48 Hour Film Project - I Survived!

Shooting a Road Movie!

It's over a week since I completed the 48 hour film project. I took off for a few days in Las Vegas to recooperate.

I can now reflect.

It was an insane 48 hours. I got about 5 hours of sleep in two days. I started becoming delirious...and yet I kept going. We only had 48 hours! So, it was utter insanity, but a lot of fun too. I'd recommend it to anyone. You should do it!

For those of you film buffs, we used a relatively cheap camcorder to shoot it, the format being mini-dv. It was edited on Final Cut Pro, but I'm sure even iMovie would have sufficed. There were a few groups that were more high budget. One had a crane shot, but they were in the minority.

As to how the 48 hours were broken up - writing took up most of the initial 48 hours on Friday night. Saturday was spent shooting all day. Since we had drawn "Road Movie" that meant using a car and shooting in empty parking lots and random locations. It took ALL day. Saturday night was reserved for editing into the wee hours of Sunday morning, with music being added in last of all on Sunday morning along with any final edits. It was an action packed weekend with barely any time to sleep, much less eat.

Our group finished about two hours early - that being when we dropped the tape off at the drop-off location. Success!

My opinion on how the film turned out? It's fun! The initial minute is the best of it and we should have kept that energy going, but overall I thought we did a good job, especially since none of us had done anything like it before. It's a cute little movie and I thought we used the required elements cleverly, but, then again, it is MY movie.

The time constraint is stressful, but fun. You HAVE to get it done! It's a great motivator if you have a tendency to procrastinate.

I would highly recommend it to any wannabe filmmaker. They even show it in a theater a few days later. I missed the screening because I was in Las Vegas, but the rest of my group went and had a great time.

So, if you're pondering the 48 hour film project in your city...just do it! It makes for an exciting, busy weekend! And, did I mention it's also fun?

48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film

This may sound like a delusional blog, being that I'm writing it on 2 hours of sleep.

It's about 13 hours into the 48 hour film project. Everything is still quiet...for about another hour.

It was smooth sailing, at first. For those of you not in the know, the 48 hour film project is basically writing, shooting, and editing a film (with music!) in 48 hours. You get a genre, prop, line of dialogue, and a character at 7 pm Friday night and have until 7 pm Sunday to get it all together...somehow. It's scary, but sounded like a blast, so I was in and signed up!

So, it was Friday the 13th, 7 pm and I picked the genre - Road movie. Okay, that's do-able. It's better than western or historical biopic. I think. Although, musical would have been fun...probably until about 6 in the morning when we'd still be coming up with songs.

But, anyway, road movie!!!!! And, then there was the prop, the characters, and the line of dialogue that also had to be included into the film. The character - Ronald or Rhonda Donellson, game host. The prop - 3 or more potatoes. The line of dialogue - "Leave it to me, I'm a professional." Hilarious!

Now, to write a 4-7 minute film. The hard part. What in the world were we going to write about? And, potatoes???? 3 or more? Game host? What's a game host, exactly? Huh? Ahhhhh!!!! But, that's the point, right? It's FUN!!!!!

So, our team spent all last night into the wee hours of the morning writing a script and coming up with a concept, hoping it was funny and would translate into film...at least enough to make it watchable. I'm hoping it still makes sense today - the whole what sounded hilarious at 4:30 am deal.

I can barely believe that was last night...and it's now this morning. And, we have to shoot the whole thing. Am I going to make it?????? OF COURSE!

I could go into details on what the 6 fantastic writers of the film came up with after much debate, but I won't just yet. I'd rather show the film at the end of this process. Just know there was lots and lots of pizza and caffeine, much debate over witty lines of dialogue, punctuated with character impersonations, and lots and lots of laughter (probably much to the discontent of my roommates who were trying to sleep at 3 am...oops). Oh, and definitely some delirium in the wee hours - "Wait, we cut that line?" Yes, 2 seconds ago.

Ok, I need to go shoot a film. There's less than 36 hours left! At least I have the potatoes, that's what Ralphs is for at 6 am.... I wonder what went through the cashier's mind at my purchase - yes, it's 6 am! I must have potatoes. Geeesh.

On that random sleep deprived delirious tangent - it's time for me to go put together a film! Woo-hoo!