The Dallas 48 Hour Film Project
What Happened During Your Weekend?
The Dallas filmmakers share stories from their wild weekend of filmmaking. (Blogging will begin after the filmmaking weekend ends.)
...and then there is drama...
Well I had a blast last night at the screenings! And I've got to say, there were actually A LOT of pretty good movies... Probably 60 to 70 percent were all-around very good.
Initially, I was hoping to pull comedy for the team. But instead, we got the opposite... DRAMA. And Ken (who played Peter in "It's on her") was right on board with the drama choice. So I opted not to pull for a wild card, and to take the challenge. I am pretty satisfied with the results you'll see below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw1jJu__uEc&feature=player_embedded
There are no explosions, kung fu or fart jokes. But there are two very solid performances and some good production value. We feel pretty good about the short.
As far as the time it took to produce the finished product?... Well we started shooting at around 8PM Saturday night. And I had the movie on flash drive and DVD by 5:30PM on Sunday... Not too shabby. And probably a true benefit of doing drama, LOL.
And it was very satisfying to hear some disgusted reactions from both male and female audience members. We even got a good comment leaving the theatre. --Thanks--
Overall, a great experience. And I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of the entries on line... starting now.
Eric Brown
Movieric Pictures
- Eric Brown, Movieric Pictures
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Fun with a skeleton crew!
Spent about a month straight networking since the 24 hour race we did and pulled about 20 interested people. Well, only 5 people, including myself, showed up to help. 3 other people had legit excuses, but most just flaked.
We were left with no real writing talent either. Ultimately we had one actress, another guy volunteered who didn't act before, I ended up being a character (only in still images) and then the hair & makeup people ended up being one character and two VOs.
Despite our incredibly small crew, we worked it out. We had NO script and just shot some talking head interviews with the characters talking about other characters. This lead us to make somewhat of a mockumentary, although our chosen genre was superhero. We successfully mixed a bit of superhero, horror, mockumentary and comedy when all was said and done.
On the technical end, we brainstormed and shot over Friday night until about 5am. I got up to start rough cutting at 10am Saturday and the other guys showed up to shoot the rest about 4pm. We were done shooting at 9pm. Edited some more, got about 5 more hours of sleep, then spent from about 6am til 4pm on Sunday editing the hell out of this thing! I am primarily a post production, After Effects guy, so everything I was doing was completely off-the-wall editing with lots of Photoshop and motion graphics tricks. We were able to record acoustic and electric guitar with a shotgun mic that worked out pretty well too.
We ended up with a zany little piece that is actually quite enjoyable. Also, it was my first time to work with real hair & makeup people who wanted to do something as creative as myself.
Just glad we turned it all in on time and can't wait for the showings! All I am looking forward to is fun audience reactions, no matter who wins what awards!
- Jon Lambert, Badasserasaurus
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"What Comes Next" Trailer
I meant to post this on our team's blog entry, but here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiRmfoT3MiM
See you guys at the screening!
- Wade Couturiaux, No Shoes Productions
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48 Hour Film Project: The Aftermath
“Nothing is over!” – John Rambo. This was our team's second year participating in the 48HFP. We competed back in '07 and, after a year hiatus, we were back with a vengeance.
KICK-OFF EVENT: Our team initially drew the genre "Mockumentary." However, my gut feeling told me to re-draw for the wild care genre. I'm not sure if all of the twenty odd something teams were happy with the genres that they picked or if they were unaware of this option, but ours was the only Dallas team this year to go back for the wild card. Since nobody else was drawing, we were forced to take the first genre on the wild card list: Surprise Ending. In my opinion, this was a far better deal than Mockumentary.
PRE PRODUCTION: Assigning jobs to the crew and parts to the actors was a no-brainer. We had the most talented group of hard working people that anyone could ask for. Putting the story together, though, was a bit trickier. Although we all agreed on the concept, our creative team began to have contrasting ideas on how to approach the story. Ultimately, time was running out and everyone was growing extremely tired. So we decided to commit to what we had and hoped to rewrite some of the stuff we weren’t too crazy about during filming.
PRODUCTION: Right from the bat, things started off pretty bumpy. The DP we were going to work with was running incredibly late (due to traffic and then running out of gas), so we had to start without him. By the time he had showed up, we were already 2 hours behind schedule. Despite a few tense moments, I made the quick decision to let him go so that we could move on. A couple of us shared DP duties and things turned out fine. The actors were absolute pros and the crew (mostly consisted of my good friends) kept their chins up under pressure. Filming outdoors for a couple of scenes in the 103 degree Texas heat was a real pisser, but we fought through it thinking that soon enough we’d be shooting in a nicely AC’ed indoor set. Little did we know that some of our indoor scenes would be just as hot as the outdoor ones! Never the less, it seemed like everyone had a good time while shooting some of the party scenes. And, believe it or not, we wrapped shooting much earlier than we did 2 years ago.
