My pants is tight!

This weekend I was involved in a 48-hour film challenge, and holy moly am I tired… but incredibly satisfied!

For those who don’t know, during a 48-hour film challenge, you’re given an “inspiration package” that contains 4 things:
1. An object
2. A location
3. A character
4. A phrase

You then have to write/shoot/edit a 5-minute short film within 48 hours. Sounds pretty easy, right? Totally not.

Friday
On Friday evening, Brad, Kirsten, Eddy, and I drove down to Port Moody to collect our inspiration package. We were given:
1. Object: Blue cooler bag
2. Location: Park
3. Character: Personal life coach
4. Phrase: “Someone ditched it.”

My first reaction was “Wow, we got some weird shit.” The cooler bag and life coach items really threw me for a loop, but I was sure that with this many minds working on it, a good story would eventually form. As we were walking back to the car, everyone was already throwing around some neat ideas.

The full team, consisting of myself and Brad, Kirsten, Eddy, Adrian, Majid, and two of our main actors Eduardo and John, then met at the campus and brainstormed story ideas from 7pm to 4am. Early on in the session, the idea of having a head in the bag was introduced, which I initially thought was ridiculous — an entire story wrapped around this idea of having a talking head in a bag, and a guy carrying it around and being totally fine with it… I mean, come on! It walked a very fine line between awesome and cheesy, and I wasn’t about to make a cheesy film.

Brad came up with some interesting ideas, though, such as having the head be a completely over-the-top character like Richard Simmons, and having the main character go through socially awkward situations with the head, and after a few hours of fleshing the idea out with the rest of the team, I was sold… but still a bit hesitant.

It’s a head in a bag!

Saturday
We started the day at 9am. Everyone, including all the actors (Eduardo, John, Alannah, Lacey, Devan), met at the Mezzanine, exchanged pleasantries, grabbed some coffee, and headed out to our first location: the park.

We were a bit concerned, as it was supposed to rain on Saturday, so we tried to shoot the scene as quickly as possible. Lacey, the actress on the left, looked amazing and totally nailed her lines on first attempt. (Sidenote: Catch her on Driving Television with Zack Spencer on Global!). John, homeboy on the right, with little direction and dialogue, managed to bring our “everyman” character to life with his incredible acting. Any doubt that I had about our film completely cleared after seeing the actors on our in-field monitor. We wrapped up about an hour and a half later, and headed back to the campus to get the rest of our shots.

The next five or so hours went by pretty rapidly, with dialogue and actions being created on-the-spot. We shot some great stuff in the parkade elevator, which included a cameo from the production crew! I was thoroughly impressed with both John and Alannah (our female lead), and their ability to come up with realistic reactions and dialogue, especially with the whole head-in-a-bag thing.

In the evening, we traveled to Eddy’s awesome house to shoot the last remaining scenes, eat, unwind, and edit. Before we got down to business, Brad ordered up a bunch of pizzas for the entire cast and crew, and Eddy provided a seemingly endless supply of beer— this is how all of our movies should be made haha!

We ate, hooked up our camcorders to the TV, and watched all the footage we had shot to this point… upside-down (an unfortunate by-product of using 35mm adapters). It made for an interesting image, seeing everyone with their heads tilted to the side to see the screen upside-down.

After pizzas, we went right back to work. Eddy and Kirsten did an amazing job lighting the kitchen scene, making it look like 7am when it was really around 7pm and pitch black outside. We also shot closeups of Eduardo’s face in the bag, as well as recorded voice overs.

Sunday
Around midnight, we captured all our footage and started the editing process. I was delightfully surprised with how smoothly this process went— someone would start editing, take a break, someone else would step in and pick up where the other left off, take a break, and so on. Brad and Kirsten handled the majority of the editing, with myself, Adrian, and Eddy jumping in whenever we were needed. Eddy and Adrian took care of all of the special effects, and absolutely nailed the head in the bag effects.

This process went on all night and well into the morning (except for about 3 or so hours, when everyone took a short nap from 6am-9am). The rest of the day was pretty quiet, with hardcore editing and compositing going down. We finished up around 4pm, watched the finished version on the television, and high-fived one another. Since we didn’t have to hand it in until 7, we decided to shoot some fun team photos in front of Eddy’s wicked wood panel wall, and slide them into the credits sequence.

And that was the 48 hour experience. It was long and tiring, but having a group of talented people really made the process smooth, efficient, and most importantly, fun. I can’t wait to work with this crew again!

(PS: Thanks to Brad for all the photos! Also, I’ll have a link to the film as soon as I get clearance from the rest of the team!)