The Austin 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

The Austin filmmakers share stories from their wild weekend of filmmaking. (Blogging ended shortly after the filmmaking weekend.)

What I learned in 48 Hours

First timer making a film. After a week I've had time to decompress from the experience. Enjoyed it a lot and learned a great deal. Let me share.

1. Either make a film or have a party, not both. Buy a keg after the shoot. We didn't have a problem this time but I could foresee it coming and it added an edge to the shoot.

2. The kinder you are to your actors the better performances you get.

3. A film has one shape going into the shoot and another after editing. Cutting actually makes a film stronger. The darling scene you don't want to cut, 10 minutes later you don't even remember what it was.

4. Film is a collaborative work, even if you write, direct, edit other people must nudge the film forward and more ofetn into better directions. On the other hand a film isn't gumbo, just throwing things in the pot won't make it better.

5. Wish I had invited musician friends to come in during the shoot and improvise in another room while the second camera man filmed, then split the audio track and used in in the film. Maybe next year.

6. Plan for the big disasters but the little things can trip you as well. Cell phone batteries, etc.

7. Everyone gets gets stroked for the good job they do on the shoot...... except the director. The cheese stands alone until the film is finished and the audience sees it. Kinda lonely.

8. And finally there was a sort of post partum depression after the film is done. It's like seeing your baby born, grow up and graduate from college all in 48 hours. Didn't see that coming.

Thanks Sherry for this great experience.

Mark Martin

- mark martin, everything that rises must diverge

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49 Hours

Just got back from the first screenings and I loved what I saw! Lots of great ideas, lots of laughs, and some nice technical work, as well. Well done, everyone!

This was our first event and we loved it. We have had so much fun and have learned a lot about the art of writing, working, and shooting under pressure. For me though, the real learning came in learning to accept the little mistakes, foibles, and mediocre takes that are just going to happen when filming under these conditions. No time for perfectionism. No time for multiple takes; there are other shots to setup. That was a real challenge for me. That and the sleep deprivation. I am getting too old to do 42 hours awake, anymore.

Anyway, thanks for the stories. My friend Jim and I were wondering if anyone ever rendered on the drive down to the drop-off. Now we know. Sadly, we had several renderings fail and we were a little over an hour late. It was a bitter pill, but it will just steel us for next year.

A superdy-duperdy long production blog entry is at the following link. Our film was called "Highway 71"

http://www.jimmypribble.com/blog/2008/06/49-hours/

Cheers,

Jimmy Pribble

- Jimmy Pribble, JCS Productions

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Ripping One for the 48hr. Film Festival

In all honesty this was the smoothest 48hr. FF we have done. This is our 3rd time doing this and we\\\'ll be back next year. As you can tell by our name we are a church group,(stop on by and see us sometime www.calvarysouthaustin.com). Being that we are a Christian organization we always try to include the gospel (that we are all sinners in need of a savior and that being Jesus) so you can say that we have one more self imposed stipulation than the other teams... The most mindblowing thing that happened was that we finished filming Saturday at noon,, and still had a crucial edit session up to the last minute!

- Jeremy Valencia, Calvary South Austin Films

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good times, good times

this was our second 48HFP--the first being in Dallas 2007.

after drawing one of the genres we wanted (suspense/thriller) on Friday night, we still didn't have a script until Saturday morning. one by one, throughout the night, all our actors called in and said they couldn't do it. we would start writing a script and someone would call and we would have to rewrite because we didn't have the actors for that story. that happened three times. we were down to just two people.

well once i found out that i, the cameraman, would have to be a lead actor, my thoughts of winning any award went out the window. but i soldiered on and did my best in my acting debut while trying to work the cameras at the same time

thanks to everyone who ran the 48HFP and to all the people that helped us over the weekend. we look forward having more problems next year! afterall, if everything worked smoothly, you would never have anything interesting to talk about!

- Jon Hobson, Tw15t'D (Twisted 15)

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The Orange Beast

Being the only one on the team without any experience in live action left me pretty dissoriented, not sure at all what would come of this movie. Fortunately the other team members were experienced in this and I leaned heavily on.

Coming together we just had a lot of fun... it was so much fun. It was tiring, a few of us are certainly accustomed to late, late nights, no biggy there... we really enjoyed it all, the long nights, the uncertainty, the smells...ewww.

Our genre was Historical Fiction, one of the genre's we felt would be very challenging, and it was. But we felt strong about our abilities to create and make a movie from virtually anything, so we opted not to pick a wildcard.

Off we went to create.

We started with a sci fi, messed around with a horror, landed on an action, then shifted to a comedy... somewhere along the way we ended up with spy, and then folded in film de femme... and when the dust settled we had Take Out.

I think our biggest challenges were crowd control, fight choreography and props... yet the thought was to exploit our weaknesses to make something entertaining.

Interesting thing though was, I came into this abondoning my tricks and techniques from Animation really cleaning off my slate, as a live action I imagined would be totally different, yet probably somewhere towards the middle I realized that a movie is a movie, be it live action or animated, which really gave me confidence in terms of crazy shots or effects and editing.

I think also something that we efforted, while many others may seek a different approach, we really considered our time, assets avilable, cast and setting and decided to not take ourselves so seriously, embrace the flaws and put something together that we liked, of course hoping the audience will like it as well.

In the 48 hours we didn't worry about the destination,we just enjoyed the ride : )

- Arik Renee Avila, D7 Studios

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Love Reading Your Comments

Keep 'em coming! It lets us relive the fun, frenzied, fabulous adrenaline rush that is the 48HFP. We're so proud of ALL of you and so happy to work with this awesome Austin film community.

