The St. Louis 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

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

Edit feature

With an edit feature on that last post, I wouldn't look like such a moron. Perhaps I should have been a part of Redundant Redundant Films.

- Brian "The Train" Mayer, The Train Productions

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Didn't make the cut

Well, we didn't quite make the top 15, but of course I'd love for more people to see our movie, "Penny Wars". Of course I'd like for people to see the movie though, so I posted it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWFOclRlx8o. So please give it a watch, and drop me a line at thetrainproductions@gmail.com if you'd like to tell me how big of a hack I am. Good luck to the top 15!

- Brian "The Train" Mayer, The Train Productions

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Great experience

This was the first time for the entire crew (and myself). Many Doug's tips came in handy over the weekend. Energy drinks and little to no sleep from Saturday morning until Sunday's deadline were well worth the experience. Not sure how long rendering takes, it was somewhat stressful came Sunday afternoon. If only some of us wouldn't have to wake up at 4 or 5am next morning for work.

The randomness of genre, character, prop and line is a fantastic idea! It's also encouraging to see so many filmmakers in the St. Louis community.

There were some great work in Group D and we were pleasantly surprised by the crowd size. What a great weekend!

- Sam Lin, Bubble-Wrapped Fish Productions

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some further thoughts

Screening for Group E went great last night, we seemed to get the reaction we were looking for from the audience with our dark romantic tragedy. What a relief!...there's always that moment when you hope that the audience actually likes it and not just applauding the effort.

I just wanted to get my opinion out there about the other teams from the area...Boy, do you guys ever make it a challenge to stand out! All these creative minds pushing for those golden moments on the screen to captivate and enthrall the audience and get the reactions you want. I am constantly impressed with what we all put out each year, and I can see every team improving and evolving. It's no wonder St. Louis ranks among the top cities for this competition, although I'll say again that it makes it a challenge to set yourself apart from the rest...but that's okay, because we all happily accept the challenge and always bring our best feet forward! Good job to everyone!

- Stephen Province, Bug-Juice Productions

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Roustabout

We had a blast this year and finally made the deadline by an hour. This is my favorite time of the year, I also had a very default time picking three movies for my favs.

- Daniel Darkside, Shadyrow Productions

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Relaxing weekend (strange)

This was probably the most relaxed STL 48 we have done. Shooting in one location for about 95% of the day was part reason but so was the cast and crew. Special thanks to all the people who continue to work with us (whether we make it to best of each year or not) and have a blast. For me the ultimate prize is the fun we have together and of course seeing our work up on the big screen in the greatest theater in St. Louis. If we can make some other people laugh along the way... even better.

- Steve Birkmeier, Los Hermanos Politicos

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Great Showing Group C!!

Well we made the drive from Cape Girardeau to the showing last night and for the third time we found ourselves running at 6:59 to get to the theater. We've never had that problem on Sunday night! We're always so paranoid about the drive that our group member ends up getting there at 5 sitting around till turn in time. The showing was awesome!! Every film was entertaining and there were hardly any problems. It's crazy how far St. Louis has come in just three years!! I had the hardest time deciding my top three.

Third times a charm for us. We worked out alot of kinks in our work flow, things went smoothly, and we finally broke out the jib! I'd love to hear feedback if anyone went to the Group C showing. Ours was "Best Day of The Week" with the lottery ticket. KLBeaver@gmail.com. Thanks!!

- Kristen Beaver, The Truffle Shuffles

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48 hour Virgins

2 out of 12 people in our cast, crew had done this before, everyone else were all first time go getters including myself. We had an absolute blast from beginning to end. I think we ran across a few problems from time to time and some of everyone's favorite process (rendering). But we made it on time with minutes to spare and overall had a great group who I want to throw a shout out to. Thanks again for being as talented and incredible group of people any group could ask for. In the end, it was fun, exciting, and really creative to come up with ideas and see how fast one could make a well oiled machine of production.

