Day: October 27, 2003

How fricken crazy would this be?
The Extreme Filmmaker 48 hour thing is coming up:

Well, the Summer Screening may be over, but it’s not too early to start thinking about your next film! The next festival is scheduled for February 28, 2004, with a submission deadline of February 6.

Just the thought of it makes me want to go to sleep.

Whenever I hear that phrase I think of 12 Monkeys.

But I’m not talking about releasing zoo animals or destroying human civilization. I’m talking about the 48 Hour Film Project and our entry, “Xtremely Xtreme,” showing tonight at 7pm and 9:30 at the Roxie Theater in SF, and again at 7pm on Wednesday.

The rules for the 48 Hour Film Project in summary:

• Your finished movie has to be 5-10 minutes in length
• you have to write, shoot, and edit in the 48 hour time period
• you have to include the required elements in your short: in the 2003 San Francisco we had:
  • a vinyl record
  • the character Hugh Simon, Bouncer
  • the line “I was lied to, and very much deceived“
• You have to match the genre you pull out of a hat on Friday. Our group got “Mockumentary” and my friend Sam got “Horror.” Personally I was scared to death of “Musical” but as it turns out they merged it with “Western” so you could do either.

Soooo…. we did it. Ben Hardie, my brother Kirby and I developed the story we came up with (based on our required elements) on Friday night. Hardie and I had a finished script around 11 pm, and wrote our schedule for the next day.

We started shooting at around 8 am on Saturday, and shot until about 1 am Sunday. I took a nap-break and then at 6 am I started editing… by this time I was basically a zombie, but enough infrastructure was in place that let me be on autopilot. At around 10 am Kirby, Matt, Ben Scott, and Hardie came over to shoot coverage shots, and Tom to finish the music and integrate it into the rough cut. Dy was slaving away on the credits (easy) and the reality show titles (not so easy).

I’ll log more later… it’s still too close to remember half of what we did. Shac is totally sick now, and I am barely awake as I go in to work. Our premiere is tonight! Woooo!

SAM: so we made the competition
SAM: i mean
SAM: the exhibition
SAM: but not the competition
SAM: pinnacle sucks ass
SAM: we lost the entire edit at 5 PM
SAM: so we had to recut
SAM: it came out nice htough
BRIAN: oh my god that sucks so hard
SAM: yes
SAM: yes it does

…

SHAC: holy crap!
BRIAN: yeah!
SHAC: thats like… monitor-punching level frustration

Continuing on my
observations from the shoot/edit:

• we need a slate. It speeds up editing a LOT.
• If we had both a slate and
  a PA writing down the tape counter readings for
  all the takes, and a check next to the ones the director said were “good,”
  we could have someone loading the clips onto the editing machine while the production is still going. About a third of the time I spent editing this one was getting the clips from the tape onto the machine. This process would give us the DV equivalent of “dailies,” and we would know if there are bad takes while we were still running around shooting. So notice that process actually needs three additional crew- one to note the counter times at the shoot, one to get the samples into the machine, and another to run the tapes back and forth. Ideally you’d have a fourt person doing the slate, but I’m thinking that could be a member of the cast.
• More than one unit (camera, lights, sound and associated crew). I’m a little undecided on this one… it would have been very helpful to get people doing the individual interviews in parallel, but then I don’t have a control over the look of the shot. Maybe if I explicitly storyboarded the shot in extreme shot detail?