It is Monday, which means that yesterday, done or not, the 2017 Greensboro - 48 Hour Film Project is now complete. Teams had until 7:00 pm on Sunday to turn in all of their paperwork and their film. Of the 32 Teams registered, 29 films were received on time with 2 more expected to be turned in later. Every year there are new people competing in the film project, which is the goal of the competition. I haven't competed every year, so I don't know if there has been a year that the city competition had everyone turn in a film on time. The first few years I competed, the failure rate was almost 40%. So, it does seem that word is getting out and people are understanding what it takes to complete a film from start to finish in 48 hours.
So, what did my team do? I can give an overview, but I really can't explain or talk too much about the film. When the restriction time is done, I can post the film.
The first thing was to only send the Team Lead to kick-off event.
The desire is usually to send the entire team, so everyone can socialize with the rest of the teams. Sure, this sounds great, but in reality, it is a time destroyer. If you entire team is there at 7:00 pm, then the time it takes for your team to get back to your base of operations is time wasted not brain storming and writing. Based on the crowd in the room and the fact that they have chairs now, instead a mass of people standing in a room, means that teams have learned this little trick.
Our Team Lead called us immediately after she was notified of her genre and hearing the announced required elements (character, prop and line of dialog). As soon as we verified the information, we began throwing out ideas.
Since we didn't have any real locations secured, we were limited to open public spaces and homes offered up. This helped focus our brain storming. We also knew that we were limited in the amount of time we would have to drive around to different locations. I gave a hard stop of 10 pm on Saturday for filming. While more ambitious and younger teams would try to actually write/film/edit during every minute of the 48 hour, I learned that doing so is not a great idea. You need to take breaks and you need to set deadlines.
Since I set a deadline of writing for midnight on Friday, I also had to narrow down the script ideas.
After about one and half hours, I ended discussion and limited the options to two ideas that I thought were feasible and took a vote. In reality, the director is more of a dictator in the group and would probably just pick one idea and make sure the writers get started on that idea. The worst mistake for a team, is to continue hashing out ideas and not having someone decided that enough is enough and that the idea and script needs to be finalized.
With the idea finalized, we began writing the script. Some how, I managed to get myself written in as the main character of the movie and so I was throwing out lines that the writers would review and write down. As a guideline, one page of script is equal to one minute of movie time. We were limited to tell our story between 4 and 7 minutes. Shorter than 4 minutes or longer than 7 minutes, we would be disqualified. At the start, we were worried we wouldn't even get 5 minutes of movie, but later, this became evident that it wasn't going to be a problem.
The meet time for Saturday was 8:00 am. Of course, I started receiving texts that people were running late. By the time we were ready to start shooting, it was 9:30 am. The first scene, which was the longest and had the most dialog took over 2 hours to film. As a second guideline, one minute of final film takes about one hour of shooting time. After we got past that scene and others for that location, the rest of the scenes went much quicker. We finished all shooting at 5:30 pm, just shortly after a thunderstorm rolled in. Well sort of.
After calling wrap and getting the group shot, everyone headed home. The editor took the film and tried to create a rough cut. Unfortunately, he left the script supervisor's notes back at the location. On Sunday, I picked up the notes and drove out to the editors house. We went through the cuts and trimmed things up. The editor decided we needed one more scene and I decided we needed another scene. So, we had to shoot two other quick scenes at his house, which wasn't the original location. Also, we found out that one of the cameras didn't have the sound on, so we also had to voice record some dialog to fit one of the scenes that only that camera recorded. After slicing and trimming the film in order to work in title, credits and other things, we had a movie under the 7 minute restriction. The editor started fixing the color at that point, with just a few hours left to go.
Since we used three different cameras, the image was different for each. This is why it is best to either set a base line on each camera or use exactly the same models with the same settings. All three cameras were made by Canon, but because of their differences, that didn't help.
Also, even with a boom make, lavaliere mic, ambient mic and camera recordings, we still had issues with sound. Properly setting up each of these pieces of equipment is important, but hard to do when people are new to things. Unfortunately, after finding some issues after a test compiles, the editor wasn't able to fix the sound more before he had to hand off the final cut to the Team Lead.
The Team Lead got together all of the paper work and two copies of the movie on usb drives and drove to the drop-off location. She checked-in at 6:58 pm, just 2 minutes under the deadline. Now we just have to go to the premiere on Thursday and hope that our film isn't the worst in the competition.
Wow! That was pretty close to the deadline time. Great work! I hope you win.
These are a lot of fun to participate in, but they certainly bring out both the best and worst in people. My first 48 was in Cinncinnati in 2004. The last one I worked on was in Columbus in 2013. There is a certain formula that works. Setting ground rules in the beginning for how the set is going to run is a helpful thing to do. Kind of like a pre-production meeting getting to know everyone on the team and what their jobs will be and what is to be expected from everyone. One team I worked on we had to make a no alcohol rule because in their previous year they had a problem with people getting drunk and being mean drunks. The best rule of thumb is to pick no more than two representatives to go pick up the line of dialogue. prop, character name, and team genre. As soon as they get that information it should be relayed to the writers back at base who should have an outline hashed out before any of the team reps arrive back at base. Limit your writers to 4 hours to get the job done. If they can't write 6-7 pages in 4 hours then you're in trouble. Call time for cast can be as early as 2:00am depending on the locations you may have access to, and no later than 8:00am Saturday morning to start shooting. Be sure you minimize your locations to no more than three, but one location is best because it makes the best use of the time and your group doesn't have to move and set up and tear down as much saving time. While you are shooting you should be switching out cards to an on site editor who should immediately be working on the edit as soon as the first shots are able to be downloaded. Also a major time saver. Shooting should conclude after 12 hours and the final hours should be used for the post production magic like special effects or whatever you dream you might be able to do in post. I was AD on a 48 in 2011 in which our editor decided at 8:00am Sunday morning he was quitting and he hadn't really done anything. Sadly that project didn't make it in on time, but it did show and won the audience award for our group that year. Anyway, thanks for sharing your 48 experience, It was a pleasure to read.
All good information.
We have never had any alcohol during the contest. LOL Never had any time for that.
Yeah, the best 48 hour film (there are other competitions) that we did was done in mostly one room and we zoomed through the filming and had plenty of time to edit in order to include a special effect.
This one, we filmed in 3 locations that were next to each other, one that was driving distance and in the car as we drove to that other location. And of course, the extra stuff at the editor's house.