Our 48-Hour Trip

Over the weekend, I was part of a team entering the 48-Hour Guerrilla Film Festival, and it was one wild ride. The premise is, you get your team together, submit your application, and the contest randomly generates a genre and a line of dialog you must use. Then, you have exactly 48 hours from that moment to write, shoot, produce and upload your film, which must be between 5 and 7 minutes long.

In order to be allowed to use Chatham University's equipment, we had to promise we'd only shoot on campus. No problem, right? There are plenty of usable locations there: pool, gym, classroom, office, park, science lab, Victorian buildings, etc. We were pretty confident, until the computer randomly generated "Road Trip" as our genre. Our line of dialog was a little better: "There is a time and place for everything, except that."

How on earth were we going to do a road trip movie that was original, yet took place entirely on campus...and not have to shoot using actual cars, also shooting mostly outside during a weekend where the forecast was erratic at best? We were not happy campers.

There is a panic button called the Danger Bucket. If you decide you really can't work with what was generated for you, you have one chance to hit the Danger Bucket, but if you do, you MUST then use what you get. They warn you that the ideas in the Danger Bucket are often crazier. We came very close to hitting the Danger Bucket, until our assistant director convinced us not to be hasty, and spend one hour thoroughly thinking it through.

We did, eventually, find an idea that worked, which I am unsure about whether I can share yet. I am proud of us for sticking it out and using what we were given. Our breakthrough came once we identified what elements of a road trip movie are defining and non-negotiable: a journey, and shared experiences. Other milestones include running out of gas, rest stops, and car trouble...all of which we sought to do in a way nobody else had done before.

Once we had our premise, we threw around scene ideas, and once we had all the scenes we thought were inportant, I stayed in the staff room to write the script while the rest of the crew went into the art gallery to build a large, very important prop.We adjourned at 4am.

Saturday morning came, and the first road bumps occurred. The boom microphone we'd checked out wasn't working, so, we were going to have to use a backup audio recorder in addition to the camera's mic, and sync all the audio later (a timely process).

A couple people we were expecting to show up, didn't, and a couple people we weren't expecting to show up, did. One of our actors showed up at the 10am call time, but began throwing up at 10:15. We appreciate his bravery, but...we did some re-writing and shifting to allow him to be able to go home.

A requirement that had been added late in the game was that you have to have a "money shot" of the place you're shooting from. So, while one group of camera people were filming on the Chatham campus, a second unit was circling through the Fort Pitt tunnel a few times to get a good tunnel shot, emptying into the city. We ended up having to re-create that shot using special effects.

My camera work is way too shaky, and I know this. So while the rest of the crew was on the shoot, I composed music. We are probably one of the only teams who had a full original score for the film, written and produced during the 48 hours by a member of the crew. Bonus points!!

Saturday night, after the shooting had been completed, we had to wait for our editor to arrive. He had spent a couple days in Chicago, and his flight had already gotten cancelled once, and here came the thunderstorms. We did see him at about 11pm, at which point the editing began, but not without another major crisis which nearly killed the project.

Transferring our footage into the computer, we noticed that it looked very strange. Apparently, the camera settings had been set on "high speed" for some reason. Had the editor not arrived at 11 and been the only one who figured out why things looked funky and how to fix it, we would not have finished. A team of three spent all night fixing the individual clips, syncing the audio, and preparing a rough cut for others to watch in the morning.

By Sunday, nerves were fried, people were silly with delirium and smelling like we'd walked out of a swamp. We sent a crew out at 3:30pm to get different footage of the Pittsurgh skyline so we could use it to doctor the "money shot" that hadn't worked out. I did the end titles, and a song based on the main theme music, which plays over the credits. That involved having to teach myself SoundTrack Pro on the fly, because the guy who knows it best never showed up and the Mac Lab computers didn't have Audacity (my usual program).

I had a great time doing this, and learned a lot. First, it involves a lot of trust to finish your work and then hand it off to others, hoping they do what you intended with it. That was harder for me to do than I thought it would be, but fortunately our team was on the same page.

Second, you have to be flexible and resourceful, because people flake out or get sick, or it rains, or something breaks (all of these happened to us!) and you have to find ways to work around it. Freaking out about it just wastes time and energy. Third, you have to stay focused on your own part of the job, making it the best it can be, while being willing to include others in the process, and both accepting and integrating feedback. That can be a weird line to walk.

Finally, if you post a casting call on CraigsList, you will get some really good people and some completely mental people. That's really all I'm going to say about that.

We hit the "upload" button exactly 17 minutes before our time ran out. Due to high traffic on the festival's site, we were granted more time to upload because they could see that we'd hit their "upload" button before our clock ran down.

The title of our film is "Means of Escape." Because it is part of a festival, I can't share it publicly yet, but will when I can. I understand that it will be screened in Sarasota, FL at some point over the next couple of weeks, and until then, we are waiting for more information and reflecting on our wild and crazy ride!