Again it has come and gone. The most intense 48 hours of my year is spent surrounded by friends, new acquaintances, movie set jargon, artists, and sleep deprivation. Check out my team's entry last year 86 during the inaugural Orlando 48HFP.
What is the 48 Hour Film Project?
The 48 Hour Film Project is an internationally run film project and festival that gives groups 48 hours to write, produce, edit, and distribute a film. Groups draw from a list of genres, and then are given a prop, line of dialogue, character and occupation/hobby.
As last year, I'm reprised my position as Director but reluctantly added two other positions. The previous year, my friend John brought all of us together for this competition and was Producer. John was unfortunately unable to participate this year, making me the go to guy for this year.
Friday at approximately 7pm, we received our genre, Film De Femme (strong female character) and kept it, deciding not to attempt a wild card genre. Last we were given our elements:
- Prop: A cake
- Line: "Your eyes are telling a different story"
- Character: Virginia and/or Victor Lambe
- Occupation: Illustrator
Together a group of 7 (2 actors and 5 crew) got together and within 2 and half hours a story had emerged, and a finished screenplay in another 3 hours. At 3am in the morning everyone went to sleep to be on set at 7:30am.
Learning from our experiences last year we we able to have a near-flawless shooting schedule with few hiccups. Filming lasted from 11am to 7pm. We had two 3ccd SD Cameras on set, which helped immensely, giving us excellent coverage on nearly all scenes.
Mission Control: We Have a Problem
If anything can go wrong, it will.
Our strategy, like last year, was to film 30 minutes and capture on set to save time. Billy initially forgot his own camera to capture in the morning, With 7 minidv tapes filled with roughly 5 to 6 hours of footage, it would take at least 7 hours to correctly capture the footage.
After the current footage was captured, issues arose in looking at the freshly captured video. Either video was too fast, or audio was corrupted. I recaptured on using my personal 8 year old camera with similar results. At about 3am we determined that there were issues with our cameras, and ended up using our crew member, Ben's camera for capturing on my custom built PC.
Initially, Billy was supposed to reprise his role as editor on his Mac Book. Because of all the troubles, and the fact that the footage was now on my computer with Adobe Premiere, I now had to take over the editing duties. Footage was still being captured. Billy went to sleep, I set my alarm every 50 minutes to have the next capture ready to go.
Digital Slicing from Sunrise to Sunset
My alarm rang on last time at 7:30am. Everything was now on my computer and I was the only one capable of editing on Premiere (I recommend all editors should know Premiere, Final Cut Pro, and Avid).
Three crew members joined me at noon and sat behind me for another 6 hours as I edited non-stop. From 7:30am to 6:30pmish I sat in one chair, slicing, dicing, ripple editing, etc, etc.
At the end, the film was not-complete. It's good, not solid, another hour and it would be 25% better. But this wasn't the 49 Hour Film Project. Primarily the audio is what needed the most work, especially at the beginning.
The film, "Ponged" was dropped off with all necessary paper work at Ker's Winghouse in Orlando with time to spare. According to the organizers, out of 25 teams, only 16 showed up to deliver a final project on time.
"Ponged"
See our entry, "Ponged" at the Screening. Our screening group is Group A, which will be shown on Wednesday. Tickets are $9. Each audience member is allowed to vote for three films they enjoyed the most. The film(s) with the most votes will receive an Audience Award that is factored into the Best Picture consideration. Our tag line is: "1 Ping Pong Ball, 6 Cups, $500 Jackpot".
| Date: | Wednesday, August 19 & Thursday, August 20 |
| Time: | 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m |
| Place: | Premiere Cinemas, 3201 E. Colonial Dr. Orlando, FL 32803-5140 |
I plan on posting "Ponged" on YouTube after the screenings to prevent any possible contradictions to the competition rules. I will also add a Director's Cut (even though I edited it anyway) to fix the problems associated with the submitted edition.