TimeFest Official Rules

"Primary Filmmaker" is the person who uploads & takes credit & responsibilty [& ownership] for the entry.


So if Jack and I together make 3 movies. Two can be mine, and the third will then be the winning entry. :laugh:

- Mikko
 
Go time!

Go time!

Barry_Green said:
So embrace the theme. Make it about "time". As Barry_S said, a race against time, or time travel, or an out-of-sequence film that manipulates time such as "memento" or a film that deals with time's influence, maybe something like "the portrait of Dorian Gray"...
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This looks like fun! I'm gonna go watch Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) now. :thumbsup:
 
mikkowilson said:
"Primary Filmmaker" is the person who uploads & takes credit & responsibilty [& ownership] for the entry.


So if Jack and I together make 3 movies. Two can be mine, and the third will then be the winning entry. :laugh:

- Mikko
Click to expand...
hehe and we'll be in dead last... :nads:
 
Zak Forsman said:
are you actually going to make three shorts between now and june 16th? that could answer your question right there.
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Well, the deadline is 3 and a half months from now so sure, why not? 2 definitely. This 3rd one is a rollover from All Hallows that we didn't do. We can also wait for another fest later in the year and see if it works for that.

The question is really more about whether or not we can get the locations and actors we'll need. Also, the stories are pre-existing scripts that all deal with time, but we have to adapt shorts from the feature scripts. If we get the scripts done next week there's no reason why we couldn't get all 3 done.
 
mikkowilson said:
"Primary Filmmaker" is the person who uploads & takes credit & responsibilty [& ownership] for the entry.


So if Jack and I together make 3 movies. Two can be mine, and the third will then be the winning entry. :laugh:

- Mikko
Click to expand...

That works for us. The original idea for one of the three was his anyway.
 
Get it done, Mike!

It's cool to know that there's a possibility of actually directing two shorts and being able to submit for the fest.

Lookin' forward to what everyone cooks up for this one. LONG deadline should equate to even better shorts this time around.
 
Instead of a clock, can we use an Hourglass. I assume yes, since it appears to still fall under the time constraints, but I just wanted to check.
 
As long as the hourglass is an actual hourglass.

And not this:
sophia_loren_4.jpg

Though we appreciate entries which feature both, only an actual time measuring device is required :)
 
I couldn't help either...

Or an hourglass figure in an hourglass....

Okay... it's not as funny as it was earlier.... time to go home!

1204331517.jpg
 
So let me see if I got it right, let's say my movie is about the future, do I supposed to have something that shows what year is it? like text or something saying the year? and showing a clock , watch, or something related?

would this be ok?

help
gv.
 
I don't think it can just take place in the future. I think you would need to have an element in there explaining how something in the past got to that point in the future or affected that future.... as an example. There's many ways you can make it work of course. If you have a specific question I imagine you can PM a mod with your basic idea and he can tell you if it qualifies.
 
abalex said:
So let me see if I got it right, let's say my movie is about the future, do I supposed to have something that shows what year is it? like text or something saying the year? and showing a clock , watch, or something related?

would this be ok?

help
gv.
Click to expand...

You don't have to have something that shows what year it is. An hourglass or a sundial wouldn't do that, and no where does it say your clock has to be working.

But .... as per filmmaker's post lets be clear ...

flmmkr said:
I don't think it can just take place in the future. I think you would need to have an element in there explaining how something in the past got to that point in the future or affected that future.... as an example. There's many ways you can make it work of course. If you have a specific question I imagine you can PM a mod with your basic idea and he can tell you if it qualifies.
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Exactly. Just setting your movie in the FUTURE or PAST does NOT qualify it for time fest than just setting it in the PRESENT.

Not that that's what you have in mind, but just so everyone is on the same page.

For example. Star Trek wouldn't qualify just because it's in the future, and neither would Lonesome Dove just because it's in the past. A Star Trek or Lonesome Dove where the film specifically deals with time ... it's effect, etc. would.
 
OK, OK, OK. just to be VERY VERY VERY clear on what making a movie about time means..


SIMPLY SETTING YOUR FILM IN A DIFFERENT TIME PERIOD DOES NOT QUALIFY AS THE FILM ACTUALLY BEING ABOUT TIME.

If you could just do that then why couldnt you just make a film set in this time period .. 2008. and its a film about a teen who's addicted to world of warcraft and facebook or something. ..this is why simply setting your film in ANY time period does not qualify as the film being about time. .. so again.. setting your film IN a certain time doesn not mean the film is ABOUT time. those are two different things.

IN ORDER FOR A FILM TO QUALIFY AS ACTUALLY BEING ABOUT TIME, THE FILM MUST ACTUALLY DEAL WITH THE SUBJECT MATTER OF TIME.