- Sherry Mills, Austin Producer

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oven

48hr is a great thing. It's the one time you can get artist, filmmakers, geeks and beautiful women in an oven and cook the creativity out of them. I hope this keeps growing because, after 3 days no sleep, I am sad to be a late entry but amazed by the group that I had, all first timers. It was best said by my late father, You are the Fabric of this reality." To me the mistakes, the second takes was not about perfection but, about dreaming. I wish all the best dreams and lots of money or friends. Austin you rock.

- lotus, Lastknowndimension

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Chaos Films Strikes again!

So after just two short weeks of rest from the Houston contest, Chaos Films Traveled to Austin to hook up with our friends from Aggresive Muse to take on all comers here in Austin.

We learned a lot in Houston, and even trained some of our tech crew for back up positions on other tech jobs. We came ready with our light kit, camera, portable recording studio, and some great people.

Once here, we drew one of the three genre's we really wanted to get: Sci Fi. Setting our writers to work, we started casting our piece. By 8:30 we had our script, which stayed basically the same all weekend. Way to go to my writers for a job well done.

Aggresive Muse did a wonderful job of providing actors for us, and we in fact added a member to our team. She was a "friend of a friend" who came out saturday afternoon to act in our party scenes and she fit in so well I didn't even know she hadn't know anyone there until then.

As Sunday rolled around, we started editing, and spent the whole day doing that. Thank goodness we had learned from Houston how to roll off to tape, other wise we wouldn't have made the dead line. We made it to the drop off with 3 minutes to spare. Once our paperwork was verified, we came back to celebrate with our cast and crew.

This was an awesome weekend, and we'll be back for more next year too.

- David Morgan, Chaos Films

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We survived another 48 hours

What a great experience! We could not have planned to have a better group of people working with us this year - that's why we never plan things! Seriously, every single person who helped us this year brought their "A" game and we all learned from eachother.

I think our biggest enemy was the heat. But other than the aroma of 28 people crammed into a 1/1 apartment with all AC and fans turned off, I think everything went very well.

- Nathan Lowe, Matahari Pictures

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A truly fun experience

This was out first time in this contest, and it was a truly fun experience. It was also tiring! The teamwork I witnessed was beyond belief. I'm sure all the other teams had the same experience. It was so cool to see everyone working together and just executing our plans. I couldn't have asked for a better group of folks. I highly recommend to other filmmakers they give the 48Hr project a try. If only you could have seen the look on my face when when my Director asked Sherry if we could do this again next weekend!! Sherry might not realize this, but he was serious! :-)

- Mark Holliway, Pecan Street Productions

- Mark Holliway, Pecan Street Productions

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Warddrobe Malfunction

We had a 65 year old male actor in boxers who had a "warddrove malfunction."

Unfortunately, the reaction shot of his co-star did not make the final cut of our movie but fortunately she was the only cast or crew to see this.

I wish everyone luck tomorrow and you all should proud of participating and working so hard. I hope you had fun and remember no matter the results, cherish the journey.

Charley D.

- Charley Devany, Burning Ranch Productions "Delivery"

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Walking Away

Wow, what a weekend! I\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'m not sure what was the bigger adrenaline rush:

- 6:43pm: Friday Drawing “musical or western” (are you kidding me? we don’t even have a horse)

- 6:56pm Friday: Throwing it back and getting “silent movie” (there goes the money we spent on the wireless package)

- 5:56am Saturday: Wandering through HEB while buying ice and water for the day and finding Henry the stuffed cat for the film

- 3:30pm Saturday: Getting drenched in the first thunderstorm and rain in over a month

- 6:00pm Saturday: Working with my 79 year old dad as the lead actor

- 12:15pm Sunday: Watching Sony Vegas completely crap out on me

- 12:16pm Sunday: Begging my friend Mary for her Mac laptop

- 12:45pm Sunday: Capturing my first shots onto the Mac laptop

- 2pm Sunday: Dropping in my first events into iMovie for editing

- 3:30pm Sunday: The arrival of David my editor who knew how to use iMovie

- Watching him and my creative guy Gilbert edit the whole thing in just 3 hours

- 7:02pm Sunday: Jumping into the car to drive in from Georgetown

- 7:05pm Sunday: Rendering the tape in the car flying down IH-35

- 7:07pm Sunday: Fixing the flat on the car with the laptop while flying down IH-35

- 7:08pm Sunday: Transferring the laptop to the backup car (and watching David standing on the access road cradling the laptop in his arms while it is still rendering)

- 7:10pm Sunday: Thanking the Round Rock police officer who stopped to assist us.

- 7:25pm Sunday: Flying into Austin off the IH-35 exit ramp at 26th Street as the rendering completes (“don’t we still have to burn the DVD!”)

- 7:27pm Sunday: Careening down 26th street and cutting up to 30th street (“was that a fire station we just flew by?)

- Screeching into Mangia’s pizza while the DVD is still burning looking for Sherry to toss it and the paperwork into her hands.

- Sitting around eating pizza with several other teams recounting how crazy their weekend was till 9pm.

Now, you tell me, would you rather be cutting the grass and working in the garden all weekend or this?

Thanks to Sherry and Gaby and all the folks at Reel Women who put this on every year. I can’t wait to see the other films (“hey, did anyone on the team watch the whole film before we turned it in? did we remember to get the line in somewhere?” \\\\\\\\

- Greg Davidson, Quatrafoil Films

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Congratulations Austin 48 HFP-ers!

Such an excited and energetic group this year. Lots of fun to work with. Everyone seemed to have lots of fun. Looking forward to the screenings.

- Sherry Mills, Austin Producer

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