A feature film on Instagram?

Many of us have had an exceptional experience or a life-changing event and wished we had recorded it for posterity. Nicholas Sosin and Americk Lewis have no such regrets — not because they’ve never done anything memorable, but because they record everything they do.

“Literally every day we have adventures. Every single day,” Lewis explained during a recent interview in The Lakeville Journal’s offices — and yes, Sosin’s camera was running throughout.

Both Lewis and Sosin are tall, shaggy and likable. Lewis was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, the son of Barbadian immigrants. Sosin grew up in Lakeville, the son of Joanna Seaton and Donald Sosin, well-known for their work with silent movies.

Which doesn’t explain why Sosin and Lewis document their every moment. They are millennials, although they may or may not be narcissists, but they are filmmakers — hence their fondness for recording equipment (or maybe it’s the other way around).

Their company, AM Media Group, makes music videos, promotional films, commercials and documentaries for a wide range of clients, including former Yankee manager Joe Torre (a documentary about his charity, the Safe at Home Foundation), model Petra Nemkova (a promotional film for her Happy Hearts Fund) and the pop trio fun. (a music video).

Much as they enjoy their work, the partners had always hoped to make a film that was theirs rather than a client’s, that came from their hearts rather than a client’s needs and desires.

The opportunity arose in January 2015, when they had an excess of labor in the form of seven French interns working at AM for the month. Lewis and Sosin decided to have the crew follow them around for an entire day with the hope that they could turn the resulting footage into a film.

That is how “Caffagne” was born. The first thing Sosin and Lewis did that day was meet a friend for breakfast in a New York City diner. The first few minutes of the film play out like an early morning “My Dinner with Andre,” as the friends discuss celebrations and condiment caddies.

Then, in order to celebrate life with no special occasion involved, Sosin ordered a bottle of champagne. (Why he thought a diner would have a bottle of champagne in stock, not to mention why they did, is left to the viewers’ imagination.)

As a joke, Lewis poured some champagne into Sosin’s half-filled coffee mug. Just to be ornery, Sosin drank it. And that is how Caffagne (the product, not the movie) was born.

Apparently, a mix of coffee and champagne tastes quite good — Lewis compared it to Guinness stout. The friend convinced them they had a million-dollar idea on their hands. So the two set out to make a million dollars. In 24 hours. 

“Caffagne” (the movie, not the product) follows Lewis and Sosin (fortunately, there was enough equipment and interns to form two groups when the pair split up) on their quixotic quest.

Once the shooting was done, Sosin and Lewis spent a year editing 120 hours of footage into a one-hour movie. Then came the next in an already-long series of flashes of inspiration. Rather than following the usual independent-filmmaker route of screenings and film festival applications, they decided to post “Caffagne” online. On Instagram. In one-minute segments.

(For those not familiar with it, Instagram is an app that allows users to upload photos — and, more recently, videos — in order to share them either with selected friends or the entire world. The catch is that Instagram limits how long your video clip can be. Hence the one-minute segments.)

“We have another project that we’ve been working on at the same time,” Sosin explained. “This project is one-minute clips of stuff that we’ve filmed over the years. We call it ‘Random 2017.’ We just took a random clip from one of our hard drives and we posted it up. So we started seeing things in terms of one minute.

“We were watching ‘Caffagne’ with a friend of ours one day, and [Lewis] said, ‘We’re thinking about this as a full thing. But it could work as a series. Let’s see what the first one minute looks like.’ 

“So we looked at the first one minute, and it ended, and I thought, ‘I want to see more.’ He said, ‘We could just post this as a series on Instagram every day or every week or something.’”

Lewis elaborated on his thought process at the time. “Originally, we said, ‘It needs to go into film festivals. We need to get paid this much. It needs to be distributed around the world.’ 

“Then we said, ‘Y’know what? Let’s just release it. Let’s just show our friends. This is an inspirational story about being an entrepreneur, seeing what you can do believing in something, putting yourself out there and doing whatever it takes to try to make something work. This is a good story — let’s get it out there.’”

Sosin says it didn’t take much to convince him. “My experience growing up was watching serials. Serials were silent films that were released in episodic chunks. And now, coming full-circle a hundred years later — because the first serials were released in 1916 — I’m looking at something I’ve created and realizing: Wait a second. They figured this out a hundred years ago, but we’ve forgotten about it. Let’s release a whole movie in one-minute chunks, the same way that they used to, but using a new technology.”

The first episode of “Caffagne” hit Instagram on Jan. 1, 2017. For the first month, Lewis and Sosin released a new episode every day. Then they switched to posting once a week, on Wednesdays. Under this schedule, the last episode will come out in September.

That’s the plan, anyway. But Sosin said that things could change.

“There is a possibility that there might be a future for this idea,” he said, speaking of Caffagne rather than “Caffagne.” “It’s a real thing.”

“People love the product,” Lewis added.

Which brings up the obvious question: Did they meet their goal of $1 million in 24 hours?

Both men answer practically in unison. 

“You have to watch the end of the movie to find out.”

“Caffagne” contains a fair amount of NSFW (not safe for work) language. If you want to watch it on Instagram, the handle is caffagne; Sosin and Lewis’ is allmyfriendsarestars. If you don’t know what that means, your best bet might be to go to YouTube and search “Caffagne.” Click on the first episode, and the rest — as many of them as have been posted, anyway — will play, in order, automatically.