48hr Film Project pre-prod?

W

wheatgrinder

Hi all,
Iv decided to jump in with both feet and either join or form a team for an upcoming 48hr film project.
For those who don't know, the rules stipulate no creative work outside the 48hr window, so at this stage is JUST planning.

http://www.48hourfilm.com/portland_oregon/

I'm looking for tips, pointers, and any suggestions..

I need to set a deadline on when I will decided to form my OWN team (or not). Are there a limited number of slots for these things?
 
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You can hash out as many ideas as you want about script possibilities (which can form-fit numerous genres)...trust me, all of the good teams do this.

You can put your cast and crew together (even casting specific roles) beforehand as well.

I also highly suggest you nail down some locations beforehand. As well as backups.

I don't suggest you build props/sets before...unless you're really sneaky (ummm, I didn't say that).

There is not a limited number of slots for teams, to answer your question.

Another bit of advice...save *all* of Sunday for post production.
 
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Are there a limited number of slots for these things?
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It varies by city, but yes...there are usually a limited number of team slots per city. Sometimes a city will add 12 more slots if 12 fill up (or whatnot), but if you want to do it, get in early.

As for pre-production, instead of seeing the rule as "no creative work outside of the 48 hours" think of it in reverse...how much BESIDES creative work can be done beforehand? Pay especially close attention to securing locations. Interesting locations will set your film apart from the pack. When you go to the screening, one thing you'll notice is that most entries take place in one of two locations: A)some dude's house, or B)some restaurant frequented by members of the team. So if you have a cool location ahead of time, it's to your advantage. In previous years we've had an abandoned piano warehouse, an abandoned high school auditorium and a cemetery.

Brainstorm stories, too...there is no thought police involved, so get your gears turning on the various genres. Come up with stories based on these genres based on your locations. I never do any pre-writing (against the rules, and why break the rules? If I want to make a movie in 48 hours I can do so at anytime without paying their fee), but I sure as hell brainstorm things like how I would tell a western in a piano warehouse, how I would tell a musical in an auditorium, how I would tell a buddy film in a cemetary, etc.

Turn it in on time, too...some cities allow for late entries to screen without being judged, but again...why bother paying the fee? See what you can come up with in the allotted time. If it needs further fixing (and it will), do so after the competition.
 
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Thanks, good advice.

Seems that just registering my own team is the best approach. I want to drive the process, but as I have NO experience I want to avoid REALLY stupid mistakes.

Iv been eyeballing locations for the last few weeks, and have some ideas. Would you think my rural home location as an advantage or disadvantage to luring talent\crew? I was thinking Id could send the wife and kids to the beach for the weekend and use my house (with its many beds) as HQ and use the surrounding locations I can find. Would that sound appealing, or just creepy if you were an actor\actress :)
 
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wheatgrinder said:
Thanks, good advice.

Seems that just registering my own team is the best approach. I want to drive the process, but as I have NO experience I want to avoid REALLY stupid mistakes.

Iv been eyeballing locations for the last few weeks, and have some ideas. Would you think my rural home location as an advantage or disadvantage to luring talent\crew? I was thinking Id could send the wife and kids to the beach for the weekend and use my house (with its many beds) as HQ and use the surrounding locations I can find. Would that sound appealing, or just creepy if you were an actor\actress :)
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Using your house as home-base is fine...as long as it's not a junk heap (nothing personal). :) And as long as you have more than just an actress staying there. :)

* another bit of advice: record good sound. You don't want to have to pull people in on Sunday for ADR (additional dialog recording).
 
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Yeah, I have my own rules against that kinda stuff.
I really am FAR out of town, 60 miles from Portland. Where most the talent would be concentrated, to me its not that far, but geze, when I tell people in "the city" where I live, they react like its Outer Mongolia... :)

Junk heap is relative. :) but it has character..
 
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Iv been trying to build up sound gear.. but am still committed to ON CAMERA(via external mics etc) recording. Hopefully, some crew will join up with options..

I'm Planing on having to do everything, supply all the equipment, etc, and HOPE that I don't..
 
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Seems that just registering my own team is the best approach. I want to drive the process, but as I have NO experience I want to avoid REALLY stupid mistakes.
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Go for it! You'll learn a ton. They often have meetups prior to the competition; see if you can hook up with a production manager. He'll be in charge of collecting and managing the talent leaving you to focus on creatively driving the process.

ps: it's not entirely a bad idea to record sound via external mics directly to the camera even when every second doesn't count...
 
