What is short film

[Redlum]

I did a 48 Hours one last year. Make sure you've completely thought your idea all the way through otherwise you might end up changing it like we did at midnight on the first day. It effectively became a 24hour festival.

[Pubrick]

The ones I've done had Red Bull sponsoring it, so you could put in an order at any point during the 24 hours and they'd deliver Red Bull to everyone on your crew.

that's exactly what we've done when we participated in 48hour ones. we get the idea friday nite and submit the finished film sunday nite.. only non-essential crew got to sleep, and i ate the most disgusting 3am meal: two big macs. seriously my stomach's reaction to that was the one thing that almost defeated me.

what redlum said is most important. don't have any half-ideas about equipment, crew members, or anything like that. know what locations you can get on short notice, have them pre-arranged if you get a flexible genre to work with (you get genres on the first nite and mandatory "ingredients" for your short, unless it's different to what i did). it is a big task to get it done if you want to have a GOOD final product. bad film kitsch can only go so far.

we came third last time i participated and got the audience prize. it was funny but not as funny as the winner, and not as technically impressive as the second placer (they had hi-tech laser beam effects in a existenz-like story set in a bleak not so distant future). it depends what genre you pull out of the hat, and how willing your crew is to get behind your idea. we wasted the whole first nite writing and assigning roles. avoid dissent.

[Ghostboy]

The first one we ever did, we wanted to do the most complicated thing possible, so we decided that, regardless of the genre, we were going to do an original musical.  So as soon as midnight hit, one of my friends went and started composing lyrics to some music he'd already written, and within six hours we had four or five songs and we started shooting. It turned out beautifully, except that by the time we were done, it was ten minutes to midnight, and we didn't have time to make it to the finish line. Oh well.

[killafilm]

Well our production crew is more or less set.  I'm out in CA so I'm a little bit in the dark.  We haven't decided on a writing team, I guess that's really my only concern.  Cause stuff that we've done in the past, which wasn't set to a time frame, the writings been WAY weak.  Here's hoping to a fun weekend.

[polkablues]

If anyone in your group is a good, fast drawer (cartooning skills are  ), it can be extremely helpful in these things to have someone storyboarding as you're writing.  It's a good way to make concrete the abstract notion of "what shots do we need to tell this story?"  But then you certainly shouldn't feel obligated to follow the boards frame by frame.

[killafilm]

Mod, trying to go back to DC the weekend of the 5th?

[modage]

Mod, trying to go back to DC the weekend of the 5th?

i didnt see this.  sorry.  i rarely read these forums.