ourselves?

Casey Gates Frey is a writer and director currently on staff at Elizabeth Banks' WhoHaHa, a digital platform promoting women in comedy. When she’s not spotlighting comedians or making viral videos, the writer-director creates her own work through a film initiative titled Lady Brain, for which she received a BlogHer “Voice of the Year” award in 2016. Her career in media landed her an on-set digital producer role for NBC’s The Good Place, where her work contributed to a 2019 Emmy nomination for Achievement in Interactive Media Within a Scripted Series. Her pilot The Bump was a semi-finalist in The 2019 Black List x WIF Episodic Lab, and most recently advanced to the semi-finals of the 2020 Pitch Competition at the ATX Television Festival.