POST-PRODUCTION: This is where the real pain came in. I had made the decision to shoot on the Panasonic HVX200 camera, which records directly onto a P2 hard drive disc. Apparently, footage is stored in the form of a .XMF file. I had planned on editing our film on Final Cut Express. However, we did not find out until Sunday morning that Final Cut Express will not import this type of file (you need the full version of Final Cut Pro). We made the quick decision to edit on Adobe Premiere, a program in which none of us were too fluent. However, by the time I had the movie in any presentable form, there was simply not enough time to render it and burn to disc by the 7:30 deadline. Despite this, I continued to work on the movie so that we could at least have our film screened. I managed to clean up the film as best as I could before the midnight deadline and turned our film in to Raine at 11:52pm on Sunday night. The film is very rough and could definitely still use a lot of work, but hopefully the integrity of the story remains intact.
In the end, I am bummed that our team didn’t make it in time to be eligible for competition. But it was definitely another learning experience that helped us learn a lot more about each other. See you at the screening!
- Wade Couturiaux, No Shoes Productions
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It Takes Two...and a lot of help.
We were a two man crew (with an audio guy waiting to score and add SFX on Sunday when we had a rough/final cut). With that said, we could not have done what we did without the help of our actors, so thank you.
If you are like me, what you fear most coming into the 48 is the dreaded draw from the hat. It can turn a pleasant race into a nightmare with just an unfolding of paper. Can you say musical or western. Thankfully we drew horror. Scares over right? Wrong.
We were told our indoor location was not going to have air and we were thinking it was going to be hot and terrible, but it was not. (Kuddos by the way to all you teams that shot outdoors in Texas in June)
After that things went smoothly until 1am Sunday morning, when after a 13 hour shoot we decided to each go home and shower and meet back up for the edit. Well, I could not get a hold of my co-leader/editor/tape holder. He was not answering his phones and I did not want to wake up his wife by calling his home number. As I was laying in bed resolved that we were about to lose at least 4 hours, my wife wondered whether he had even made it home safely...so I called his house. He had made it home (45 minutes from me), but had fallen asleep. I finally was able to wake him up, thankfully, because had we lost any more time I do not think we would have made it by deadline.
When all was said and done, we had a great experience. Can not wait to see what people were able to do with a weed whacker...especially the teams that drew musical/western. Did they have weed whackers in the old west?
- Brian Wood, ForWood Media
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Trust Me
If you want to know anything about divine intervention, look no further than the Factionwork Team. We came into this festival with few crew members, no cast, no location, and no money for food and props. I thought we were done! But there is a GOD and he is great! He sent me some of the best cast and crew members I have ever had the privilege to work with. Even though I had only known most of them for a few minutes we all bonded as if we had been childhood friends. Of course, there were some very tense moments and some people couldn't deal and bailed out, but everyone else handled it with great professionalism. To the cast and crew of Factionwork Production I just want to thank each and every one of you very much!! To all the other teams in the festival, all I have to say is I hope you brought your "A" game, because we brought definitely brought ours!
Team Leader
Jay Cooper
214-723-8529
Factionwork Production
www.myspace.com/factionwork101
- Jay Cooper, Factionwork Production
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Stress and fun.
So we drew comedy! A
s our team grabbed up comedy we thought to our selfs this is going to be great we have amazing talent in writing comedy. So with in a hour we had figured out a script that would work and started off to writing. When i Showed up on the scene the script was mostly written. It was 12 pages long. After Reading up on the script i thought to my self this is going to be great. This is funny its witty and its shows the prop off great.
So i started to create a shot list right away. Friday night we shot for 3 hours and got what we at the time thought was a amazing opener. ( We then later edited it out due to time )
Saturday morning
After getting only 3 hours of sleep we showed up at location to do some shooting. The actors were all there. Learning the lines and all we had to do was nail down what i was thinking 5 or 6 good takes at several different angles. We were blessed in that we had a group of actors who all knew their lines. If i could of ended this paragraph at that point i would be happy. The stress part of my title now comes into effect and play. One of our actors could not remember a sentence at all. Normally he is great but once the camera was on him it fell apart. So the Fun and enjoyment of shooting the other people quickly fell into a job of trying to coach this person in how his role should be. Normally this would not be a problem i would of wrapped shooting for the day and asked that we start up again tomorrow. How ever this is a film race the shots had to be completed today! So after what i think was a 16 hour day with capture and shooting we decided to do our rough edit sunday morning. With a set of fresh eyes.