- Ian Wilsn, 4 Her Pleasure Productions

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Always fun times

I've always said, no matter how experienced you are, you are just one tech glitch away from being late. Fortunately we dodged that bullet again this year. We had a great time and I'm always amazed what people are willing to do to help out. Nice to see the quality of films getting better each year, at least in our group. I might suggest a boycott of Dierbergs and Schnucks for putting up the corporate wall for people shooting in their stores, but that would just be petty.

- Dave Lang, Los Hermanos Politicos

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Not Even "Masters" are Perfect

As soon as we were invited to speak at the "48 Hour Master Seminar" this year, I had a sneaking suspicion that something would finally go wrong.

This being our sixth year in the competition (and having reached the "Best Of" the last three), we decided to change up our system a bit, and take a few risks.

Some paid off. Others didn't.

-We decided we were going to make a Musical of sorts no matter what genre we drew.
-We drew "Silent Film" ... go figure.

-We went for the "Wild Card" ... which we've always said we'd never do.
-We got "Adventure Serial" ... not bad (Others got Foreign Film. Yikes.)

-We decided to write the soundtrack (which included an AMAZING 10-person choir) at the same time we were writing the script.
-Ended up with some great original music, an amazing theme song, and a pretty good script by Saturday morning.

-We decided to shoot on the Canon 5D Mark II in HD instead of the Canon XL2 in SD (which we used the last five years).
-Footage looks great, but our workflow didn't flow so well.

-Along with the 5D, we chose to record the audio on a separate device ... the Handy Zoom Recorder.
-One of our crew members, unknowingly put that device on the roof of a car when leaving our last location late Saturday afternoon ... It was lost for 17 hours until two of our amazing other crew members went back to search the location (and surrounding area) for a third time and found it on the side of the road intact.

-After all of that, the movie was only about 15-20 mins late.
- :(

Special thanks to our amazing cast and crew. Sad we can't really win anything, but our movie turned out great!

- Mike Rohlfing, Anonymous Productions

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pleasant surprise

Wow, so another 48 Hour Film Project is in the books ! My friends and I really look forward to this weekend every year. We've been doing this now for a few years. Every year we get a different genre, and every year we manage to come up with something.

In years past, I always save up money to rent an expensive camera and talk to people I know who have businesses and such that might make interesting locations - and basically get all stressed out before it even happens.

This year, I thought - screw it. Just have fun. Do it in the moment, let it happen natural and hope the cliche' comes true - "everything happens for a reason". I couldn't have hoped for a better genre pick for this outlook than what we drew - mockumentary.

What a great weekend ! We've made some films in the past for both this contest and the NFC in the fall that I am really proud of and a few that I don't exactly always claim to be mine lol. This year's offering is definitely one of the best we've put together in a long time. No one is more surprised at this than I am. I cannot wait to get an audience reaction tomorrow night at the Tivoli.

The shoot was a lot of fun, very relaxed, lots of great creativity and collaboration going on. The edit was a dream. I had too much good stuff to work with. So many times I think I've got what I need and then I edit and have to figure out how to piece it together. This time, the hard part was making the run time rule - so much fun stuff to work with.

Great job and huge "thank you" to my cast and crew. You guys continue to amaze me.

- John M. Dunlap, South City Flix

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Relaxing weekend.

Good times. We wrote until about 1am on Saturday morning, slept until 9am or so, started shooting at about 2pm, slept from about 1am until 9am Sunday morning, did our thing, and then it was Monday.

- Jon Michael Ryan, Tangent Mind llc

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chicksssss

I had an experience that i think is sort of odd in the film industry today: my crew was all female (with 2 exceptions, location and titles). It was so amazing to work with all beautiful and talented ladies. This experience for me, is one I\\\'ll always cherish.

- Courtney, Salutations

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A different experience this year

For this year's film project, I included myself on the writing team as director/writer, and MAN what a difference! I was already planning the shoots and schedule as we were writing the script. This allowed for fewer decisions in the field, a more concise plan, fewer takes and a very very relaxed editing schedule. Despite the challenge of nailing every line and nuance exactly right for the story we had, shooting progressed smoothly. I have the privilege of working with some consumate professionals and wonderful team members, who helped throughout the entire process. We turned in our film about an hour before the deadline, and enjoyed not having to have just minutes and seconds to spare as we speed down a highway.

