i48 Friday Night: Pre-production

It's 11pm, and I should have been in bed hours ago. The last of our hardcore group have left for the weekend and the kitties finally have their house back. You'd think they'd be pissed that it has been taken over by strangers and friends for an entire weekend, but they're just loving the fact that they get to sit next to me instead of being worried that someone might try to chase them. We have just completed our first 48-hour film competition. I am exhausted, elated, and somewhat drunk. It's been a good weekend.

It started on Friday. Gene, myself, and our director, Mike, headed to the park at 5pm to pick up our team packets. The 48-hour film competition takes place over a 48-hour time period, in which teams of filmmakers get together to produce a film. You have to write, produce, and edit a film in a single weekend, with no pre-planning. When we met at the park, we received the genre of our film, a prop, a character, and a line of dialog that has to be included in our film project to prove that we made the film over the weekend. At 6pm, we were allowed to open our team packet and discover the type of film that we had to produce. We had  most of our team in attendance for this life-changing moment. While only one person from each team was required to attend the pre-meeting, we had our director, two actresses, director of photography, and production assistant with Gene (editor) and I (producer). Our hearts were pounding as I opened the envelope to reveal what our fate might be.

We received a genre that not a single one of us had any real interest in - sports. I read the genre aloud and we all just kind of looked at each other as though we were all ready to throw in the towel and start drinking the massive amounts of beer that we had stocked our fridge with - we go hardcore, none of that pussy shit, like coffee, to stay awake. We each got in our respective cars, Gene and I in Mike's convertible - we only travel in style - and headed to our house to start the brainstorming and writing.

After we had gotten the ideas down on paper, the writing team, myself and Mike, headed to the writing room (what Gene and I have dubbed our movie room, complete with greenscreen), while everyone else was given the task of finding a bar to shoot in either that Friday night, or the following Saturday night. Only a few lines in, I got a phone call from my fantastic friend, who played the Warrior in our D&D Parody video, saying that we were allowed to shoot in the bar that he was working in that night. So, Mike and I finished our bar scene, ate a couple slices of pizza, directed our talent to get into costume and makeup, and rushed to the bar by 10pm. We were about to shoot our first scene...

(I've just realized that I am exhausted and need to get some adequate sleep if I want to function at work tomorrow. So, I'll be back to write more about our experiences. I apologize if none of this makes sense, I've gotten about 8 hours of sleep in total over the last 48 hours and I'm not quite sure how many beers I've had to drink since we turned in our finished product at 6pm tonight.)