Too Damn Funky

Mon, 21 May 2007

And so the 48 Hour Film Competition has ended and this weekend, has made it onto one of the top spots in my ever so hard to remember list of really perceptively long periods of time. And thus, I will hold off a much needed shower to post a blog to try to recap the events…

7pm Friday, I’m at the museum a few beers down and pulling out the Genre… Grindhouse. Although I was personally hoping for Unnecessary Sequel or Based On True Story, we had a very fun idea for Grindhouse and got to writing it.

By about 11pm, we’d gotten pretty much a decent script, made with the attitude of Blaxploitation films entitled “Flash Sanders: Funk Detective”.

At around midnight or just after, we were at our first location, which was the Chartwell mall’s new carpark, which I have always made a note that it’s lights were always on. So we go to filming and very pretty filming it was, but with about two more shots left to shoot for the opening, we got an overzealous janitor or employee of some kind kicking us out and vowing for revenge.

New location and we shoot the next scene somewhere else on the streets instead. Nice and brief and then its off to another location: an underpass in Hillcrest which probably holds the title of most overused location in a low budget student level production. But the shots look good and by the time we were done it was 5 in the morning.

Got back to Sash’s house which fronted as our base of operations and I got onto capturing our footage and cutting some of it. Sleep eventually came after that.

About 10 in the morning, I’m awake and editing again. Midday we discover that our very cool and very pretty opening we shot, we couldn’t get permission to use as a location. Trying not to think about it, we started shooting at the Academy at 3pm, which took a bit longer than expected and by the time we were outside and shooting the ending, we were losing light fast and with some rapid filming, got it done and cut together, the scene amusingly goes from day to night rather fast. But it still worked and that’s okay.

Shot a few more bits in the night and the back to base for more editing for me and food mostly for others. At this point we’d not really assessed the situation of our unusable opening, but problem solving eventually came in the end, I’ll associate the idea coming mostly with the music we eventually got and listening to it over and over again I just couldn’t shake the idea of a tv movie like opening, and so off to uni at about midnight to film some crazy shots of all sorts, including a dummy being thrown off a building, which looked great.

Back again to base at 3 in the morning for some more inspired filming and then more editing for me. A little sleep and its onto more editing in the morning.

At this point, I’m hating editing.

The rest of Sunday was spent editing and waiting for stress and editing some more and waiting for more stress. But I got the edit together by 3pm and very tightly cut too. Spent the rest of the time fixing audio an adding foley and wishing I had more time to colour correct, which I didn’t even get to do to one frame of the film unfortunately. But the raw footage still looks good.

Our tape got handed in with ten minutes to go, but man… there were some really close entries going on. One guy made it with a few seconds to go, but he had no tape as the laptop and camera he was running and printing with at the same time had stopped printing. And another team turned up no more than twenty seconds after the deadline had closed. Total madness and there were actually quite a few teams that didn’t make it on time and a lot more horror stories of things being told.

Overall it was a helluva lot of fun. I pretty much hit a magic high of tiredness at some point on Saturday evening and have been riding it out all the way up til now (its almost two in the morning).

It was kinda dumb of me to be doing all the directing, filming, audio and editing of the film… Prior to the competition, I’d been prepping people and making sure I’d have lots and lots of people on hand all over the city for whatever situation and genre we’d get. In the end, I used none of the contacts and starting here, I must apologise to many and all for kinda losing contact with, not keeping up to date or just zoning out of reality during the competition. It was pretty insane and once caught up in it, really hard to focus on anything else in the world. But it worked itself out in the end and to most satisfying and amusing results. We’ve watched the film a couple of times since handing it in to put our minds to rest, but crazily enough we still found it funny even after the million time of watching it… probably cause we were so tired and strung out at that point. Or at least that’s how I see it.

This post is just phenominally huge. And its probably full of crazy jibber jabber and if you’ve actually read down this far, holy crap, congrats to you. Here are good looking images for you trouble.

*temporarily gone*