If someone told you the film was supposed to be about boats .. it wouldnt be enough to simply make a horror film about a rabid gerbil that wants to find a way to forget his childhood .. oh and by the way.. it all takes place on a sailboat. ..the film wouldnt be ABOUT the sailboat just because theres a sail boat in it. it would still be ABOUT a rabid gerbil who want to forget his childhood. so dont just set your film IN a time.. make it ABOUT time itself. playing your movie in reverse or slow motion doesnt make the film about time either. fast then slow and reverse and whatever in a film about the same gerbil is still a film about a gerbil. Simply put you can make your film contain whatever material you want, AS LONG AS THE FOCUS IS ACTUALLY ON SOMETHING TIME RELATED< AND IT IS GLARINGLY OBVIOUS THAT TIME IS A MAJOR FOCUS OF STORY IN THE FILM ...NOT JUST A THEME .. AN ACTUAL MAIN ELEMENT IN THE STORY THAT IS AS IF IT IS A CHARACHTER IN AND OF ITSELF. I would suggest thinking about time and what it is and does, and could potentially do, and narrow down till you have one aspect of time you find interesting enought o make a film about, and then build your story around that aspect of time. I woudl suggest NOT just trying to stick something about time into a story about something else. the possibilities are endless:

not enough time
race against time
too much time passed
routine times in a day
comparision of this time to that
imagining another time
learning to tell the time
timing an athlete, or machine
orchestrating an event where timing is critical
once in a life time moment in time
times up
existance of time
the relativety of time / how time is percieved
the persistance of time
no time to spare
..yes .. time travel too

and the lsit could go on and on and on.. the important thing to notice is that all of these films would be ABOUT time.. and as you see. TIME itself is actually written in and a central focus of each of these ideas. and as long as it also makes it through to be a central and integral main focus of the film made from the idea. the film should qualify as being ABOUT time.

and just because ireally dont want anyone to say they didnt understand im going to slightly rephrase it again.. making a movie with something IN it does not necessarily make the movie ABOUT that thing. if i stick a logo in the bottom right corner of every scene of "Jurassic Park", it doesnt change the film to all of a sudden be about logos. so when you need to make a film ABOUT time.. simply make it ABOUT time. dont try to skirt it. TIME has to be the underlying and overall central focus of the film in some form.. TIME should be the charachter and/or force that moves the story forward and/or plays a major part in the outcome or events that traspire ..even if its completely unseen in a physical manner ....such as a dazzeling ball of morphaliscious energy when somenone rips through a black hole and goes back 3.1764536 years to the exact moment he was about to forget to take his new jock strap to the high school scocial club swap meet and dance off.

..in fact. the idea of time travel alone doesnt even make a film about time.. what if my protagonist travels back in time in the very beginning of the film, and then spends the rest of the film trying to win back his college sweet heart. ..its not a film about time.. its a film about a guy trying to win back his college sweetheart. ..and it just so happens that he went back in time to do it. I would ask.. how was time a factor in this film? could the same film exist without him traveling back in time.. yes. how does time affect or move the story forward? ..it doesnt. what role does time play in the outcome? none. theres no point in making him go back to do it other than to say "look" he time traveled .. so its about time.. and then ...i would have to have my trained chipmunk slap that person who just said that. this is why if anyone is having a hard time understanding, i think they need to think of an idea thats about time first .. and build your charachters around it, and not the other way around.

so.. film about bananas.
DO NOT just put bananas in the background, set your film on a banana boat, show a banana at the end, have the charachters say "banana" every other line, CC your film yellow, have a main charachter named "banana". or anything else that is simply a gimmick whih places bananas into the film. bananas are not the secret ingredient that have to show up at some point in the short. the film actually has to be entirely about the subject of the bananas themselves. how much you love them.. how much you hate them. how yellow they are. but focus on the bananas. and write a story around that focus..

..on bananas.
 
Everyone should remember that the theme is not just a band-aid. I think that's where people may be getting stuck. Like the required object of a camera in LoveFest -- people wanted to know if they could just stick a camera on a table in the corner of one shot, and would that qualify? Yes. But would that qualify for a THEME? No. The film must be about time somehow, in order to satisfy the theme of time -- just like all the LoveFest films had to be about love.

We had people concerned that all the LoveFest films would be "romantic comedies." And now we have people thinking that the TimeFest films should all be about time travel. No. The idea of the films being about time travel is, to me, the same thing as the romantic comedy was to LoveFest -- it's the low-hanging fruit, the first idea that pops into your head. But I think we had no more than maybe two or three RomComs in all the 50 entries of LoveFest, right? So we may only have two or three time travel movies; hopefully you folks will reach deeper and come up with more than just grabbing the low-hanging fruit.

Explore the theme, have fun with the theme, stretch your minds. But don't ignore the theme or think that there's a way to cheat the theme. The theme is the common element for this fest.
 
Here's some films the mods have thrown around as Theme Appropriate in some way:
  • Memento
  • Run Lola Run
  • Dorian Gray
  • 24 type thing
  • Ticking bomb somehere
  • That movie where a guy and a girl wrote love letters to each other even though they were in different times
  • Time Machine
  • Back to the Future
  • Time Cop
  • Donnie Darko
The last 4 are time travel movies, what we're thinking of as low hanging fruit for the fest, but they ARE allowed. Donnie Darko for example would be anything but low hanging fruit. It has time travel as an element but very actively explores the theme of time.
 
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