The "48 Hour Film Project" Experience

Nothing forces you to overcome the inertia of procrastination like a bona fide deadline, and for this reason I recommend entering contests, whether you really want to find out what you're made of, or simply need to get your creative juices flowing.

It was in this spirit that my friends and I put together Irony Coast Productions and entered the 48 Hour Film Project in Houston, Texas, where we were competing against 13 other teams. Between 8 pm on Friday, May 19 and 8 pm on Sunday, May 21, we had 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a short film, 4-7 minutes in length.

Not just any short film, mind you. First, we had to pick our genre out of a hat. From this list of possibilities, our Team Leader drew "Romance" (Yuck! We were tempted to throw it out and go for the Wild Card genre, but were relieved that we hadn't when the Wild Card for Houston turned out to be "Foreign Film"). Then we were given a list of 3 elements that every film (regardless of genre) had to include (in the form of a prop, a character, and a line of dialogue):

• The prop: a pair of pliers
• The character: a cheerleader named Davey or Diane Delisio
• The line of dialogue: "Just keep going, you'll know when to stop."

(Things were off to a bumpy start when the person reading off the list of elements pronounced the first one "pillars" and explained that they were the things that held bridges up. But thankfully she spelled out each element, and everyone quickly realized that p-l-i-e-r-s had nothing to do with vertical supports).

Thanks to the tools and the talents of our fearless Team Leader and Director Victor DiGiovanni (of Victory DiGital in Houston) and our Director of Photography Chris Lognion (of MediaPost in Lake Charles, Louisiana) -- both of whom have extensive professional experience in video production -- we knew that our short would look good, so our real concern was coming up with a decent concept and story.

With that in mind, we left the Kickoff site (a bar called Dean's Credit Clothing) and headed to our base of operations, the home of Charles & Cecelia Ottenweller, affectionately known as Hotel Ottenweller, or Hot Ott for short. Officially, Charles is credited as a Production Assistant and Cecelia a Screenwriter, but those title don't truly cover the scope of their contributions, because it was their support and hospitality both at home base and on location that kept us going throughout the weekend. Thanks again, guys!

Assembling in C & Ce's living room, we broke out the white board and started brainstorming story ideas. Altogether there were 10 of us that night, including most of our actors (Shelley Farrell, Kimberly Ensey, and Marc Isaacs), production assistants (Charles, Eric Renard and Tim Hershbach), and screenwriters (Victor, Cecelia, Blayne Gorum, and myself). When that became too unwieldy, we broke up into 3 groups for an hour or so and then returned to pitch our ideas to the team (and our Team Leader) as a whole. The challenge was to incorporate all 3 required elements into a Romance screenplay that could be shot with our 4 actors at available locations... and, of course, to be happy with the results.

From the three story ideas, the group naturally picked the one that proved to be the most abstract, complicated, and impenetrable. After another hour or more of struggling to nail it down (and getting a tad frustrated with all of my questions being answered with "It's a metaphor") I desperately tried countering with my straightforward "Zombie Cheerleader" pitch, but to no avail. And so, as head screenwriter (read: the guy who brought a laptop with Final Draft installed on it), I offered to do the only thing I could think of in this situation: type the script out as they dictated it to me.

But that proved to be unnecessary. After everyone else left to get a decent night's sleep, the screenwriters rallied and, after extracting the imagery we liked from the winning pitch, wrote an entirely new story to go with it... somewhere between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m. A refreshing one hour's sleep later and we were ready to begin filming.

Our male lead (Steven Arthur) and our other 2 production assistants (Christian Ryder and John T. Powell) joined us on Saturday. Compared to Friday night, the rest of the weekend went pretty smoothly. Saturday morning, oh, 6-ish, the Team began scouting the locations we needed: Hermann Park and Olivewood Cemetary, where we shot until 7 or 8 p.m., with our dauntless actors memorizing their lines on the fly. We had an awesome and talented cast, who never complained, even when we did cruel and sadistic things like make Shelley run barefoot through the woods over and over again. (She said that dodging the broken beer bottles was the worst part. At least we let her wear sneakers for the long shots). As a writer, my function on Saturday was basically to act as a Grip and to occassionally operate the Boom Mike. For the tech geeks in the audience, our DP was shooting with a JVC HD100 with a Firestore hard drive on it; we were amazed that even our test footage looked like scenes from a movie.

