The Milwaukee 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

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

Outside of Our Comfort Zone

At one point during editing, we kept reviewing a particularly shocking moment to make sure we'd gotten the maximum impact out of it. As this messed-up image kept looping on the screen in front of us, everyone in the editing room got really creeped out.

And that's when I burst out laughing: "Where the hell did this COME from, anyway?!?" Because none of us, on our own, would've come up with the film we did. Not one of us had Suspense/Thriller as our first Genre. None of us would've imagined something as dark, or would've had the instinct to play it completely straight.

We made The Other Woman solely BECAUSE of the restraints the 48 Hour Film project imposed upon us. They forced us to stretch outside of our individual comfort zones, and embrace true collaborative creativity. And together, we made something greater than the sum of its parts--something we were all very proud of.

- Joel Zawada, Ideogram Films

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"The Other Woman"

When I pulled Thriller/Suspense from the hat, I have to admit I was disappointed and rather hesitant.

My immediate reaction was to put it right back and draw a genre I had a better handle on and more ideas for.

I sat down with some other members from my team and started thinking. They were really excited to tackle the genre we got. I couldn't stop thinking about when the redraw was.

After more thinking and encouragement from my teammates, I decided to go with what we got.

We headed over to Pizza Shuttle for a quick slice and brain storming. We checked the internet several times to get definitions and examples of the genre. The Godfather seems to be the best of every genre for some reason. :)

We decided to go with something like a Hitchcock story where the audience and the main character know a terrible thing about another character and create suspense that way.

We moved on from Pizza Shuttle and started writing the script, some simple music composition, and casting. I have to admit this took a bit longer than I had liked. I chalk it up to my teammates not having seen or worked with each other in a while and a lot of time consuming catch up conversations.

We broke it off at 2am on Saturday morning with a call time at the first location at 8am.

My cinematographer and I didn't get to bed until 4am as we were taking about moods and shots.

After a quick nap, I got up, woke my camera man, and met my actors in my driveway. We started setting up the basement while updating the rest of my crew and cast with the script and what we needed for production. I was happy this went smoothly and we didn't waste much time with other ideas for the movie or other time killers. Everyone got on the same page quickly and professionally.

Filming went really quickly. I think it was a benefit to have a majority of the crew there at the script creation as we all saw the movie in our heads already.

I have to say the make up we needed looked great. My art director had no prior experience in that department aside from some zombie walks she did make up on. She took to the challenge and passed with flying colors.

From my house, we moved locations to my art director's house to shoot the rest of the movie.

This also went without a hitch and we had our movie shot in 16 hours.

We decided to take a break and get some rest for a job well done.

That wasn't the best decision. We had some communication errors with the format we shot in and our editing software. Plus the actual edit of the movie took a bit longer than expected.

We scrambled to make the deadline and decided turning in a good movie was better than turning in a rushed unpolished movie just to hit the deadline.

Trying to get the movie exported properly took more time than my patience could stand.

We finally exported to tape and handed our movie and paper work off to Angie at 11:55pm.

I was disappointed that we didn't make the dealine because we had a great little movie.

Having it screened at the Oriental Theater was an amazing experience. Just to think about all the great movies and acts that have shared that space with our films is a great honor that I am proud to have in my life. Actually hearing the crowd react to the piece of cinema that my team and I bleed, sweated, teared, and exhausted ourselves for the past 48+ hours is unforgettable.

- Jared Stepp, Ideogram Films

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