48 Hours of Movie Mayhem

So, I never got back to blogging after Sunday morning. All went well, but it was cram packed full of doing stuff, so I didn’t have time. Here’s some stuff that went down.

I finished up my first complete rough cut Saturday night. This is as far ahead as I had ever been that early on in the 48. AND, the film was actually under time. That has NEVER happened. Granted, I had forgotten a few scenes and our graphics weren’t in, but I figured we were sitting pretty. But man, were we still rushed for time on Sunday. I’m still not even sure why. This is the first time we’ve really done major audio design, so that may have been it. My pal Tommy is a genius at just about everything techy and creative. He did an amazing job putting together some ambient bowling alley sounds, fixing some audio issues, and drumming up some fun sound effects for us. The only problem was, I didn’t really take into account how slow it is for me to create clips for him to use for reference. We post in HD even though the final viewing isn’t in HD. What can I say, we’re HD snobs. It just causes some time issues when I’m exporting a 45 second clip and it takes 8 minutes. Ugh. I had lots of b-roll to edit in over our voice-overs and lots of shaping up on some of the tournament scenes.

The day went fast, but was fairly stress free. Until I went to make our first dvd and my handy dvd burner decided to make a style choice and burned the movie in black and white. Yeah. At 7:00, with our film due across town at 7:30, I’m making new dvds. Not awesome. But, we still got our film turned in by 7:21. Hooray!

I don’t really remember much else. Shockingly, I never really got tired. All day. And I didn’t ingest a single ounce of caffeine. Even when the gang got together for dinner and beers afterwards I was fine. Then, I got in my car for the dark drive home. And ohmygod I had never been so ready for bed in my life. Monday was rough. Tuesday was better and today I’m back to normal. Sure I still want to take a nap right now, but that’s pretty much par for the course in the afternoon.

Stray observations from the weekend:

• Bowling alley burger baskets are the best bad food ever. I need to add Val Lanes to my list of favorite lunch spots
• Those bar top video games are GRAPHIC! We thought it’d be funny if our villan character was playing one of the girlie games during a scene. Last I saw one of these they consisted of cheesey scantily clad ladies not too much more racy than your average romance novel cover. This one however had stripping girls rubbing their lady bits. Yeah. Whoa. That’s a lot of raunchy for a bowling alley
• Production is wack, yo
• Beer makes everything better
• Jeremy loaded equipment, lit the set multiple times in various locations and shot all day. I believe he consumed a bottle of water and six french fries. Late Saturday night I was already demanding a bloody mary bar and breakfast sandwiches for Sunday. Somebody’s a diva.
• My workplace is creepy at 3am when you’re there by yourself. The raccoons are NOT AFRAID to get all up in your window and freak your shit out.
• I want a The Plumber t-shirt
• You do have more abundance than me.
• The ref’s monologue was adlib’ed. And it is amazing.

So, friends here it is, Team A Sense of Urgency’s 2010 48 Hour Film:

It’s a god damn way of life, you guys.

If you’re in the Des Moines area, our film will screen Thursday night, July 29 at the Fleur Cinema at 7 & 9. Come on down and vote for Cowboys and Hot Dogs!

c.