I think most everyone got a decent night's sleep before the all-day editing marathon began on Sunday morning. Again we took over the Ottenweller's living room, where many of us spent a lovely day backseat-driving while Chris and Victor assembled our film on a computer hooked up to C & Ce's flatscreen television. It was a similar experience to the Friday night writing session, with a roomful of opinionated people trying to shout their creative vision over everyone else's, but at least this time we were facing 90 minutes of raw footage instead of a blank page. Trust me, that's a far less desperate situation to find yourself in.

We made the deadline, just barely (is there any other way?), delivering our entry, "Eternal," on a MiniDV cassette to Dean's Credit Clothing with about 20 minutes to spare. As a backup, we had a second team rush a DVD to the dropoff point as soon as one finished burning, and that was turned in literally at the last second after a harrowing drive through the streets of Houston at speeds that my stomach considered to be highly unsafe.

Now we had 3 days to kill until the premiere and the judges' decisions, so we of course spent them showing our film to friends and family and fretting over every nugget of negative feedback they offered.

The Houston 48 Hour Film Project 2006 premiered with 2 showings on Wednesday, May 24, at the River Oaks Theater. This venue was particularly cool for those of us who had last been there to attend a Bruce Campbell book signing and a screening of "Man With The Screaming Brain." And the fact that our DP picked us up in what came to be known as the Irony Coast Party Bus didn't hurt either.

While we didn't get the award for "Best Film," overall we were satisfied with the results. As I type this, they haven't posted the winners of the judges' awards on the official website yet, nor have they even announced the audience awards, and the battery in our video camera died just as the coordinator began reading the list of winners to the audience at the end of the screening, but as far as I can remember, these are the 6 awards we won or tied for: Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Sound Design, Best Use of Line of Dialogue, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.

More important than the awards, of course, was finding out what we could do under serious time (and content) constraints, and now that we've got the filmmaking bug, we're anxious to see what's possible with complete creative freedom and actual prep time. We plan to assemble Irony Coast Productions again very soon.

If anyone reading this is planning on entering the 48 Hour Film Project (there are still plenty of cities left on the tour) -- and I highly recommend the experience -- here is my advice:

While many of us describe the Friday night writing process as a nightmare, it was also a learning experience. We definitely had too many cooks in the screenwriting kitchen, but I wouldn't recommend cutting anyone out of the brainstorming process. You never know who might contribute a brilliant idea, and if everyone has had a hand in guiding the direction of the film on Friday night, they'll feel that it is partly "theirs" and have a much stronger connection to it for the rest of the weekend. Considering that everyone is a volunteer, that latter part is invaluable. Also, Friday night is a great opportunity to bond with your actors and get a feel for their strengths. When you're making a film in 48 hours, it's a lot better to have the cast involved in the creation of their characters from the outset than to simply toss them a script on Saturday morning and have them catch up as best they can.

So while I think that everyone on your team should be involved in the initial brainstorming of story ideas, there needs to be a definite cut-off point where the people who are responsible for actually writing the script are left alone to do their job. Otherwise, everything descends into chaos and despair, and you're really lucky if that's a downward-spiral you can pull out of.

You can watch the "theatrical cut" of "Eternal" on YouTube. Chris and Victor both began work on "director's cuts" almost immediately after the contest ended, so we'll eventually get to see what we could've created with more than 48 hours at our disposal. You can check out the rest of our pictures from the premiere, as well as behind-the-scenes production photos, here.

Finally, a personal thank-you from me to everyone on the Irony Coast team for making that weekend such an enjoyable experience. It was great to meet, work, and hang out with all of you, and I hope we do it again soon!