At this pace, nothing is for certain.
The 48 Hour Film Project has grown into quite an international phenomena. Apparently, having to randomly select your topic, write, shoot, and edit a short film over the weekend is quite addictive. Getting into it, you know full well that you will be spending no less than 40 of the next 48 hours with your eyes open, but you are still stoked to play the game. For some who come to play, it is the first time they have shot video with something other than their cell phone. Other teams bring their professional talents to bear. Big or small, it doesn't matter, when you are done with this weekend, you will be a more efficient and effective filmmaker. That is, if Murphy doesn't get you first.
Nick Holden takes a hit
Why would you do this to yourself?
When you first decide to forfeit a weekend's worth of sleep and sign up your team, you immediately acquire delusions of grandeur. "We're going to win the whole thing: Best Film, Best Director, The Audience Award. We'll run away with it." The adrenaline starts pumping at the first cast and crew meeting and it doesn't stop until you are putting down your first pint at the drop-off location Sunday night. I put together a team a few years back and it was insane. I thought I had everything covered. But hey, this is filmmaking, and if good 'ole Murphy hasn't shown up yet to lay down his law, you can rest assured that he'll be there before the martini shot.
Make a plan, Stan
You need to get your ducks in a row beforehand, because you are going to need every one of the 2880 minutes you have to actually do the writing, shooting, and editing. To not think about good shot locations before you pull your genre is just plain silly. I put my whole house up on the block as the backdrop for anything we might need to shoot. We could dress up the veranda to look like a nice outdoor café , the kitchen was pretty wide open, there were three bedrooms, and I had my drum kit and a few borrowed guitars upstairs. I was even ready with a 15-foot wall of green screen. We had two laptops ready to capture directly from the camera to disk, saving hours in capture time. We had a steadicam, a 12-foot jib arm and a full-sized dolly that I made myself. All bases covered, right?
Now scratch that plan and come up with something else
It was Friday evening, right before we were about to draw our topic for the masterpiece we would undoubtedly create. I had 15 people standing around me at my house as I am on the phone with Terry, my DP, who was pulling our weekend's destiny from a hat. As 6:30 rolls around, it's his turn to draw. And our film genre will be...ROAD TRIP FILM. Road trip film? But I have a whole house. There goes that idea.
OK team; PLAN B! What kind of car does everyone drive? Great, Terry's friend has a mint condition 1959 Impala, black with red interior. This could not have been cooler. This car is gorgeous. It gets soft polish with a clean cotton diaper twice a week. He won't even take the car out in the rain. Good thing we are in Austin with our 300 days of sunshine, right?
Make something up
Within your seven-minute short film you need to stick to your genre, but also include a character's name and occupation as well as a pre-selected prop and a line of dialog. Otherwise, you get the big DQ, and I don't mean Dairy Queen.
We brainstorm, we write, and we brainstorm some more and by about 4:00am, we have our storyline. Our characters are from a family of Italian decent. They have a job to deliver a special "package" to Uncle Carlucci at a funeral in Chicago. Our characters included a hot girl who is really into cars, a stoner, a metrosexual who is very concerned about his appearance, a lovesick holder of the "package," and Ali, the neice of Carlucci who speaks nothing but Italian. She spends the entire thing tooling on every one of the characters in Italian, which they don't speak. They all get into our really cool car and drive to Chicago. There's our road trip genre and a nice little story. Great, let's get a few hours sleep and shoot when the sun gets up.
Plan C
It's 6:00am and I bolt upright in bed to a clap of thunder. It actually vibrated one of the strings on the guitar in the other room. It is raining so hard that drops are bouncing off the ground. Crap. Rain. No cool car. So, does anyone ever really have a plan C? I mean, plans A & B almost never fail consecutively, right?
But hey, we are flexible indie film makers, aren't we? So instead, we went with the last shot first, in the funeral parlor. To fit the bill, we dressed up my whole dining room. It was kind of creepy. Regardless, between the claps of thunder, we were able to get some really good shots. From that point forward we were jamming. Everything started to go right. The sun came out just in time to get the cool car shot, where the Impala drives up to meet our heroes in an alleyway. In addition, my friend's house was about to be torn down so we had permission to have our way with it. Even better is the fact that all of my actors were dead-on. They were improving lines that I couldn't have found if my life depended on it.
Cast in a can
I like to think I cast it perfectly, but it was a stroke of good fortune that it turned out this way. Nick and Josh were brothers, so their chemistry was almost guaranteed (check them out in Linklater's Fast Food Nation). Ali is stunning, a great actress and, oh yeah, fluent in Italian. Ace made me literally jump off my feet when her character had to yell at the brothers. She just nailed it. Bill, as always, is a genius with his improv and elegant good looks. Not only that, but he is a composer. He now has his MIDI keyboard hooked up to my computer and he is composing as we go. Julie and Marian are amazing as they jam between their three jobs each. Terry was nailing the shots, the dialog sounded great through my headphones, and things were getting crossed off the shot list in record time. We were definitely going to win this whole contest! Before long I was getting one of those goofy uncontrolled smiles you get when you know something is shooting oh-so-good.
We shoot until midnight on Saturday, having had three company moves and every shot we needed in the can. After a few joyous well-chilled beers, we start going through the dailies and it is making me cry because it is so good. Reel Women, who sponsor the event, were at my house taping us for some behind the scenes footage of one of the, 48 Hours Project's "team to beat." I was glowing all over the place. It was disgusting. We couldn't lose, right?
So, do you remember that guy Murphy?
