Monday marked the end of an exhausting, but productive weekend for many of us here at Monkey See. We completed the 48 Hour Film Project—with less than 30 minutes to spare.
For those of you who don’t know, the 48 Hour Film Project is a major competition between filmmakers around the country who write, shoot and edit a 4- to 7- minute film in only 48 hours.
Even though all production takes place during the 48 hours, we had a lot of time before hand to begin prepping for the event. We cast two fantastic actors to help us shoot the video—Meera and Paul. Preparing further, we scouted locations and assigned everyone to a specific job.
On Friday night, every team selected a genre by drawing from a hat, which included drama, comedy, musical and horror. Each team was also assigned a character name, profession, a prop and a line of dialog that must be included in the movie. Our genre was “Film de Femme”, and we had to use ‘sauce ‘as a prop, a designer named Larry or Lori Gardner and the line “I’ll be glad when he’s gone.”
Derek and James had the script finished by midnight for the first read-through while the rest of the team scoured the local malls for props and costumes. Most important was a red gown for Antonia’s soap-star character, Celeste. Anna and Antonia found it minutes before the mall closed at 9:30 and—with the help of a coupon—even stayed within their budget.
Many of us only slept for 1-2 hours on Friday night before getting up at 5:00 am to begin a LONG day of shooting. We began during “Magic Hour,” a time when the light is perfect, at dawn or sunset.
The first scene we shot starred Win and Antonia on the top of a parking garage. After that, our crew quickly moved to a bar area in a building nearby and then drove off to Antonia’s dad’s house to shoot the rest of the movie.
Shooting took place from 6:30 am until 6:00 pm, with most of the time spent in an extremely hot room, thanks to the lights. It was a challenge to keep our makeup from dripping off and stay cool. We were relieved when the shooting was completed and we could retreat to David’s nicely air conditioned apartment to begin editing!
We edited in shifts from 7:00 pm Saturday until 5:30 pm Sunday. James was our main editor and had some help from Josh and Antonia. Derek worked on After Effects throughout the night to create a hilarious car explosion special effect.
By 10:00am the entire piece was cut together and all we needed to do was add effects, fix the audio and add music and sound effects. No problem, right? Wrong. By 5:30 we all started to sweat—again—as we struggled to burn the DVD and get all of the paperwork together.
Finally at 6:15 pm – only an hour and 15 minutes before the deadline – Courtney and Win left for the Warehouse Theatre in D.C. with our DVD. At 7:00pm Courtney called to let us know that the video had been delivered and was on time. Success!
I don’t think any of us have ever slept as well as we did Sunday night. It was an amazing weekend and a huge team building experience for us. We all worked together to create this movie and we hope you enjoy our film, entitled Mulberry Place.
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