I spent the end of last week reading up about 48HFP (research, in the context of a project I'm working on myself) and was wondering to what extent the three requirements would affect the "final cut"
Gotcha. I'll share my experience, in case it helps. There are actually four requirements:
Character - Michelle Thames, a retired athelete.
Line of dialogue - "I have just one question."
Genre - Film de Femme (Outside of "strong female, " this is wide open.)
Prop - A cell phone.
The only thing you can do ahead of time is to select your team and shooting location. You can also use preselected music that you have the rights to. All writing and filmmaking starts after the assignments. I've done this before, so I like to shoot the night we get the elements. Most teams write Friday night, then film Saturday morning. They end up staying up all through Saturday and Sunday, so no sleep.
Our scenario was the following:
Friday night, I drove downtown and drew a random genre out of a hat. There are 30 genres, which you can see here:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/genres
The character, line, and prop were announced at 8pm, Friday night.
I drove home and hashed out some ideas with Aaron (the bearded guy). Sheila got off work at 10pm and had the idea of the Hag character. She wasn't going to act in the movie, originally, but when I drew Film de Femme I said she had to be in it. We worked the ideas till about 11:00pm, then packed up and drove to Mount Charleston, about 30 minutes from our house.
Friday night/Saturday morning -12:05am, we reached the location. We unpacked the gear and pitched the tent.
12:30am, I started shooting the first scene. Wrapped up at 5:00am. Sunlight was starting to appear.
Around 6:30am (now Saturday morning) I transferred the footage to my computer. Damn! I meant to shoot in Pro Res format, but shot in BRAW (Black Magic's proprietary codec). That meant I couldn't edit in Adobe Premiere (my usual editor). I spent the weekend pulling up Youtube tutorials on Davinci Resolve, as I was only vaguely familiar with it.
8am - 2pm I slept. I spent the rest of Saturday editing late into the night.
Sunday morning, I slept about 5 hours. Got up at 11:30. I returned to editing, mostly sound levels. I started composing the music around 1:30pm. Around 6:15pm, I completed the music, then imported the tracks and lined them up. I rendered two copies to USB thumb drives, then left the house around 7:30pm. I drove downtown and handed in the drives and paperwork (talent and material releases) by 8pm, Sunday night. 48 hours.
Note: Some genres can vary, each year. The character, line, and prop are always different, from year to year.