The concept was simple enough. Pay an entry fee, assemble a team and then create a movie in 48 hours that would be shown at the inaugural Southwest 48-Hour Film Festival.
I enlisted two of my coworkers, Scott Rains and Chris Wilson, into forming a small production group and entering the festival. None of us had ever made a short film before, but we are all creative for a living so we wanted to give it a shot.
We paid our entry fee and waited. You see, the entire concept of the 48-hour film festival is that you only have 48 hours to make a film. So, to keep you on your toes, and to keep you from planning ahead, you don’t know what kind of movie you’ll be making until the official start time.
There were four things we were waiting on: our two genres, a prop and a phrase. Once we had those we could begin. And on Friday, Dec. 4, around 7 p.m. we got the parameters for our challenge.
Our genres were revealed first, horror and action. Then our prop, a dirty mask. And finally, our phrase, “my grandpa once said.” All we had to do then was come up with an idea, write a script, film the scenes and edit it all together. Easy, right?
We immediately dove into an hours-long brainstorming session to come up with ideas. So many good stories had to be shot down because they were too ambitious to be completed within the time limit. We must have left at least 20 potential scripts on the cutting room floor before we finally settled on an homage to the Evil Dead about a seasoned journalist and a greenhorn who decide to explore the basement of a newspaper.
Hey, you work with what you’ve got.
By the time we made it to “Set” aka The Lawton Constitution offices, we knew that we would need extra hands, so we enlisted another fellow journalist, Justin Stevens, as our principal photographer. We also dragged Sports Editor Glen Brockenbush into our schemes as an extra. A rough outlining of the “script” was about all we had time for before we set to work filming the first scene.
One thing nobody tells you about making a movie in two days is that you don’t have time to bring in outside actors. Having a team that you are familiar with, that you trust, is crucial to the process because they are all you have. So we became the actors.
Well, I say we, I should say we minus me. I spent my time behind the camera directing. There was a scene planned out that would have had me in it, but I cut it. I was also the one tasked with editing all the footage together, and since our film could be no longer than 7 minutes, I knew we were crunched for time.
For the most part, the shooting went smoothly. There were a few technical glitches that we had to deal with on the fly but other than that it was just a group of friends having a bunch of fun with cameras and fake blood.
Oh, I hadn’t mentioned the fake blood yet? Yeah, we got to mix up some fake blood. Food coloring, Karo Syrup, water and strawberry jam for texture is all it took. Covering your coworkers in movie blood is something more people should get the opportunity to do, honestly.
Filming started around 11 a.m. Saturday and wrapped just before 4 p.m. the same day. With two SD cards worth of footage in hand I set off to begin the arduous task of editing. If you’ve never edited a short film together before, I’m going to make two suggestions: use as big a screen as you can get your hands on and drink a lot of coffee. Oh, and order a pizza. OK, so three suggestions: big screen, coffee, pizza.
It took me around 10 of our allotted 48 hours to put together the first draft of our short. That’s roughly one minute of film for every two hours of editing. After the rough draft had finished, I got some merciful sleep and then started fresh the next morning doing punch-ups. The second draft went through a round of approvals, then a few more punch-ups, then another round of approvals until finally it was ready to be submitted.
At 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, roughly 44 hours after we began, I submitted our short film “Black & White … And Red All Over.” It was one of the coolest things I’ve done recently. After all, how many people can say they wrote, filmed, edited and produced an independent short film in less than two days?
Less than a week later, our movie premiered at the inaugural Southwest 48-Hour Film Festival. We didn’t win, though we did get an honorable mention. But winning was never the point. We went into this as a challenge to our own creativity. The fact that we made it through the other side was reward enough in the end. We will definitely be back next year.
I encourage anyone who has ever been interested in filmmaking or storytelling to sign up for the festival when it rolls back around in 2021. It will be a lot of hard work, and you might get some fake blood on your shoes, but you’ll be glad you did.
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December 20, 2020 at 02:00PM
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Lights, camera and 48-hours of action during Lawton's inaugural 48-hour film festival - The Lawton Constitution
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