Last weekend I participated in the 48 hour film project in Baltimore, which meant for a lot of playing with cool gear, a bit of logistics, and a lot of sleep deprivation to get everything to fall into place.  So I’ll start this story just as I’m about to Hsien’s(our director) place, and we get our list of required elements:

Genre: Horror

Character: Tim or Tina Flagler, Unemployed Musician

Prop: a tire(any kind of tire)

Line: “I need to leave in a minute.”

Not distributing a link to the movie itself till the screening on Wednesday at 7:15PM  in Baltimore.  Probably a bit too far out of my way to make the trip.

Behind the cut is mainly my recollection of a timeline with comments of what I(and maybe some of what other folks)  was doing, so that we can at least hope to manage our time better for the next time that we attempt this.

7pm(Hour 0) – As people started trickling in, we started working with our ideas.  We spread out and had everyone brainstorm for a bit before meeting to deciding as a group which we would be doing.  My personal best idea was a story about tire eating zombies who cause the downfall of modern civilization by crippling the transportation system.  Though it’s probably for the best that we went with a trapped in a bomb shelter thriller that actually had a story(since we did have Omar’s bomb shelter available to us).

11pm(Hour 4) – Omar, Rinny, and I split off as the rest of the group worked on the script to get some lighting tests and to do some final cleaning of the bomb shelter.  We drove around UMBC campus in the middle of the night looking for an appropriate grassy hill with trees for an ending shot.  While trying to figure out how the sun would come up, I had the brilliant inspiration to use the iPhone’s built in maps to orient myself and thus figure out where east was.  Then we went to Omar’s place and did some cleaning of his bomb shelter, and doing some lighting testing before we did shooting the next day(really a few hours).

2am(Hour 7) – Drove back to Hsien’s, so that we could help read and revise the script and to start storyboarding a bit.

4am(Hour 9) – Went shopping with Omar for canned foods as well as various bits of supplies for set dressing.  Drove back to Hsien’s to get ready for shooting.

5am(Hour 10) – Picked up Rinny, the Canon HF10 camera, and a shot log to prepare our shooting adventures.  We drove back to UMBC campus, found the spot that we picked out last night and started shooting the sunrise.  We got really lucky and got a clip with birds flying right past the sun over the hill(which would eventually go in later).

6am(Hour 11) – Hustled over to Omar’s place to begin shooting.  As this would likely be approaching 24 hours of awake time for many of us, Rinny and I decided to take over setting up the lighting and let Hsien relax for a bit.  After we had everything in place, we finally let Hsien come down and start directing.

7am(Hour 12) – Shooting, shooting, and more shooting!  Around 4-6 of us were crowded into the bomb shelter at any given moment.  It was amazing just seeing Hsien give basic directions on the script and just seeing Lindsey do her thing.

1pm(Hour 18) – Finally got our lunch delivery of mexican food and Subway.  Being couped up in a bomb shelter for a long time definately made us all appreciate the fresh air that we found outside.

2pm(Hour 20) – Setup the back angle of lighting, so that we could have proper conversational cuts.

3pm(Hour 21) – Chugged a 5 hour energy, which tasted absolutely awful.  Eventually it kicked in, and kept me going for a long time.  Started copying and reviewing the footage from the memory card onto my laptop, but I wasn’t able to get it all before we needed to start shooting again.  Unfortunately we only had memoy card, which means that our workflow wasn’t nearly as streamlined as it could’ve been.

4pm(Hour 22) – Charles and I decided to head back to Hsien’s place to start getting things prepared for the edit fest.

6pm(Hour 23) – Watched some of our footage.  I was really impressed with the footage that came out of the HF10 camera.  It’s amazing how sharp the video from the HF10 turned out, especially when only few years ago digital cameras were spitting out images of that level. It’s potentially disconcerting to discover that we may have accidentally shot a snuff film.

7pm(Hour 24) – Editing, editing, and more editing!  I had to remember how to use Premiere, as Hsien, Rinny, and I were probably the only ones that had recentish Premiere experience(or at least we were the only ones to admit having it).  I went into everything with the goal of setting up all the various scene – takes so that it’d be easy for Hsien to just pick through which ones that he wanted.  I did eventually wind up editing a few of the scenes.

12am(Hour 29) – Took a break from editing and uploaded a few promo worthy photos.  I should sit down at some point and photoshop them into an appropriate movie-poster looking thing.

4am(Hour 33) – I merged Rinny’s fight scene in with the rest of the clips that we edited.  Full timeline complete!

5am(Hour 34) – While some more tweaking on the sound and video edits, we watched some of the other videos for other 48 hour film projects in various other cities.  We’re pretentious assholes.  Though we did find this gem – The Guts and the Glory.

7am(Hour 36) – Everyone was asleep except for me.  I had a meeting with my realtor, so I packed up my stuff and drove home to Virgina.  Driving while sleep deprived is a vastly different experience.

Luckily all this gets me a shiny badge to put on my blog.