*Note: I had some awesome pictures inserted into this post, and then the editor kept crashing and losing the post and otherwise making me pull my hair out...so, for my sanity and the continuance of this post, please refer to the facebook page for the film The Soul Virus
A few weeks back, I co-produced a short for a 48 Hour Film competition. All of the teams had to wait until the official start of the 48 hours to do ANY creative work. Though we could scout locations and assemble crew/cast. At the beginning of the 48 hours, each team would draw a genre from a hat (ours was Sci-Fi). In addition to this, everyone had to use the following three elements:
Character: Reginald/Regina Worthington - Banker
Prop: Traffic Cone
Line of Dialogue: Holy Crap! Did that really just happen?
The films had to be 4-7 minutes in length and turned in on time, other wise they would not be eligible for any of the awards. Though, late films would still be screened at the theater where they were holding the awards ceremony.
So, in our team there were 4 producers:
Steve Edmiston, writer-producer of 3 feature films and numerous shorts, who also handled the writing and directing for this project
Jeff McCord, who produces games by day and films on the side, who also handled certain locations and some directing for us
Myself, who's just getting started in this business, and handled legal, created the story, and dabbled with lighting on the film
And Jake, who works for a local TV station and who also wrangled crew for us.
The story was an Adam-and-Eve-Post-Apocalyptic scenario. Disease wipes out almost all of humanity, girl meets boy, boy is a jerk, they meet an older man (Reginald), and in the end the girl picks the older guy over the younger guy.
We spent several hours, from 7 pm Friday night to 3 am Saturday morning working on the
story/script/casting, and then had call for our cast and crew at 7 am that same morning. So, with what little sleep we could muster, we began filming. And then our PA for running errands got lost. And camera batteries began dying even though they should have had a full charge. Airplanes and helicopters flew overhead ruining our audio.
Thankfully, our crew was awesome and were able to come up with some very creative ways around these problems. My personal favorite involved our boom operator lying on the ground at the feet of our actors, just barely hidden by a berm, so he could be close enough to get the sound without picking up the other ambient noise.
At last, at 11 pm Saturday night, filming was finished. Our editor had already begun her work as scenes were completed but now she had everything to work with. Our editor, use to Final Cut 7 and Adobe Premier Pro, however, was having difficulty with the Final Cut Pro X suite she had available to work with. Youtube tutorials could only do so much for her, but she makes her living as an editor for a reason and she blazed on through. Our deadline was Sunday, 7pm. At 6:30 pm we had a 7 minute cut of the film...and it was terrible. We'd made a really great 10 minute film, instead of a 4-7 minute film and those 3 minutes of additional cutting that had to happen to get us into the required time took too much out of the story.
We held an emergency teleconference with all 4 producers. After some deliberation, we all agreed that a good but late film was better than a bad film on time. We re-cut the film up to 10 minutes and got it in late.
The only other time I've been late with a film was when our gear got stolen. Every other time when things went wrong, I'd found a way around it. So this was not a pleasant experience for me, having to turn in a project late. Still, I had to agree that it was for the best.
In the end, we got to see our film up on the big screen and we're now in the process of tweaking an refining it so we can take it around to film festivals (which is why it's not going to be up on my blog for some time since most festivals don't want the films up on sites where anyone can see them).
Now what did I learn? Awesome people make awesome films, even if you don't win. And working with great people tends to teach me things I didn't know before, which is always a huge boon.
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