So, this last weekend (July 12-14) I produced a short film for the 48 Hour Film Project with my friends Marcus, Heath, and Chuck. What an experience. I had done this last year as a part of the DivX team and learned a lot. Much of which I brought forward this year. The most important thing I learned last year is to have people understand their role in the project, and keep people focused on that role. As well as keep people from trying to other people’s roles. Overall, I think the project came out good, it could have been better but we made a few mistakes and some bad calls on scheduling. I think we were over ambitious and tried to make it bigger than it needed to be. Additionally we didn’t get enough actors lined up and when it came down it I ended up playing the lead. (I have no acting experience, none, nada). Fortunately Pearl is experienced and worked with me so I could pull it off (Man that was a tiring day).

The event started out with a big gathering up in Sorrento Valley where we would draw our genre and receive our three vital components to the film, character, line of dialog & prop. We met Tyler, Kirk & Pearl there as well as running into some fellow DivX people and Marcus’ sister-in-law who was also competing. Basically none of the groups can leave until everyone has their genre to keep it on an even playing field. They called our group up to start drawing genres and Marcus idled his way up there. We were the second to pull our genre and we got……….Road Movie! Gah! I had road movie last year! Ah well, its something we can work with. The other components were Alex/Alice Gromm a County Employee, A Spoon, and the line “Keep that thing away from me”. With that information we hopped in the cars and headed back to the house.

Heath and Chuck were waiting for us at the house and Pearl came along (which turned out to be an excellent add). We brainstormed our ideas, Marcus being the ‘happy’ guy wanted the happy ending to the story. The rest of us wanted the main character to get run over by a car at the end. Haha! After we got a rough outline together, I ousted everyone else so Heath could get to writing. Something I found last year is that if you have the entire team writing, you end up with a disjointed story that kind of rambles around. Definitely get the team in on brainstorming, but I think it worked better to have our writer and director collaborate this year.

The next day was overly ambitious. Marcus wanted to head all the way to Yuma so we could get a shot of the AZ/CA border. We were quickly 2 hours behind schedule and we realized that hitting Yuma is just not feasible. Marcus settled for El Centro, but again as we found out that just cost us too much time. (Next year no remote locations!) We rehearsed on the way out there while Marcus and Colby got all our backdrops for the green screen. We eventually found a location with little traffic and filmed one of the scenes. I got to skid around in Marcus’ boxy Scion to get some action in the movie. That was pretty fun. After we wrapped from the shot we started down the road and I kept hearing something wacking against the car. I pulled over, and his left rear tire was coming apart. Another delay, I had to get two new tires for his car. The sliding around didn’t do all the damage, these tires were pretty far along to being destroyed. But another delay none-the-less.

We got back into San Diego later than we planned, about 4 hours behind schedule now. Our film crew got setup quickly to shoot two scenes inside the house. Man, these guys are good! I was really impressed and think they did a spectacular job. We shot the two scenes, wrapped and headed over to the second to last shooting location where we’d setup the green screen. The goal was to control the lighting situation and allow us to take as many takes as possible in a controlled area. I think that was great, what we didn’t account for was the level of effort around getting the green screen footage cut and edited AND have it look good. Lesson learned. We wrapped at about 4:30 AM and had to meet up again at 6 AM.

Final shot was at Stephanie’s Bakery in Ocean Beach (Awesome pastries!) The film crew got there first followed by the actors. The shot here was brief and met our goals. And, brought a wrap on all the filming for the weekend. At this point plenty of people were beat and just plain exhausted. This is where Marcus and Kirk got to work on the footage. I wish we had planned our time better as I think Kirk could have got started earlier that morning or the prior night with some of the footage we had. Our bad.

While Marcus and Kirk were at work we filmed a few last pickup shots that didn’t require much skill and got those back to the house. Then around 2:30 it was all in Marcus’ hands. We knew we were behind and around 5 we recognized we weren’t going to have something we’d like by the 7 PM cutoff, so we made the decision to hit the second midnight cutoff but be disqualified for the contest. I think it was a good choice and truthfully, I was dissappointed we didn’t make it as so many people worked so hard. But there was no way in hell I was not going to allow us to miss the midnight turn in. Marcus rallied around 8 or so and we found with some changes and adding music, it wasn’t bad at all. Unfortunately we were plagued with Premier rendering problems and our final render cut stuff off at the end. We turned in what we had at 11:56 PM. Just in time!

Here’s what I’ll take from this year forward to my next project.

Other than that, the team we had this year was pretty awesome. Our camera crew did a great job with lighting and setting up the shots. Those guys worked their asses off and I’d like to thank Colby, Keiko, and Layne. ROCK ON! Thank you Tyler for the music, I wish we had more time to work with you directly and compose custom music for the film. Kirk, thank you for your help with the effects, next time we’ll have to recruit you for some more stuff (and I should do some better scheduling next year to accommodate that). Chuck, thanks for picking up the audio work. Alison, Gregg & Amanda, totally appreciate you guys jumping in at the last minute and making this happen. Eve, thank you for your make-up help. We’ll do it again next year I’m sure.

I’ll be posting again here when I’ve got the video online for all of your viewing pleasure.