Another 48 Hours

More about the 48 Hour Film Project, which is basically all I am thinking about during free time and work time… don’t worry I’m not an air traffic controller and this week, actually, is pretty slow in the work department.

Just to get you up to speed:

Here’s a quick explanation from the website:

"The premise? Filmmaking teams have just one weekend
to make a short film. All creativity - writing,
shooting, editing and adding a musical soundtrack -
must occur in a 48 hour window beginning Friday
evening at 7 and ending Sunday at 7. The following
week, the completed films are screened to an eager
audience."

I am very excited. Why? Mostly because by this time next week I will have a completed a short film. Now, I know it’s going to be hell between now and then. Without this crazy contest, I would probably be watching baseball and drinking beer this weekend. I have my whole life to do that. Hopefully this exciting challenge will spark the motivation to match my creativity and access to talent and equipment. This weekend is the ultimate excuse crusher.

I hope.

I am competing against 60+ teams. One team, that I was briefly a part of, is staffed with a real life producer, a real life director and assorted real life production crew. I will have a bunch of pros on my team… no complaints really, hell I point a camera at people for a living. What I wish I had was a producer.

I mean I can get things done.

I run the financials of my 3-unit condo association.

But the team that I was on has had like three meetings already. They’re using our company’s conference rooms, they’ve sent outlook meeting invitations. I’m mostly emailing people and hoping they respond. Fear not, tonight I’m going to make some calls to shore up locations, crew, equipment and actors. Right now I have some production jack-of-all-trades, a few interested editors and a couple of actors. I’m still looking to nail down a place to edit. The pre-pro scares me much more than the actual filmmaking.

One reason I’m making this short, with its rules and restrictions, is as a dry run for a feature or another short film. If I can make this movie, if I can get it all together and show some people (on my team or elsewhere), hey look what we can do. When everything comes together, under these constraints, imagine what we can do with all the time in the world, a well thought out idea and more than 48 hours to achieve it.

I hope.

I went to Boston Costumes to check out what they had to offer. It was inspiring. They open at 9am on Saturday and my costume/prop people or myself are going to head over there sometime between when we write the script and start shooting. Other important places to get props will probably be Home Depot, the various Walmarts and Targets, and You-Do-It Electronics… don’t ask.

I’m going to use this site as a way to document this project for now.

Oh, yeah, the short version of this post is that I haven’t worked on the script.