A suprisingly long 48 Hours summary
Tue, 12 May 2009
So, 48 Hours is over. After a madcap weekend of filming and editing and hair pulling, I think we managed to make something… interesting. I was obviously too busy during the weekend to blog anything about our progress, though I wanted to on many occasions. And was too shattered afterwards and even yesterday to string together any coherent words. So now I’m writing this trying to reflect on a weekend I have very little memory about. I do remember drinking lots of energy drinks, accidentally sitting in a puddle of kerosene before lighting up a cigarette and various other strange activities…
The competition started off like normal, got our elements: a rock, Alex Puddle (an exaggerator), dialogue of “it doesn’t fit” and our genre was Alternate World. Brinstormed like crazy Friday night, got to work on props, costume and the such and filmed a bit on the same night.
What’s slightly different was that we did the bulk of our shooting on the Saturday. In previous years, we’d have gotten at least half our shooting done by the first night, but this time it was only a few shots for the opening and ending and that was it. A little different and a little terror inducing for me as it meant more time pressure.
Still, Saturday went by pretty well, got plenty of shots done in the morning for a montage, dialogue shooting done over the afternoon and evening and a fight sequence at night. Thinking about it, I’ve never shot many fight sequences and now I know I’m not a big fan of shooting them, at least, in a 48 Hours period. They take ages to do, plan and film the various actions and beats.
Saturday night was a near sleepless editing process for me. Lots of trying to get the pacing of scenes right, the timing of jokes set and the fight scene… fighty? I dunno, it all starts to get hazy about here. Sunday was set aside for pickup shots, narration (which we should have done the day before, whoops) and laying down of music and sound effects.
Sound is a factor we always overlooked in previous years. Well, not so much overlooked, cause we were always well aware of it. In our first year we had incredibly bunged mics and last year our sound tended to drop off at times, but this year, we were well prepared with a totally sweet microphone, but unfortunately not enough time to really get the levels perfect. The film still sounds great, but given an extra hour or two, we would have had a really tight sounding soundtrack.
Same thing with music, last year the process involved the music being scored side by side with the editing, which allowed both processes to work back and forth. This time, music was done in a separate location and with time going against us at this point, there was just not enough time to get the pacing of both to work in sync with each other. The music still works and works great, but I’m just so uppity about music that like sound, if given a few more hours, it would have been a totally sweet marriage of the two.
But in the end we got it all down, and laid back to tape with almost no drama… almost. Our titles were a bit of a rush job, so that wasn’t quite right either and I just realised we missed out on our Special Thanks card, so at least on here I must say big thanks to Jamie for the support and putting up with our crap all through her and Ben’s house, Bella for being an all around helpful elf and of course Mum and Dad for being supportive and all around awesome.
Going into the competition, I had the intention of making a film that was more serious than previous years and telling a simple story that didn’t get too ahead of itself. Of course, pulling Alternate World there were some story options to make it serious, but c’mon… you gotta have fun with a genre like that. So we went all out on the gags again this year and well, I’m not too sure what our final product really is like, its definitely something I’m sure we can all be proud of, but its just weird man… weird.
It’ll be screening tonight for the second set of Hamilton heats and not to sound arrogant, but there’s a lot of anticipation from others as to what our final film is like. Hilariously enough, I’m getting a lot of second hand information about people’s attitude to us. Prior to the competition, a guy came into my work and talking to my workmate, he was all… “That’s the Chris Tan! We have to beat him this weekend.” and at the hand-in, teams were wondering if we’d get it in on time and quite a lot were hoping we wouldn’t… it’s so flattering to be feared. We’re like the bogeymen of Hamilton 48s.
Actually, more disturbing is that apparently there’s a character in one of the 48 films that’s based on me. He even has the name Tan and bares quite the resemblance to me. Flattering… but very disturbing. I look forward to seeing which one that is.
Will this be our last 48? Probably not, I say that every year, but we definitely had a lot of fun making it again and I hope audiences enjoy our final product. I’m not even sure if I can make it to the screening tonight, but I at least look forward to the reception of “Hardwood Floors” online later tonight.