Congratulations to all the teams that made it and to all the teams that finished their films and turned them in, on time or late. It's because of all of us that St. Louis ranks among the top participating cities in terms of numbers.

- Stephen Province, Bug-Juice Productions

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Idea Change and Travel Time

For the first 7 hours of the project we began scripting and shooting some preliminary shots for our idea based off our genre. At about 1 a.m. Saturday morning we realize the story we created was more of a film noir or drama style instead of our thriller/suspense. We quickly sit back down and draw up a new idea until 8 a.m. Shooting went perfectly. The neatest shots were from on top of an old watch tower as well as me being wedged into the side of a car holding on to the open door as I filmed the actors driving down a gravel road. At about 4:15 p.m. on Sunday we begin to get worried. Our video is processing onto the desktop but we live nearly 3 hours from St. Louis. When it was done we threw it on a flash drive, my editor thrust it in my hand and yelled "GO!" we rushed into the car and sped off to St. Louis from very, very, southern Illinois. On the way there we ran through construction, and a speed trap only to be barely missed by the police when they got the SUV behind us instead.

All in all it was a great learning experience for our team. We plan to participate in as many cities in the future and look forward to creating more films.

- Kelin Field, Provision Productions

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Everything Broke

Writing and filming went excellent. The moment we incorporated the computers it was catastrophic.

Keep in mind all technology was tested before hand.

The moment we went to upload our first disc (in the middle of filming) the computer responded with "Not enough hard drive space". After realizing that there was only 500MB left on the computer we quickly put as much stuff as possible on an external hard drive.

We finally get to editing, at first all is going well. Then the computer responds with "Not enough RAM", after having put extra GB of RAM on the computer this was very baffling.

We ended up installing the editing program onto the audio engineers computer, and transferring all the clips. Having to tell the computer clip to clip which one was a part of the edited film.

Finally finishing editing, we only had a few extra audio things to fix.

Early Sunday morning we finish the audio and go to do a test render which took 2 hours and did not complete!

At 4pm we decide we have the bare minimum to find out film acceptable. We make some changes and go to render again. Taking another hour to then spit out a finished product that is 14 GB. Not having a big enough flash drive and it being 5:30, we pile in a car with a car adapter and speed to Target, spending $50 on a 16 GB jump drive.

At this point we try rendering to a different file type which ends up taking 10 minutes!

However, we lost the finished clip, and end up doing our final edits in the car on the way to Schlafly.

We are in the car at the Tap Room waiting for our finished product to finish rendering.

It finally finishes at 6:45pm, we go to burn a disc, and the computer doesn't recognize a disc drive. Keep in mind this computer has been on for about 30 hours.

So we rip open the newly bought flash drive to put the large movie file on and that doesn't work! (Some tears were shed at this point).

We finally take the smaller file and put it on a 2GB flash drive. this method not preferred by the 48.

Go in and tell Doug what happened with about 10 minutes to continuously try to burn or find someone who will help us burn a DVD.

Nothing is working, we end up turning in our film 5 minutes to 7:30 on a flash stick. Making it on time!

If the flash stick doesn't work, we finally have a DVD copy today. Though it will be late.

The last 24 hours was probably the craziest, most frustrating and most defeated I have ever felt in my entire life.

Nothing Worked!

However, as of right now we made it! We made it!

- Lindsay Cranmer, Not Obvious

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Crying During Filming

I 'spose the craziest thing that happened during filming was that my leading lady's family was at another table being filmed as extras. Jenny's daughter started crying about something. Her husband, sitting at the table with the two girls, was trying to not laugh because of the absurdity. He was concerned that she might start balling and make a bid scene and didn't know what to do. You can later see him holding her in one of the shots of the film. For some reason, she never made a noise, just sat and softly cried... She's such a professional!

- Shawn Greene, Friday Group Productions

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