The Seattle 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

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

9 noobs, 0 experience, our 1st film, in 48 hours

This weekend was absolutely crazy and I couldn't of asked for anything better.

Noobtacular consists of myself and 8 of my family and friends...none of us which have ever even attempted to make a movie before. The most experience was me doing some makeup and props for 48hrfilm back in 2007, but nothing outside of applying some fake blood here and there.

We drew our topic...Horror...heck yes...and we got to work. We should have been able to bang out a script in no time, but being green as we were, we spent more time talking and throwing out ideas rather than writing an actual script and finishing it. By 2am Saturday morning we had a completed script and began shooting our final scene, which happened to be our only night scene. Everyone went to bed while myself and 2 others romped around in the middle of the morning.

Saturday morning we got a late start due to the makeup & costume store not opening until 9am...but once we got our goods, we ran off and began shooting. We were able to complete all of our shots on saturday, from 12 until 12. And from there my team headed off for some shut eye while I begain editing.

Everything was smooth in our production up until this point, but this point turned terrible. First off...I completely planned wrong for many of our shots, so a few key scenes were completely unuseable. Dang me. I still had to use the scenes, so I attempted to do some trickery in editing. I hope it worked. My editing software decided to crash of me about every 15 minutes, causing me to actually reboot every time. So that was a constant struggle...my program also decided to be awesome and randomly delete all of my audio and wouldn't let me recover anything. I had to then restart with the clock winding down. With one hour left I just had to stop where I was, make a half-assed opening title and closing credits and ran off a render...that took FOREVER! I was watching the clock convinced that we weren't going to make it. But thankfully the render completed and we had 30 minutes to get from Edmonds down to the studio. Thankfully traffic was flowing and we made it with 5 minutes to spare!

All in all, I am extremely proud of my group. None of us knew what we were really doing, we were all ambitious, we went out there and gave it our all, and we had a frickin blast doing it. I even think we made a pretty decent flick as well....and I know I left a ton of potential in the cutting room floor that I was unable to use due to the time constraint and computer meltdown. So that is extremely promising for our future! I'm still kicking myself a bit because I know our film could be so much more, but I was unable to really piece it together...so close though. Next year I know I'll be much better prepared to really kick some ass and make a great film. And I know we'll all be jumping at the bit to get goin and really put on a show.

Dan Alexander & Noobtacular Productions signing out...for now.

- Daniel Alexander, Noobtacular Productions

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Musical or Western?!

Oh, yes. My first time doing the 48-Hour Film Project and we draw "Musical or Western," neither of which I have ever attempted to make... both of which could be potential nightmares! We spent over TWO HOURS trying to decide if a musical was feasible... we went with Western. Which meant we had a lot of work ahead of us. We didn't have our script until Saturday at 4:30am, we arrived on location at 5:45am, and didn't start filming until noon because of all the extra production design required.We shot everything outdoors and got all of our shots by 7:30pm on Saturday!

We had to from Olympia to the dropoff in Seattle. made it with 7 minutes to spare. I have no recollection as to whether or not any number of traffic laws might have been broken on the drive up.

- Gary Voelker, Experience Studios

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Software Nightmare!

We actually decided to sleep on Saturday night, since we had gotten all of the footage captured onto the editing PC. I wake up at 6AM on Sunday to find that Adobe Premeire Elements was not very happy. It kept crashing, taking 20 minutes to reload a project, and on top of that we discovered a bug which (long story short), prevented us from adding any audio transitions for fear it would crash the editor. We barely made the 7:30pm cutoff.

- Charles Horkin, Saxy Productions

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