For
the 2013 "48 Hour Film Project: Minneapolis," we created a short
movie called, "Campground Creeper."
We had 48 hours from the moment we received the film's criteria to write
it, shoot it, edit it, and turn it in.
Criteria:
- Genre: Buddy Film
- Character: Bobby (or Betty) Bulmer, the
Farmer / Gardener
- Prop: A lamp
- Line of Dialogue: "She told me it's a
secret."
According
to the rules, the movie had to be between 4-7 minutes long, not including
credits. Unfortunately, the film was
originally 47 seconds too long, and I had to cut out a good deal of the ending.
This
is that Director's Cut.
The
only major change is the addition of the parking lot sequence at the end of the
movie. Otherwise, I cleaned up the sound
a bit, and altered the length of some shots for better pacing.
Gag
Reel: Watch on YouTube
Director's Notes: The
Long Short of It
I
sat on this director's notes for a long time because there simply is too much
to talk about. I also felt that I had
over-saturated our channel with everything going on. It was an exciting and eventful time for
Stranger Things Studios. A new movie,
our first film competition, a screening at the Riverview Theater in
Minneapolis. Wow.
I
imagine the biggest curiosity is how it played out. How does the 48-Hour Film Project work? How did we go about doing it? I'll break down the play-by-play as well as I
can remember.
 |
| The team meets up at base to start brainstorming |
7:00pm
- The 48-Hour Film Project kick-off event began. This is when we finally got our packets that
gave us all the criteria for the film.
Everyone had the same requirements, except for the genre. That we pulled out of a hat. The criteria was short, but as follows:
Criteria:
- 4-7 minute movie
- Character: Bobby (or Betty) Bulmer, the
Farmer / Gardener
- Prop: A lamp
- Line of Dialogue: "She told me it's a
secret."
The
genre that I pulled out of the hat was "Buddy Film."
7:30pm
- I fly out of the Crooked Pint like a bat out of hell. I have two major stops before meeting up with
the team: 1.) Home, for the equipment, 2) Chipolte.
8:30-9:00-ish
p.m. - We all arrive at one of our
teammate’s house and get to work. Much
to their frustrated anticipation, I withheld all information regarding our
criteria until everyone was there.
We
workshopped the script well into the early morning. In all my years of writing, I don't think
I've ever really collaborated on a piece before. It involves a rotation of people walking away
and taking a mental break and coming back again. Eventually, only about two or three of us
were writing. Otherwise were calling parks
for hours and prices. In that span I
went for two short jogs, and took care of a pot of coffee mostly on my own.
Most
of us crashed there. In fact, if we ever
do this again, I think I'd make that a requirement. You'll understand why as I go on.
Saturday,
June 1st, 4:00am? - Seeing how I have the computer, I am the last one up. I email the script to myself and upload it on
my phone. I then take a picture of the
team passed out on the couches and the floor, and go to sleep myself.
6:00am
- Why? Maybe it was 6:30 or even 7:00,
but still! We get up. Adam (Bobby Bulmer) and Laura (our
photographer) arrive on time. We drag
ourselves up and get moving, load up the vehicles, and caffeinate the hell out
of ourselves.
At
this point in time, we don't have a set place to shoot. We do however, have several parks in
mind. It was our plan to hit them up
one-by-one until we found one. Some of
them didn't open until later, which didn't work for us. I don't remember why the others didn't work;
they just didn't.
We
found ourselves heading all the way out to Taylor's Falls (a good 1-2 hour
drive north) before we settled on a location.
This
is where things start to go amiss. One
of our teammates went home the night before to crash, and to find an old crumby
tent we could destroy doing the shoot.
He was going to meet up with us a little later in the morning.
Two
problems came out of this. First off, we were out of cell-phone range, so
getting a hold of him was damn near impossible.
Secondly, once we did get a hold of him he broke the bad news: he didn't find the tent. By then we were already checked-in at B.F.E.,
which made getting another tent a time-consuming process. He did, however, have his good tent. Unfortunately, we couldn't destroy that one,
so we quickly tried to rewrite the script on the spot.
11:00am
- Action! - I don't remember how involved our script was. All I know is that the night before I figured
out that if we started filming by 9, we would have a hour to shoot each scene. We weren't ready to start filming until 11:00
or later. By 1:30 we had only finished 2
or 3 scenes. We weren't catching up,
and the off-and-on rain was making filming difficult.
 |
| Stretching out for the first scene, which was actually the last scene. |
By
the time we were done and packed up it was between 6:00 and 7:00pm.
Let's
say 8:00ish - Half-Time. We return to
base in St. Paul. Some people dipped out
and went home. The rest of us headed to
IHOP for dinner. Tom had been adamant
about getting food from the moment we left the campgrounds, and I knew if I
didn't eat with everyone else I wasn't going to get around to it.
We
gorged ourselves on breakfast food while we watching some of the footage. As we laughed our asses off it became clear
(if not insisted) that I needed to make a gag reel when this was all done.
9:00pm
- The team breaks up. Everyone goes
home. Now it's just down to me and our
composer Randy out in Rhode Island to edit the film.
Sunday,
June 2nd, 3:00am - I finish the rough cut of the movie. It's still a little too long, but I can't
stay away anymore. At Midnight, when I
finished the first cut of the film, it came in over 10 minutes. Getting it down to just under 8 was
impressive. The last 45 seconds would
have to wait until 9:00am.
9:00am
- Time to get up.... yeah, that didn't happen.
4:00pm
- 2 hours to go - I finish editing the movie.
At this point I'm waiting for it to finish rendering. When the movie was down to 7:45 minutes it
was, as far as I was concern, complete.
It could not get any shorter without losing some key part of the
movie. Unfortunately, I had to cut
something. So, for the competition, I
cut the ending escape sequence and shortened some earlier shots. When I went ahead and released the movie on
YouTube, I put up that original cut. I
was not going to over saturate the channel with a trailer, a theatrical cut, a
director's cut, and a gag reel.
6:20pm
- 10 minutes to spare - I arrive at the Crooked Pint Ale House and drop off our
submission. We did it! We were successful entrants into the 48-Hour
Film Project.
It
was amazing to see our movie on the big screen.
It was cool to see what other, more professionally trained teams had
done; and it was heartening to know that our own movie looked to be of the same
caliber. Almost all of the winners from
the competition came out of our screening group. I would like to think that that's why we did
not get to advance. After all, we were
screened with the best of the best. Who
can compete with that?
If
there's one thing I took away from the experience it is having learned how to
create a movie in a single weekend.
That's invaluable. Most of the
movies I've made have run longer than I wanted them to, or took forever to
plan, or forever to edit. Doing the
48HFP showed me that it's possible, and not necessarily hard, to have that kind
of turnaround with a film. It all comes
down to the initial conception, and keeping the whole project in mind as you
go.
 |
| Outside the Riverview Theater before the screening of our movie. Only about half of us are pictured here. L to R: Charlie, Jon (kneeing), Tom, Caitlin, Laura, Erica |
No comments:
Post a Comment