The Los Angeles 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

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

The Perfect Storm

This was the year I was going to lead a team after having been on three teams prior. I did the best I could to find people to help make the movie who were the best in their respective fields. My editor owed me from when I gripped on his production a year earlier. My sound guy wanted to jump from live sound to movie production sound, my DP has been dabbling in DPing for years. All my actors were SAG. I made sure to have rehearsals with them prior to the actual shooting so that I knew what I was dealing with ahead of time.

My writer was in San Diego and we worked remotely. Having known him for several years, I knew that he was a prolific writer, often busting out short film script after short film script in no time at all. He over-delivered two scripts in three hours. Both were good and but a decision had to be made. I went with the longer, more poignant script.

Our call time was 6:30am. I wanted my first shot off at 8am. I missed it by 45 minutes. Hair and makeup took a long time....but we perservered and got it all shot in 12-1/2 hours by keeping it in one room of one location.

Editing took 19 hours with two computer crashes on Sunday; one at 5:30am, one at 5:30pm. We regrouped and got the film in on time.

What a great time!

- Holly Magnani, Miscellaneous Entertainment

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actresses...

phone rings at 9 am Saturday morning..

its my actress - (magically) she is on a train from San Diego & "just got my message from last night reminding her of her 9 am call time, etc." - train doesn't get in till 10 am, then she has to go to Los Feliz to get her car, then can drive to Pasadena (shooting location)

I said no, thank you and hung up...

promptly went to friends house to retrieve his sister from her slumber - and enticing her that hot guys will be on set, she agreed to be my lead actress

btw - she has never done any acting and/or modeling and she did everything I told her to do and she was awesome!!!

needless to say I'm not promoting her acting career

- John Faust, The Jobless Talents

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Writing the script...

My team got drama this year which was so difficult because trying to write a sad story is harder than a comedy for me.

We started writing a script at about 9 pm on Friday. We had planned shooting on Saturday, starting at 9 am. Carl (the leader of the Cultural Detritus) and I started throwing out ideas. We came up with a story about two sisters and I started writing. Three hours later, we were halfway done with it when Carl and I start questioning the merit of the script. Was it good enough or not? THAT is when we started doubting ourselves and began to come up with other scripts.

CUT TO 9 HOURS LATER. We still have no script. We have gone through so many stories now that they all seem ridiculous. We\\\'ve covered everything. I think that if you gathered everything together, you would get a story about a gay soldier at a barbecue with his friends a day before he leaves to Iraq and has to say good-bye to his girlfriend, which is really his best friend\\\'s wife...and eventually the solder dies in the end.

WTF were we thinking? We were soooo tired. Cultural Detritus is a team that doesn\\\'t sleep at all during the 48 hours. We stay up because there just isn\\\'t any time. At this point, we had no script. We had crews and cast arriving and nothing to show them. Then, in one random thought, I spewed out the script that Carl liked. I wrote it in less than an hour and boom! We had our story.

We made copies and distributed them among the crew and then came the best part: shooting in the heat for a long long long shoot and most importantly...hoping that Rhonda the game host, our potatoes, and most importantly, our story made sense.

- Stela, Cultural Detritus

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