24 hour film festivals

clarkage

clarkage

Well-known member
I have one coming up pretty soon that i will be entering and i was wondering if anyone had any tips? Is it better to brainstorm during the day then run around at night shooting or brainstorm at night and shoot last minute? Any experiences/comments at all would be great. This is my first one.:)
 
yah you are going to want to leave half of the time to edit. No Sleep. Don't rush shooting or else editing will be hell and will take even longer, and make sure to enjoy it, 24 hour film festivals are meant to be challenging and fun, make the most of the opportunity.
 
Yep, agree with that advice. I participated in and ran 5 of these festivals, and the films that did well were always the ones that had a concept locked down fast enough that they were shooting with plenty of daylight left. You don't have to have a complete script to do that, just a detailed treatment.

We would often split up our team and have one pair writing while the others looked for props, locations, actors, etc.

Notify the actors that you like ahead of time that you might want to use their services, and can they keep their schedule free. Let them know that the time you need them for could change drastically.

Embrace the 2nd unit, if you have to. If you're still shooting late into the night, you damn well better have someone else already hard at work editing back at base.

Minimize everything. Number of actors, locations, but most especially: plot points. The best movies of this type are ALWAYS a very simple concept executed well. If you try to do anything complicated, you will make mistakes and the movie will come out far below your expectations. If you'd doing a comedy, figure out your ONE central joke and build everything off of that. If you're doing a drama, figure out the ONE core theme of the conflict and don't stray far from it. If you're doing action or mystery, set up ONE simple scenario and then pay it off with ONE well-executed twist.

This is hard-earned advice, after making several of these films and seeing some of them turn out better than we hoped, and several of them turn out to be trash. The unfortunate thing is you'll be able to tell which kind of movie you've made by about halfway into the process. One time we were so discouraged by our original attempt that we threw it out 12 hours into the process and started from scratch. We were still shooting 2 hours before deadline. But the movie was based on a simple concept with many funny jokes branching off that, and it ultimately won the contest.
 
wow thanks for the advice doug that helps a lot! And thank you everyone else as well! Actually I should have said this earlier the film MUST be a music video. They are going to give us a specific song and other things that we must use as well. Any advice for music vids? I REFUSE to just shoot a huge dance video i don't have time to choreograph stuff or get a hold of people and i think it is sort of the easy way out. Any suggestions?
 
Make sure your story matches the genre 100% and dont try to be too clever with it.
 
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