48 Hour Film Project

[mackdadd]

right on velk! good luck! I'll be watching for updates!

[Tagger]

good luck with that, Velk !

[Rickmeister]

Sound like alot of fun!

Keep us posted.

[Velk]

Thanks guys—We are doing a casting call tonight to settle on actors, already have a full crew so this is the last big piece before the competition. It'll also be the first major thing we shoot with our new camera which will make for some interesting workflow issues.

[Tagger]

new camera beeing ?

[Velk]

The new cam is a Panasonic HVX200—been spending the last week shooting around with it getting familiar with the controls and how it handles in different lighting situations.

[Rickmeister]

Can you tell us what you have in mind for the story?

[Velk]

No idea—basically 15 minutes before the event starts I get handed a Genre, Prop, Character and a Line of Dialogue. Once they say go we start scripting and pitching ideas. There are 15 genres ranging from horror to romance and scifi to holiday film.

[mackdadd]

you bought a hvx200? wow! is it pretty awesome?

[Velk]

Yeah it rocks. Spent several hours last night testing frame rates and gamma settings trying to achieve the cleanest images. The regular gamma is fairly noisy though incredibly sharp, changing the gamma to Cine V softens the image up a touch but also really mutes the noise. Still have to figure out how to keep the noise from going crazy in the blacks on really dark scenes.

Stuff shot in 720P/24PN looks stunning—which is how we are planning on shooting most things. We can get about 40 minutes of footage on a single 16GB P2 card at that rate.

We played with shooting film style, setting the camera up to focus in feet which is very nice. The next thing to play with are under and overcranking.

[DangerousCliff]

Best of luck on your film! is this your first year participating?

for those of you unfamiliar with the competition:
www.48hourfilm.com (http://www.48hourfilm.com)

Our leg of the 48Hour race was 2 weekends ago, this week was the screening. Since my team has already shown, we can post our film.

team leaders blog:
http://collinsmedia.net/wp/

my blog:
http://www.leapoffacliff.com/cliffblog.html

next week, when i have some time, i plan on doing up tutorials on all my FX shots, which is what i primarily did for the film.

[Velk]

Nice job Cliff—I can't image trying to pull of a bunch of vfx in that time, hope you got a little bit of sleep at least. What city did you compete in and how did your film do?

This is the first time that any of us have done the competition so I'm half excited and half scared to death ;)

[DangerousCliff]

Heh, I slept about 4 hours total that weekend. we had the story down on the way to the car from the drawing, the script was finished at about 11pm that night, and we were on location shooting at 1am. We shot till the sun came up on us about 5am, took a break to clean up and nap, then we met at the team leaders appt to ingest footage, begin a rough edit and start on VFX about 11am. worked on that until we were ready to setup the second night of shooting about 1am Saturday night (Sunday morning). Again, shoot till sunup, this time, though, we didn't have the luxury of a nap- went directly to the edit, sound FX, and final comps, and finished about 4:30 on Sunday afternoon. made the deadline with an hour to spare which gave us time to finish filling out the paperwork :)

We're in Little Rock Arkansas- 39 teams signed up this year, which was 11th highest attendance in the country. Tonight is the final showing of the third group of films, so we won't find out how we placed until the awards announcement next week.

As far as being nervous, It's all adrenaline and caffeine. :) you just get in there and do it, and the time just slips away. We were fortunate to have a small team (8 people including cast and crew) that has worked well together for some time, so everyone gave 110% and there was no ego's or frustrations getting in the eway of us getting in there and working.

You'll have a blast, I recomend the 48 hour race to anyone.

[Velk]

Best of luck to you.

Our team is a bit bigger, 15 including cast and crew. We have a line on a couple amazing locations, still waiting on final approval which is really rough. We'll be camping out in a friends 2 bedroom apartment and an RV for the weekend.

[DangerousCliff]

The awards ceremony was last night, and I'm happy to say our team was nominated for 5 categories as well as making the top 10 Audience Favorites.

The categories we were nominated for were:

Best Use of Prop
Best Visual Effects
Best Graphics
Best Sound Design
Best Directing

and we won for Best Use of Prop and Best Visual Effects.

So, I'm very pleased to have a little trophy for my desk for my contributions to this years 48Hour film!

www.48hourfilm.com/littlerock (http://www.48hourfilm.com/littlerock) for all the nominations for Little Rock.

We had a blast, Best of luck to you, Velk, and to anyone else in an upcoming race!

[Velk]

Congrats Cliff, that really great news. We have 9 days till our adventure kicks off and I'm feeling really confident. I built a small three-wheeled dolly just to give us more options. Our team was completed about a week ago and all our locations are locked in. Now its just an awful week and a half of waiting and second guessing ;)

[Rickmeister]

You've did some great stuff in a short time Cliff! congratulations with the awards!

