This past month I participated in the Boston 48 Hour Film Project. This is a filmmaking experience sweeping through dozens of cities around the world (I think they are up to 80 cities now) where people work alone or in teams to create a 4-7 minute film, from script to screen, in a mere 48 hours. This most recent one was, in fact, the fifth one that I participated in and it is awesome to see how big the 48HFP has become. There were over 75 teams participating in Boston alone! I really can’t recommend enough that all filmmakers (professionals or amateurs) try the 48HFP at least once. It is such a great experience to test your skills, try something new, and make you a faster filmmaker in general.
This year I worked with a new team led by Genine Tillotson, a producer/director I have worked with in the past who was doing the 48HFP for the first time. In somewhat atypical fashion (of the 48HFP) she went about the task of preparing for this film much like you would a larger scale production. She cast actors (for whom we would not have roles until after the weekend started), secured locations for our unwritten story, and assembled a crew of mostly professional production people. This was much different than previous years, where we would often cast with a last-minute, “who do we know who can act as so-and-so” attitude, and it ultimately paid off.
My wife Kate and I went to the start location to select our genre and find out what the other required elements were. There are about 25 possible genres; some are easier to work into a film, and some are more difficult. We pulled “Superhero” as our genre. Ick. I called Genine (who was up at our “base” in Gloucester, MA with her writing partner) and asked if she wanted to go with that or throw it back for the wild card. We looked at the list of possible wild card genres, and while some were better than “Superhero”, several seemed far worse. So we decided to keep the genre we had drawn. My usual attitude with this competition is to figure out fairly subtle ways to incorporate the required genre and other elements, while still making a film that you WANT to make. I had little interest in making an obvious “Superhero” movie, and neither did Genine (although it’s possible our end product may not have exactly been described as “Superhero”, but oh well).
The rest of the weekend went off fairly smoothly. We followed my advice learned from previous years and had just two people write the script on Friday night while the rest of us slept. We got up and shot all day Saturday, and edited Sunday. Jess, our main editor, stayed up most of the night Saturday, and I took over for her Sunday morning so she could sleep, and then we both tag-teamed the edit in the final few hours. No 48 Hour Film is without its challenges, though. We definitely were under the gun at the end of the allotted 48 hours waiting on music from our composer, Russell Wolff, who was working in Nashville, TN and FTPing files to us along the way. No fault of his, but we lost a little time in the back-and-forth transfers of video and music files. We got the final piece turned in, though, with minutes to spare (about 20 percent of teams turned in their films late).
The films were screened over the next week at the Kendall Square Cinema, a great theater in Cambridge MA. That is really the highlight of participating in the 48HFP, seeing your work on the big screen. (This year they started to screen some films in HD, which hopefully means next year all of them will, which would be great.) I was not able to repeat the big win I had the last time I participated in 2007, winning most of the awards, but our film was certainly one of the most polished films and did win the Audience Award.
You can check out this year’s film, “A Perfect Fit”, here:
Tags: 48 HFP, director of photography