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Uranium City said:
Go for it! You'll learn a ton. They often have meetups prior to the competition; see if you can hook up with a production manager. He'll be in charge of collecting and managing the talent leaving you to focus on creatively driving the process.

ps: it's not entirely a bad idea to record sound via external mics directly to the camera even when every second doesn't count...
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All of our features are recorded XLR directly from boom to camera, and the sound is always high quality (at least not stand-out low quality). The rest is up to the post sound work and design.
 
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Another tip:

There are elements required before and after your film, including a 48HFP animation, bars and tone, and a title card of your team name, etc. You can begin an FCP or Vegas (or whatever you use) project with these elements ahead of time as they can be tricky to figure out when under the deadline pressure. Likewise, I think they prefer you turn your film in on a DV tape, so if you're not familiar with printing to tape, figure it out ahead of time.
 
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M1chae1 said:
You can hash out as many ideas as you want about script possibilities (which can form-fit numerous genres)...trust me, all of the good teams do this.
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Not true, on both accounts. You can always tell when a team has "hashed out" (pre-written, practically) an idea, because the required elements are just sort of artificially jammed into the plot. Plus, what are you taking part in this competition for? Play by the rules (and the rules are quite clear on this one).

My team did quite well last year, and we had NO idea what we were going to write until we got the prompts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zMyrUMVUUw

The rest of M1chael's advice is very good.

My advice?

Get all those cooks out of the kitchen! Your screenwriting team should be no larger than two! Hopefully, it's two people who've worked with each other before, and have a rythm with each other. And by "screenwriting", I'm including all brainstorming! The producer, director, everybody has an idea. So what. You don't have time to meander all over the place.

Give your screenwriting team ALL of the first night to write a solid script. Make sure they understand the limitations of what you can shoot -- keep the locations to a minumum, and keep it simple.

No need for you to start shooting Friday night. Start early Saturday morning. Run some QUICK readthrough/rehearsals. Then, before shooting each scene, give your actors a little bit of time to memorize lines.

Now shoot! And hurry the hell up! Don't spend too much time on any one thing. Keep it all quick and simple! You need to wrap by the end of Saturday night.

From the wee-hours of Sunday "morning" 2AM and on, you should have dedicated to post-production.

Have fun! And good luck.
 
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Uranium City said:
As for pre-production, instead of seeing the rule as "no creative work outside of the 48 hours" think of it in reverse...how much BESIDES creative work can be done beforehand? Pay especially close attention to securing locations. Interesting locations will set your film apart from the pack. When you go to the screening, one thing you'll notice is that most entries take place in one of two locations: A)some dude's house, or B)some restaurant frequented by members of the team. So if you have a cool location ahead of time, it's to your advantage. In previous years we've had an abandoned piano warehouse, an abandoned high school auditorium and a cemetery.
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Very well-said.

Uranium City said:
Brainstorm stories, too...there is no thought police involved, so get your gears turning on the various genres. Come up with stories based on these genres based on your locations. I never do any pre-writing (against the rules, and why break the rules? If I want to make a movie in 48 hours I can do so at anytime without paying their fee), but I sure as hell brainstorm things like how I would tell a western in a piano warehouse, how I would tell a musical in an auditorium, how I would tell a buddy film in a cemetary, etc.
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Very true. Personally, I find it impossible to not think about it, and yeah, I brainstorm possible ideas. But you know how many of those ideas I ended up using? Zero. Like Uranium said, there's no thought-police, plus, how do you stop yourself from thinking? But once you start discussing ideas with teammates, you've begun the creative process, and that's cheating.
 
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A few more tidbits:

Get that paperwork signed in advance!

Don't try to do everything. You will die. Delegate different jobs to different people, and trust them to do their work.

Will you be using miniDV? If so, you don't have to wait until Saturday night to start digitizing (or even preliminary editing, for that matter). If you have someone who knows how to digitize footage (not that complicated, can be taught to any tech-savvy person), you can send the tapes back to homebase as you change tapes. And tapes are cheap, so why wait until you've used the entire 60 minutes? Why not send back 4 different tapes (even if they each only have 20 minutes of footage)? By the time you wrap, you'll have barely anything to digitize, and you'll be ready to practically jump right in to editing.