Just after I pick my head up on Sunday, I start editing. Things start well. They even have me on camera talking about how great all the footage is. Soon after that it gets kind of fuzzy. Unfortunately, I have assigned myself as the only editor and, although I am cutting like Edward Scissorhands, I have clearly carved off way more of the turkey than I can eat. For some reason I was set on using the green screen to superimpose this little hitman dude who was chasing after our characters. Wes did an amazing job playing our villain while wielding the really cool medieval sword I borrowed from a neighbor. Having gotten way too aggressive on the 'ole shot list, and with my green screen shot not quite fitting in as I had hoped, there is real reason for concern. I am starting to hear a loud sucking sound as the last of my 2880 minutes slip into the bottom of the hourglass.
Next thing you know, there is only one hour before this thing needs to be driven 30 minutes to the 48 Hour drop-off point. Before I know it, we are literally down to the wire as I start running into rendering problems. By now I have used every curse word I know and even made up a few. It seems that within a span of two hours, things have taken a big fat turn into a serious hole. All the wheels have fallen off and we are throwing sparks from our melting rims. All of my planning, all of the buzzworthy performances, all of that gorgeous footage, a really cool car! What happened?
Filmmaking at a 100 mph
Finally, the tape comes off the deck and into Terry's hands who runs for the car with Ali who is ready to barrel ass down I-35 South to the drop-off point. I am ready to jump in another car five minutes later with an even cleaner copy that I am hoping to get in before the final countdown. As I grab copy number two, Terry calls. "Are you sure it is a left and not a right?" No Terry, it's a left, you'll go right by the place. I am sure of it. OK, so file that line under famous last words.
Turns out, it actually was a right turn, forcing them to circle around the block and as a result, we miss the deadline by 120 seconds. Murphy, we've officially had enough! Not only that, but the "behind the scenes" ladies want to interview me about our big fat deadline miss. I am not sure that the word disappointmen' has enough syllables to describe the feeling. For a straight 48 hours, the whole team poured it out and did a badass job. But now, in my on-camera interview, I was bearing the burden of my bad driving directions.
Was that a silver lining or just cheap silver spray paint?
But wait, we then learn that even though we missed the deadline, we would still screen with the other teams at the Arbor Cinema Theater. We were even eligible to win the Audience Award. I figured we could probably win that one on the sympathy vote alone. So there's still hope. Sundance here we come!
We all meet at Manuel's next to the place before showtime for a shot and a beer as I offer my condolences for everyone's loss. We then shuffle over to the Arbor Theater and it is jammed with people. Crew, cast, friends. There is that adrenaline again. We all get into our seats as the anticipation shifts from simmer to boil. Everyone is both excited and apprehensive at the prospect of seeing their work on a big, fat screen. Then it starts. The teams which don't make the cutoff time get to go first. Lucky us. The audience sighs an apologetic “awww” when they read the title which tells everyone that these are the submissions which, "didn't quite make the cutoff." Oh well, at least people will like it, right?
So do you remember my good buddy Murph?
We sit at the edge of our seats as our clip starts to run. My heart rate climbs the way it does whenever I show my work for the first time. The music comes in at the opening with a nice jib shot to the beautifully dressed dinner table. The shot is at night, so all the actors pop nicely from the background. The color and composition looks fabulous. The music rises and then fades perfectly into...crickets. No, not a metaphor for silence, you actually hear crickets. Do you remember that wonderful café we built in my back yard? Well that is pretty much all you hear. The only dialog from the actors has been reduced to a dull buzzing sound, like an AM radio, right here on the big screen in front of everyone.
Out loud, I hear myself screaming "NO!" But wait, it sounded great in the headphones, in the editing timeline, on the two DVD players we tested it on and even the final tape. This must be a conspiracy! Call the Academy, we have been wronged!
The Walk-aways
OK, so it turns out that no one had it out for us in the projection room, but we did run into something that we never expected. For a week following the screening I racked my brain trying to figure out what happened. Was it audio codecs, a bad DVD, user error? Without turning this into a technical discussion, it turns out that it was something called phase cancellation and the definition is below:
The attenuation that occurs when two waveforms of equal frequency and opposite polarity are combined. The attenuation may be total when the waveforms are also of equal amplitude.
What it means is that waves in the left and right channels of the sound file were opposite of each other. This was caused because we were running from an XLR microphone into a mini plug to record sound. The cable we had seemed perfectly good. It sounded great on location and in every other digital form we listened to it through. The issue came when converting to MPG for use on the DVD. On the two DVD players we tested it on, it sounded fine. However, on older DVD players (we have determined about five years or older) for some reason the audio in each of the channels simply cancels themselves out, leaving you with nothing but a dull buzz. So there you have it. If you have an XLR mic into a mini jack, get a converter box from someone like Beachtek and you will be good to go.
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
All in all, the biggest lesson here is that if you are taking part in any of the "speed film" contests out there, don't get too over zealous. Make completely sure that if you want to try something new or different, practice it before and get confident that you can pull it off in a time crunch. You also have to assemble the best possible team that you can. This is where good producers earn their money. Surround yourself with people who are at least as good (preferably better) than you are, and let them do their thing. Delegate and direct, but give them room to create. Borrow or beg to bring in every piece of production and editing equipment you can, along with every weird, funny or otherwise noteworthy location and prop. Ask all of the cast and crew to assemble things they can bring before the event and have it all ready to go.
The conclusion. When you have 48 hours to meld together creativity and technical aptitude, without losing your passion and sense of humor, it will make you a better filmmaker. Murphy's Law is not absolute and should never be an excuse for not bothering to plan ahead.
Make sure you are good at what you do...and always have a plan C.
Steve Muccini is president of SpotEdge Media, a video production company that produces TV commercials and films. He is a film editor, cameraman, actor, and writer in Austin, Texas. You can view his profile and contact Steve here.
