48 Hour Film Festival

[faultygoblin]

Wasn't sure where to post this under,
how many of us are participating in the 48 hour film festival this year?
This year will a first for me,

Any areas you felt that were given more say in judging then it should have?
Did audiences respond better to humor pieces?, any tips for getting video lock in quickly and not suffering burnout?

Did you film and edit in rotating shifts (to get some sleep?)
Any experiences you can share would be fun to hear,
and to those of you participating this year...
Good luck hope to see some dvxuser members included in the screenings

 

[bighouse]

I just got back from a meeting with the director and crew. Most of us are just meeting for the first time.

This is also my first year. We have a pretty large and diverse team with a writer/director & leader of the team, editor/writer, animator/graphic designer, DP (that's me), Gaffer/2nd camera, audio, Production Coordinator, PA's so the work load is pretty well dispersed. Oh the actors too most of them Pros. I'm pretty excited about this.

 

[ChrisHurn]

I did 48Hours(.co.nz) (The New Zealand one) last year. It was really fun, but it was really hard and pretty much everything...I mean, everything went wrong.

Funny thing too, it was my first film and I decided to just jump in and do it. We got no sleep. I ate pretty much mothing and survived off the free cans of V we got.

Friday night was allocated to writing the script, we didn't get a solid idea until about 3-4am, we were supposed to be shooting at 8. Keep it simple. It would have been much better to have sorted out an idea WAY earlier so we could do some other planning before 8. I'm not the most experienced but I'll just give a few things I learned from doing it: Keep the idea really simple and the actors count low. We got too many actors all geared up before the competition, and then when we were writing the script it was a case of "oh, so and so hasn't had a line in a while, let's chuck one in here...". Horrible.

Saturday was shoot day. We ended up having to scrap everything shot on saturday, because the audio was rubbish and we couldn't fit in ADR. Also, I had to leave for a while on the shoot, to go and grab some gear, and didn't see some of the shoot, when we were running it through, there was like 100 crosses of the line of action I swear, looked really bad... Our sound guy wasn't feeding back correctly and yeah it was a big problem. Communications! We ended up editing a whole segment and worked all saturday night, then scrapped it all on sunday morning at about 5am. Decided to reshoot the whole film on Sunday. Editing from 1pm until 6:30pm. We had to hand it in at 7.

While the edit was feeding back to the camera, it glitched and fast fowarded 2 minutes. We had no choice but to run with it, and we handed in what we had.
Lots of other stuff went horribly wrong too, but thats just a basic outline. Before the competition we thought we were ready, but we were not.

Check your sound, check your video - spend time checking things. It pays off in the end. Some of this stuff sounds stupid, but we honestly forgot to think through things beforehand like making sure there was enough battery to last the long shoot outdoors...That stalled us a few hours...

The audiences responded to humour pieces far better, but to be honest pretty much everything was funny since it was made in 48hrs...at the screening of ours at the cinema, you could hear me yell "and, cut!", cracked up the whole audience. lol.

We learned a huge lesson from this and 48hrs this year (may 30) will be much better. I've had a year of torture in my mind of the things I should have done last year...I'm so ready.

-Chris

 

[bighouse]

Wow Chris. You should make this years film about making a film in 48 hours where everything goes wrong. Could be pretty entertaining. Fortunately pretty much everyone on this team does production for a living so hopefully we'll have fewer problems-but I'm knocking on wood as I write that.