I'm really looking forward to Tabias' film! With the dolly, the large crew and camping in an RV story you really make me looking forward! Good luck with that!

[Chowda]

Ooohhhhh...48... Its good to have an experienced crew that has worked together before. An animator friend of mine roped me into a team...I'm usually a patient person, but I take filmmaking kind of seriously, add to that I'm a pretty competetive person...let's just say a relationship was damaged. New friends were also made however. Its a good contest to learn what someone is really made of. I think this person was using it as a vehicle to advertise their studio without any regard for making a good film.

[Velk]

Tomorrow is the day. I'll let you know how it goes, thanks for all your words of encouragement and pieces of advice.

[DangerousCliff]

Good Morning, Velk! heh.

How did it go?

[Velk]

Wow what a roller coster ride. We finished and turned in our film, "Spiral Bound", a mere 14 minutes early, thanks to some superior driving by my friend Bryan.

Genre: Fantasy
Prop: A Notebook
Character: Paul or Peg Wiltz - dishwasher
Line of Dialogue: "Don't use that one."
Location: Recognizable landmark in Cleveland

I'm actually amazed that we finished, we broke all the rules that we set for ourselves (finish the script early, no special effect, no more than 2 takes of any shot and no pick up shots).
Our team was incredible—our actors memorized lines and delivered them time after time in a convincing and credible way with virtually no lead time. Our crew had shooting down to a science and was nailing shot after shot with virtually no reset time—things were running so smoothly that we were getting 4–6 takes of almost everything.

Once I'm allowed I'll post the film online—we do have to be careful because we may want to hit some festivals with it and there are some restrictions about online or public screenings that we will have to pay attention to.

[DangerousCliff]

Congrats on getting it done on time.

Yeah, I know all about the viewing rules with the 48 hour itself, much less other shows.

When and if you can, I'd love to see it. Sounds like you had a good one.

[mackdadd]

yeah, sounds awesome velk! can't wait til you get it online! (or in a festival near me!)

[Velk]

Our screening is tonight at 7PM and I'll let you all know how the awards go.

[Velk]

The premier was pretty freaking cool. Our film "Spiral Bound" took the award for Best Use of Prop, which was very cool because everyone on the team had something major to do with the prop (a notebook) which was transformed into its own character.

[Velk]

OK guys our film, Spiral Bound, is now online, currently as a quarter size flash version, at www.ravdesign.com. Check it out and let me know what you think.

http://www.ravdesign.com/48hfp/spiralbound03small.jpg

[Tagger]

that's actualy pretty sweet concidering the tight deadline you're on, great job Velk (and team).

that's the way to handle a 48 hour project. Simple story but handled with care.

[Velk]

Thanks Tagger—we actually had a lot of trouble with the story and keeping it simple was key.

Here is a small production photo from the shoot, I'm to the right looking at the monitor and Jared the DP/Editor is talking with the actor, Dean, on the couch.
http://www.ravdesign.com/48hfp/spiralbound01small.jpg

[DangerousCliff]

Sweet!

Congrats on your film, and your award. Fun story, well done, very clever use of prop.

I think, for me at least, the 48 Hr provides 2 main things- the desire to do more, and the proof that it can be done (the caveat now being "wonder what I can do with 4 weekends")

[Tagger]

Hey Velk,

the 48 hour project doesnt happen to be http://www.48hourfilm.com/ ? cause it's hitting my city on the 5th of october and i've been asked to join a team :)

[Velk]

Tagger, it most certainly is! Have you accepted? If so you'll have to keep us up to date on how you do.

[Tagger]

The project leader has enlisted us today, hopefully there's not gonne be a problem getting us in. Now thinking of a location and trying to compleat the team.

[Velk]

The biggest thing I can recommend is to get some sleep—doesn't have to be a lot but your decisions will be better that way.

[DangerousCliff]

Tonight is the night, Best of luck, Tagger!

[Tagger]

unfortniatly i got cought in between this and a deadline for a shortfilm in a couple of weeks so i had to bail out of the 48 hour project at the last moment :(

[carlocodamus]

hey will you be posting videos as well?? goodlouck!! More power to you guys.
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[carlocodamus]

hey where can i find a link to this video!! congrats man!!

[Velk]

There is a small flash version on our website (http://ravdesign.com).

[DangerousCliff]

http://www.filmchallenge.com/

Looks like it's run by the 48hr guys, and simmilar rules, except rather than a meeting and a hat, you log on to a website to get your criteria- and it's national rather than city.

comming up later this month, October 19-22, 2007, I think we're going to get the band back together for this.

[helsing]

Just finished watching Spiral Bound and I gotta say, it was really good.
Real clever use of the prop :P

48hourproject seems like loads of fun :P!

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