48 Film Practice

On Monday this week, Luke and Sam supplied us with an envelope containing a genre, character, line prop for a practice 48 hour film for Cow Wins, the team Debbie and I are helming this year. Debbie has blogged about the process somewhat, so I’ll make my comments brief: * The elements were awesome: Lysney Rogers, a compulsive risk taker; a toothbrush; “I’ve done this a million times before”; Reality TV * Script writing is made much easier when you have a wireless keyboard, and a big LCD TV in the lounge. Everyone could read what we’d written, and everyone could take turns typing, without having to swap seats (not that swapping seats is a bad thing, except for the team member who’s still in a moon boot from a sporting injury – a torn tendon in the ankle I think). * 5 people is a small number for a team, but is a great number for scriptwriting. We are all teachers, so we’re used to turn-taking, and twisting student answers to drive towards the point we have in mind, so we worked well together :) Actually, the group are all friends, and really do work well together. Contributions were very even, and criticisms or scepticisms were expressed in a straight-forward way. * Having the script finished by 10pm leaves a good amount of time to get ready for the shooting day. * Writing several graphic design type gags (like fake album covers, magazine covers etc.) may be a little unwise if your 2 graphically skilled people are also your editors. * Arriving at your location (school) and finding cleaners, concrete cutters and huge drain-clearing trucks parked in various locations, all using noisy machines (concrete cutter especially) is not cool. Luckily a school is a big place, and with a bit of investigating and set dressing we were able to find some quiet spots to film in. * Having one actor play twins, using only eyelines and screen positioning to sell the gag, can work surprisingly well. I may even be keen to investigate split screening at some point (tripod the camera, overlay one of the shots, then crop the one that’s on top – should be very simple). * It’s a good idea to go grocery shopping before the 48, so you don’t have to spend part of the editing morning going to the supermarket. * Using really tacky filming tricks like the aforementioned twins, and faking skydiving (in a way not dissimilar to Jenni’s flying in WMP) is fun to shoot, and can be convincing enough to be worthwhile. I want to revisit all the cheesy effects stuff Adam (and to a much less skilled extent, I) played around with as a teenager. * Voice-over is fun to record, and can really help with exposition. Obviously it’s a tool that only suits some genre. * Overall prognosis for the team: good. We’ll have a bigger cast on stand-by for the real 48, Debbie and I will make sure we’ve got all our shopping done ahead of time, another team member is going to be learning some basic editing skills this holidays, and we managed to write, shoot and edit our film to a respectable standard in only 49 hours. Sure, we were a little over the deadline – by about one shopping trip, give or take. I think if our script is as easy to shoot as this one was, and we push ourselves just a little harder in editing (like getting an hour or two done on the Saturday night), we should have no trouble getting a decent film in on time. Barring, of course, the dozens of unforeseen complications that we’ll have on the real weekend :)