Don't forget about open domain music. Bach and all his dead-classical-composer cronies are fair territory. You just need an original recording of it. Do you know how to sequence? Do you know anybody who can bang out a nice piano score?
 
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lol Cracker that was great. I honestly don't know if I could write anything that good in 48 hours. I take ages over my writing. I thought it started a little dry but after the guy entered he brought a lot of genuine comedy and energy to the piece, and the three of them bounced off each other really well. Are you the lead?

The last two shots were good, nice colours. You could see that punchline coming but the timing was so sharp it made me laugh anyway. That's good comedy, if you can tell an old joke and make it new.

I'm starting to enjoy short films. I never really liked them before but I really appreciate the art now, and I'm impressed that someone can knock out something watchable so quickly. When are you entering next?

I wonder how Stanley Kubrick would've done in a 48 hour film fest.
 
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Cracker Funk said:
Not true, on both accounts. You can always tell when a team has "hashed out" (pre-written, practically) an idea, because the required elements are just sort of artificially jammed into the plot. Plus, what are you taking part in this competition for? Play by the rules (and the rules are quite clear on this one).
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I never said pre-write. I said hash-out ideas. There is a huge difference between hashing-out, and pre-writing. It's not 'practically' the same.

And you can not tell if a smart team has done any pre-writing. It's pretty easy to input a character, a prop, and line of dialog...it's not rocket science. They do it so it's harder to shoot and edit a piece outside of the rules.

I'm not saying cheat...I'm saying hash-out ideas, and ready your locations and actors.

Another piece of advice: if you're working on a tricky bit of post Sunday afternoon...kick out a master copy of your film ahead of time...just in case that tricky portion runs longer than you expected. That way if you're cutting it way too close, you can run that 'rough cut' to the judges if you absolutely have to.

Here is a Boston 48 I worked on last year, and it's unacceptable that we were 15 minutes late due to the meticulous sound design in post...we did have a rough cut in the judges hands two hours before the deadline, but it was pre-polish, and we all decide that we'd rather show the polished version and be proud of it, rather than be up for awards and have a rough cut...but that's up to you guys. It's best to have a choice. Here is the short BLINK (I'm the dude): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCIycdSw8a0

And here is a Providence 48 that we actually received a call from the judging board suggesting we cheated...which we didn't at all. We got so much rave from this short, we made a feature out of it, which has since been released nationally and received fantastic review--here is the original 48 of NUN OF THAT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5cdoEqsOWc
 
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If my team uses my camera, then were would SD card based, but there is still a transcoding via cineform to get it usable, which is close to real time process, so the work flow still has to consider that.


This contest seems to prefer digital submissions, data DVD or flash drive..

your film must be submitted on one of the following media:

* (preferred) a self-contained, SD, Quicktime file with no proprietary codecs on either:
- a data DVD, or
- a USB flash drive
* miniDV
* DVD

CrackerFunk, that was pretty funny.. and some good acting..
 
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Get that paperwork signed in advance!
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Oh, snap! I forgot this one. This is paramount. HAVE SOMEONE ELSE IN CHARGE OF PAPERWORK. You'll be fried by the time your film is due, so assign a detail-oriented person to be in charge of the myriad forms and releases you'll need to have at the drop-off.

Also, lots of water. Lots of food. Lots of hats (having a lot of different styles of hats can get actors out of a jam or twist a scene in just the way you need.) Get someone to do slate.
 
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wheatgrinder, I'm living vicariously through you, this year. I can't enter. Yes, you will make mistakes. And you'll learn from those mistakes and feel good about and build upon the things you did right. And, yes, you'll have fun. I'm a full supporter of the 48HFP. And play by the rules ('nuff said about the rules -- they are rather straight-forward).

EDIT: Forgot my manners. Thanks for the compliments on our entry. I was producer/DP/editor. I can't say enough positive things about the writers and actors I got to work with.
 
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EDIT: Forgot my manners. Thanks for the compliments on our entry. I was producer/DP/editor. I can't say enough positive things about the writers and actors I got to work with.
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Yeah it really was a good watch CF. If a film's no good I don't comment at all. Lots of crap in film land.

M1chael,
why did they accuse you of cheating, that's pretty interesting. What was their manner like and what was their case?
 
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