SUNDAY
It quickly became evident that we had entirely to much script to work with. In the process of laying down our rough cut i noticed that we were approaching close to 12 mins of story. So my partner and I sat down and tried to basiclly rewrite the script in the edit bay to try to find some sort of story that fit. In the end we cut a total of 4 scenes. And we had to go with a passage of time title. By the time we were done with the rough edit it was apparent that we did not have enough time to do audio and to do any fun creative work with our film. It was now 4 pm we had been working on getting the correct shots for close to 6 hours at this point. We finally had a time line that was under 6 mins. While i wish that i had a chance to reshoot and do another edit of the footage the group felt it was better to get some thing turned in for judging. So we hesitantly decided to burn a copy of our rough edit.
Sunday night.
While we were happy had turned in a production we are not happy with the result of the shooting or editing. Wishing we could some how roll back time and start over. We are all looking forward to the screening night to see what the faces of others are like when they see our film. We are planning on doing some diffrent versions with the same ideas to see what we come up with.
Being that this was the first project that the Monumental Idea company has worked on as a group, we had a blast it was a great fun day saturday and sunday. We had alot of great laughs and all of us from the group are looking forward do doing another 48 hour film event next year !
Cant wait to see what the others did with their films.
Corey Smith
Director / editor
Corey@vaughnproductions.com
- Corey Smith, Monumental Idea
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"oh, those things don't always work"
It should be mentioned that our entire team had to go to a wedding Saturday morning - so we didn't get to start shooting until 4pm Saturday afternoon... Not the worst thing that could happen, let's just say the Rockstar came in handy.
The real story begins at 6pm Sunday, 90 minutes before deadline. Of course we weren't done and didn't have time make credits, but started our drive to Dallas (from FW) so we didn't cut things too close.
We shot in HD, so on the laptop we were compressing to SD and then burning to a Data DVD in the car. Yes, we took a car adapter for power. But...
We arrive at the curb of the dropoff location, 45 minutes to spare. The DVD is 85% complete. The computer shuts off. The green light for the car adapter turns off as well.
- Austin Hines , Curtis Needs A Ride
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So far, so good!
2009 has been the first year I was involved as the 48HFP producer for Dallas and what a fantastic experience it has been so far!
Though I am a producer on TV/film/webcast projects, my background is media relations and I've been fortunate enough to be on the management side of major things like world tours for major recording artists to handling sponsors / media / celebrity motorcycle builders for major motorcycle events. The largest event I've been involved with was 500,000 bikers attending the Lone Star Rally in Galveston two years ago.
When dialogue first began between myself and 48HFP, I thought I would be able to put some of my past experiences to use in this endeavor. I began by getting the word out to every resource I could and let's just say that worked well -- very well.
Thanks to the amazing assistance by so many friends in this industry, not only did 48HFP Dallas meet the goal for registered teams, we actually managed to squeeze in 5 additional teams and were sold out BEFORE our "early bird" registration ended!
Going into the event we had more than 20 teams on the waiting list which was good and bad: Good because it showed the grassroots marketing worked and bad because there was no way for us to schedule additional screening time to accommodate these teams. You see, before 48HFP announces a city date, the screening time is booked and based upon the history of previous years, that is how we book the amount of time. The first two years of 48HFP in Dallas, only 22 teams signed up; last year, 11 of those teams signed up in the last week of registration leading into the event. So given that type of history, we played it safe with the amount of time booked.
On a personal side note, I had the pleasure of speaking to Sam Tuomi who is the 48HFP producer for Des Moines. When Sam told me they have 45+ teams, the Texan in me kicked in. I was miffed! DES MOINES? FORTY-FIVE TEAMS? And Dallas only pulled in 22 last year?! Dammit, we're not to be outdone - this is Texas and we do everything bigger & better here!
Needless to say, next year, things will be different when it comes time to book the screenings!
In retrospect to this weekend, there are a couple moments that really stood out. First, during the Kick Off when we announced the final element which was the line of dialogue. Close to 150 people went as silent as church mice as they were writing things down and then the way the venue emptied out at 7p as the teams grabbed their cases of Rockstar Energy Drink and hit the door!
The second moment was during the Drop Off. I saw some guys that I've had the pleasure of working with on professional shoots in the past. They were all on different teams, but the way the strode confidently and calmly into the building with 20+ minutes to spare, greeted one another with smiles and laughs, and were generally in great spirits was truly fantastic to watch.
I hope all continues to run smoothly and we have a great screening on the night of Thursday, July 2 at Studio Move Grill – Dallas.
I am especially appreciative to everyone that has been giving compliments and positive feedback. It DOES help to know how the participants are seeing things from their side as keeps things moving in the right direction on this side.
- Raine Devries, 48HFP Dallas City Producer
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