48 Hours Recap

Hey folks! Back to updates and fun stuff. =)

As promised, here is Darren's experience participating in the 48 Hour Film Contest:


Friday:
We all sat waiting patiently for the genre announcements.
The call came in for “sci-fi / monster movie”. The crowd goes wild!

We immediately began a brainstorming session. Ideas pop in ranging from the dark and sinister to the light hearted and insane. Finally, we settled on “sci-fi” and then comical. I can’t say I wasn’t a little disappointed, but it all worked out.

After the narrowing it down session, the writers disappeared and we started talking FX and music. I headed down to the HQ Basement and started writing music. This task didn’t let up until around 3:00am that morning. At which point I made numerous attempts at sleep but failed due to the extreme cold of the living room and a blind phantom attack cat that chose my head as a perch!

Saturday:
The team arrived at 6:30am and we walked through the new script, brainstorming and making changes as we went. After the shooting schedule was broken down, we started packing everything up. I built up 4 alien slugs and packed up my stuff. Off we went.

Our shooting was narrowed down to three locations:
1) St James Theatre
2) The Carted Observatory
3) Someone’s Apartment


At the St James, I began building appliance slugs and applying them to one of the leads’ neck, then assisting with gear while I waited for touchups. The shoot went well and after a few “street” pick up shots, we were off to location #2.

At the Observatory, I began building and coloring the movable slug, the severed arm and the slug tray/juice. After a bit of waiting, I built up the final slug for the “slap on” scene and the close-up shots. Also, I wetted up the severed arm. Lastly for this location, I had to wrap a secondary character in plastic wrap as “take-away” for the picnic shot.

With the sun fading we were off to location #3.

Once at the apartment, I began setting up lights, doping makeup touchups and tying up the secondary character with rope. With the final shots complete, it was back to HQ for post-production.

Once at HQ, cuts/timing and music were discussed and mapped out. With little for me to do until the timing was averaged and while they did voiceovers, I called it a night and headed home for a few hours of rest.

Sunday:
Early to wake, got ready and annoyingly had to catch a bus to HQ. As soon as I got there I jumped right into music editing, churning out 10 songs and a series of clips and sound effects.
As the day progressed, the 3 of us stayed in the basement, working out edits, FX, timing, music and sound effects for each shot/cut.

During this time, William and Jenn stayed upstairs turning out awesome graphics and Digital FX. The time flew by and after a few computer (PC of course) issues, we had a pretty good copy.

Final renders finished and the “final copy” followed the “emergency copy” just a few minutes behind for the drop off. We made it with a few minutes to spare.

We got the call that we made it and everyone cheered!

This was an amazing experience and must again thank Norman for all of his help and for bringing me onto his team.
It felt good to be back in my native environment and doing the work I love.


**Dawn here: we had a chance to see the film at a "heat" screening last week. I'll update on that shortly!