Wow, what a weekend.
I was awake from 8:30 Friday morning until 1 am Sunday with a fitful hour of near sleep in my car on Saturday afternoon.
Then I was back to watch the editors at work around 3pm on Sunday.
What inspired this sleeplessness? The 48 Hour Film Project that's what.
About two months ago I received an e-mail from either the Salt Lake Film Society or the Salt Lake Film Center (I forget which) about this project. 48 hours to make a film from script to final edit. Sounded fun. It was.
I ran into Lance Youngberg of G. Why Productions at Junior's Tavern that night and told him about it and ended up forwarding him the e-mail the next day.
Once we finally were in the competition, because the organizers expanded the pool because of demand, the wild ride started.
Theron Read, Tom Fightmaster and I were the writing team. We had a few formal idea pounding sessions and many more informal ones. We couldn't write anything in advance, but came up with a few scenarios which could go several different genre directions. As I predicted we pretty much threw everything away on Friday night. Everything except the title and very loose structure that Tom had come up with. His idea was a waitress with three tables who kept missing the mayhem at the tables. What we worked out was a waitress who was in on the whole thing.
Unfortunately, Tom was not able to be much help on the panicked second story (after the first one was tossed because it sucked) which grew out of his idea. Theron was writer blocked and I was idea impaired. That ended up working very well. Theron would start on an idea, and I'd have half a page of dialogue written before he finished telling it to me. Alas, Tom's lines which we put in were among the first that the director, Geno Salvatori , Lance and others on the production end asked us to cut. The other early cuts were mostly from a frivolous idea Lance sent our way.
So Theron and I wrote a hell of a short play between about 2 and 4am which was turned into a fine short film. I'm really uncertain about time at this point, but the last save on the first draft of the final script is 4:35 am which should give you some idea.
This is the first time I've done more than a little script doctoring, off set, so it was exciting (and sometimes frustrating) to be on a set watching my words come to life. The crew was good natured and professional. The cast as well.
I particularly admired the cast members who sat around literally all day, shooting, reshooting, and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes waiting for their scenes - two of them were not shot until after I left at 1am. Our production dominatrix, Gina Vigor is a goddess. She was there Friday until about midnight, on her bicycle at 5:45 for the 25 mile race that was concurrent with the Salt Lake Marathon and back at HQ (Urban Bistro) at 9:30 keeping track of every scene to make the editors' work easier. She didn't get home until 5am and was back at Urban, cleaning and scrubbing by 4pm on Sunday. What a woman.
Thanks to everyone involved and all of their spouses, kids, pets and others who loaned them to us for the weekend. You worked long and hard for a few meals and an ocean of coffee. Thanks also to the folks who showed up whom we did not end up needing. The fact you wanted to play, to work long and hard for nothing, shows that you have the kind of character to make a good go at taking over the world.
As someone said as the editors were packing up their gear, "It began with one Becky and ended with another." Thanks, Becky, for the editing and letting me look over your shoulder.
I couldn't have asked for a nicer group of people to spend a weekend with.
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