- May 10th, 2009
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Hey all! Greets from Auckland, New Zealand.
We had an awesome time in the 2009 V 48 Hour Film Fest! For those of you who don’t know what it is, you have 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a short film. You are assigned a genre, characer name, prop, and line at the beginning of the competition. This prevents you from writing a script in advance, since you won’t know what you get until 48 hours before the film is due!
This year, we got “conspiracy film” for our genre. All teams were required to include a prop (a rock), a character (Alex Puddle, The Exaggerator) and a line of dialogue (“It doesn’t fit”) in their films.
Out team, called Shiner Bock, consisted of myself, Marcos Pelenur, Jonathan Jolly, Kate Erickson, Craig Bovaird, Cam Lenart, Lisette Ingram, and Donavin Wick. At the brainstorming session, I wanted a story involving a romance with a rock, that led to a conspiracy, but somehow I lost out on this one (peraps a good thing). The romantic rock does have a cameo though if you watch the full movie. Post continues here…
Instead, we decided on a conspiracy involving reptilians. Apparently this is a REAL conspiracy theorized by wierdos on the web. See:
THE REPTILIANS – WHO ARE THEY REALLY?
Yes, these people are for real… However, they were all out of reptile suits at the costume store on saturday morning. When Marcos turned up at the shoot with his proposed substitute… well I won’t spoil it for you, watch the move.
In addition to the editing, I got to do some of the directing, lighting, and camerawork for the interrogation room scene. Which was awesome, I had a lot of fun trying to create spooky noir lighting, and uncomfortable handheld camera angles. We filmed this in an unused office space with no windows in the basement of Craig’s work. The laboratory is Marcos and Donavin’s flat.
Thanks Julia and Butobase for the last minute gear loan when our rented camera proved to be defective. Thanks Cam for turning up on the day of the shoot after a last-minute call an hour earlier. Your perfect sound recording and creative touch in post made the film awesome. And thanks Lisette for being creative with cookie dough. Thanks to everyone else, for amazing creativity, patience, perseverance, and success in delivering our film on time!
