48 Hour Film Project: Throwing down the Celluloid Gauntlet
This past weekend, thousands of people around the world were pulling hair, popping pills and desperately trying to maintain focus after two days without sleep– but enough about emergency room doctors. What I’m talking about are the cognitively-challenged participants in the worldwide 48 Hour Film Project. These No-Doz™ heroes had been hard at work since Friday evening, writing, directing, scoring, titling, recording and editing short films from NOTHING and, true to the event’s name, they only had 2 days in which to finish.
The premise of the project is this: competing teams assemble in host cities all over the globe on a Friday. Each competing group (average: 40 per city) is assigned a genre (drawn from a hat) for the film they are about to make. They are given a character, prop (in Denver: a pie) and line of dialogue (in Greensboro, NC: “Hold me close and call me ’sugar’.”) to be featured in every production to qualify for competition. Then the teams disperse to write, scout locations, secure music rights, etc…
Begun in Washington D. C. in 2001, the event now takes place each summer in places as small as Aberdeen, SD and Asheville, NC and major world cities like Berlin, London and New York. In fact, more than 3 dozen cities in 4 continents will host a 48HFP competition this year.
When it comes to guerilla filmmaking, these guys are the Viet Cong. Having had experience in the field, I know making a cinema-quality short film is a long, difficult task, even when done at a reasonable pace. So why, then, do these pain junkies put themselves through this celluloid ringer? Well, there is the promise of distribution deals and new equipment for the overall winner, which is nice. Still, I imagine it might have something more to do with the feeling of accomplishment that comes from seeing the finished product, along with the other local entries, screened at a hometown venue and knowing that one had done the nearly-impossible: creating a fully-realized short film completely in one weekend.
If you enjoy making short films, if you have the basic equipment to shoot and edit the film, if you have a jones to chug Red Bull by the litre and pop caffeine pills like a long-haul trucker coming off a meth binge and if you have some masochistic friends who are willing to suffer through the whole process with you, you still have a chance to enter. Portland (ME and OR), Buffalo, Cleveland, San Antonio, San Jose, Sioux Falls, SD, Berlin, DE and Utrecht, NL will be having their competitions at later dates and still have room for more entries.
You can register online, find out about the process for enrolling next year and when and where the completed films will be screened in your locality, visit: http://www.48hourfilm.com
Watch last year’s entries on YouTube
See also: RationReality: WTF Films
Word? That sounds like loads of fun. Let’s enter next year! Not that I know the first, or last, thing about making a movie except: A. It’s hard & B. It’s expensive. It also seems to require talent… but don’t tell Hollywood.
Got that right, Jody. In general, Hollywood blows–big time!
You know, we should have some innate filmmaking abilities. (Look at the names on the credits of the next movie you watch.) We have one here and one there next year. We’ll see. Hell, if you make movies like you make music, I can coast!
It sounds exciting. It also seems like a cool thing to do if you have the talent for it.
Finally, Gloria comes to play in our sandbox!! YAY!!
Welcome, Gloria!