“‘Please Forward’ grew out of a fundamental disconnect: On the one hand, the holidays are a time of joy and celebration, but on the other, for many companies the end of December is a crucial reckoning time, as sales are tallied and financial books are closed for the year. The unfortunate result is often an uncomfortable undercurrent to an outwardly festive company holiday party. Moreover, while in 2009 the country was in the midst of a recession, the news was still dominated by business success stories in the tech arena — even though in many cases, what the companies actually did was often obscure, if not completely inscrutable. So we created Chain Mail International, a company whose sole business was creating and forwarding chain emails — not necessarily ‘spam’ per se, but everything from feel-good cat pictures to critical warnings of dubious validity — the digital descendants of the old-fashioned chain letter. A company that would have no apparent revenue stream to speak of, but that would still be obsessed with advancing into the digital age — at the expense of anyone who couldn’t keep up. We shot at the same Atlantic Media offices where we’d filmed ‘Number One With a Bullet’ and ‘All Roads Lead Away’ — filling our location with as many holiday props as we could muster (and employing some creative lighting and framing to allow early May to pass for late December).”