So! Here I shall describe my experience in the 48 Hour Film Project in St. Louis, 2009! First off, I’ll start by saying we did not make the top 15 this year. I’m a little disappointed, but I wasn’t truly happy with the way our 7 minute cut turned out anyway. If we only had more time! But I’m getting a head of myself. I guess I’ll start at the beginning…
So we were uber-prepared this year — Robert’s friend Erik had set up this giant workstation for us, complete with his powerful Mac and two separate monitors. We were going to dedicate one hard drive to the entire project so we didn’t have the horrible problem we had with FMS The Musical (which was, all the files were in 4 separate places). We downloaded all the programs we thought we’d need, including Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, After Effects, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, and Compressor. We made a list of all the genres we definitely didn’t want, and some that we were luke warm about, so when the time came, we could choose to get a “Wild Card” genre. It seemed that nothing could go wrong! And, in fact, nothing did go wrong, until the last few hours on Sunday.
We drew Film de Femme, which means all our film had to entail was a lead female character. This actually fell into the “luke-warm” category, but I was actually quite enthralled. This meant we could basically do anything we wanted, as long as I starred in it. Jim and Robert soon warmed up to the idea and we decided we would stick with that genre. Then, the elements for this year were revealed. We had to incorporate Ashton or Ashley Brown, Expert, as our character, a photo of mom and/or dad as our prop, and the line “Have you ever seen anything like it?” as our dialog. Seemed promising! We immediately went to Mike Duffy’s to have our last meal for a while and hash out our story.
Robert was really pushing doing a fantasy film, and I couldn’t have been more happy about that. I definitely love fantasy, and thought we were perfectly suited to do it. I immediately suggested a journey through the woods, something that we would end up sticking with. I also really liked the idea of a talking rock, or some other inanimate object, just because I thought the effect would be funny. We ended up sticking with that idea as well. Soon we were throwing out ideas like crazy. Our story developed quickly over the course of our meal, and we were basically ready to write as soon as we got back to Robert’s. The issue that kept coming up was why the evil sorcerer killed our hero’s parents in the first place. We bounced back and forth between it having to do something with the talking rock, his lustful habits, and his desire to conceive the most powerful children ever. The story became complicated…little did we know that this would present a problem later down the line.
Jim and I hashed out the script while Robert began to compose the score. As more and more pages were being written, I began to become worried about the length. Jim insisted that it wouldn’t play out to be as long as written…he turned out to be wrong. It was actually longer than was written. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We then made a list of props, and head out to Wal-Mart to pick everything up. I don’t know what we would do if it weren’t for the financial support of Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe!
Bags of props later, we returned to Robert’s to make a thorough shot-list. I wanted to be UBER prepared once we finally got to shooting. Since it was supposed to rain and our indoor location might be in use, I wanted to make sure we were as efficient as possible and weren’t messing around trying to figure out what to do once we got there.
Jim and I were able to take a 2 hour nap at his house before we went costuming shopping the next day. I wanted to go to the mall, because I figured Urban Outfitters would probably be the best place to find the kind of clothes I was looking for for my costume. It ended up working really well! I found the shoes I had in mind (for relatively cheap, too!) and found some great jewelry at Claire’s. Robert wasn’t able to find as much as we thought at Johnny Brock’s, but eventually we found all the costuming we needed. FINALLY, we were ready to begin filming at 1:00PM on Saturday. We needed to use the large room in Brown, and were really hoping that no one was using it. We got in there to get set up (we had to make like 3 trips to get everything up there from the car), and right when we were ready to begin, a lady came in and said that she had class in that room. Jim was very firm with her in asking if she could do it someplace else. She, luckily, agreed to move the class to another room. Thank goodness! That scene was definitely the most important and difficult, so we wanted to get it out of the way first. I’m glad we did. We were there for about 4 hours filming. We had trouble with some of Jim’s lines (he couldn’t remember them for the life of him) and getting my clothes to magically come off (it proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be). But, finally, an exhausting 4 hours later, we left.
We didn’t have a lot of time to spare. Robert and I had to get out to the sculpture park where there are cool structures and a lot of woods so that we could use the remaining daylight. Crepin met us there to shoot the ninja scene first. After a few tries and problems with his costume, we finally got the shots we needed. I was grateful to move on — I had counted about 15 mosquito bites on my legs and boyyyy was I itchy! Crepin left and we then hauled the other two huge rocks (along with our star rock) to an area deeper into the woods. The light was fading quickly, and as a result, some of our shots are less than desireable because we were in such a hurry to get out of there.
Jim had a portion of the scene we shot earlier when we got back, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I hoped it would be. Time for Robert to take over and capture and edit the stuff we just shot while Jim and I shot something else.
At this point I was starting to get worried. We had a lot left to shoot, and the editing was going kinda slow. After having a problem with one of the lights (aka Jim couldn’t figure out how to put it together), we finally were able to move on to some outside shots. I wanted a fire, so we dragged the charcoal grill out and burned things in it to get flames. We had real troubles getting the flames to be big enough to cast light on our faces as we delivered our lines…we ended up doing a million takes, with Jim feeding the fire so we had enough light.
Somehow, when it came to be morning…we seemed to actually be on track. The editing was going well, we had most things shot except for a few pickups…we were starting to relax a little bit. Once the individual scenes were cut together, I sat down to put them in sequence. That’s when the major problem arose.
When cut together, the inital cut was a whopping 12-14 minutes. Our limit was 7!!! We thought we could shoot for 8 because we heard we could run our minute of credits over some narrative. We figured it could go over the prologue and the epilogue. 3 frustrating phone calls later, we finally found out that was not the case. That left us with only a few hours to chop our 14 minute film to 7. I worked non-stop with the initial cut, and managed to cut down to about 9 and a half. Still 2 and a half minutes to slice out. Jim and I sat down and went through every shot and every cut, and made sacrifices where we needed to. We were able to cut those last few minutes out and then some, so our final cut was about 6 minutes and 50 seconds. As a result, our intricate and complicated plot, character motivation, pacing, and humorous lines were sacrificed.
We were sad about the loss of depth of the characters, but one of the most obvious changes noted was what connotation the “sexual flashforwards” took on. Suddenly, instead of looking as if the villain was implanting these sexual images in her head, he had raped her as a child! Whoops. Well, there was nothing we could do at that point. I quick threw on the special effects, did some sound editing, and Robert threw on the final score. We got there with 30 minutes to spare.
Waiting for our screening the following Thursday seemed to take forever! We kept busy by making posters for “Alura” and seeing all the other screenings so we know what we were up against. There were some pretty bad ones…and some pretty good ones too. By the time Thursday came around, we were pretty confident. We got into costume, set up our 3 posters, and handed out many little slips promoting our film. We checked the program…we were dead last! We saw that as a definite good sign. The film went over pretty well…people seemed to be pretty entertained and had good things to say about it afterwards. However, we realized that it just went too quick for 7 minutes.
We didn’t end up making the top 15 this year, but we’re still proud of Do It Live’s final production (at least for a while!).
If you read this whole thing, wow. You are quite a fan. Thanks for reading!
~Alexandra
