48 Hour Film Project

Recently, I’ve been telling Jessica that I’m grumpy that I haven’t had time to do creative things like make movies, so when FoxCard Media announced their 48 Hour Film Project, Jessica told me I should blow off one weekend doing something crazy that I’d love and go for it. This is, notably, despite the fact that we were supposed to work on the nursery this weekend, and making a film, start to finish, in 48 hours, meant no working on the nursery.

So, as something of an homage to that sacrifice¹ and to the awesome pun that is our last name, I decided to have the plot of my movie center around a guy who is creating a film for the 48 hour film contest instead of working on the nursery with his wife.

The contest started at 6pm on Friday and deadline was 6pm this evening. I storyboarded Friday night, wrote the script on Saturday morning, then was finished shooting by 2:30 on Saturday leaving 24+ hours for editing².

Sadly, while editing, I realized that the camera on my phone is soo much better than the video camera that we own, so I decided to refilm almost the entire thing with the phone. That brought mixed editing and filming to noon sunday, with some final replacement editing after. I was done by 3pm. Plenty of time to spare³

The constraints of the film were as follows:

• 4-7 minutes long
• Choose two of the following themes:
• Man vs. Machine
• A Hero Rises
• The Great Journey
• A Secret Romance
• Connecting With People
• Use the required prop of a foil pie pan and a can of whipped cream
• Optionally add up to 10 quotes from a list of given movie quotes

My movie, at exactly 7 minutes, is super silly, but I was happy with the script, a mix of “movie about a movie” style with romantic comedy, and a bunch of movie geek stuff thrown in for good measure. Plus, it was all remarkably true. I’m not as happy as I could be if I had taken time and built an actual plot structure with composed shots, but for a quick 48 hour festival, I’m fairly happy.

1. and it is a sacrifice. She seriously wants to work on the nursery [↩]
2. I’ve made movies before, I’ve already been bitten by the “shoot until the last minute” mistake. Editing is the hard part [↩]
3. which seems like it’s unnecessary, until you get into a situation where something goes wrong and you realize that you need a few hours to react to a problem. [↩]