About 12:30PM a couple Fridays ago, I was chatting with a friend about hiring him to work on a short I’m directing, and he mentioned he was doing this weekend shorts contest that was shooting the next day, and he could really use some help with the producing, and would I mind stepping in to help out? Most of you are familiar with the concept of 48-hour filmmaking, I’m sure, but for those who may not be, the concept is that you have roughly 48 hours to do everything creatively to write and shoot and post a short film. Usually you also have some constraints to throw a wrench in the works, in the form of two or three things that you must include in your film.

This short was for the PGA’s Weekend Shorts Contest to benefit the Debra Hill Fellowship; the contest rules for this particular contest stated that all creative work had to be done between 2:01 p.m. PDST on Friday, September 23 and 5:00 p.m. PDST on Sunday, September 25. “Creative work” in this context included writing, rehearsing, costume and set design, shooting, editing, sound design, rendering, and outputting. So basically, all you could really do in advance was find your (all-volunteer) crew, put together an on-call list of people willing to be in the cast, and ponder what your required elements might be. And whether you really wanted to put yourself through the rigors of a 48-hour write-shoot-post project.

So at 2:00PM we found out that our required elements were a knitting needle, a cassette tape, and a knight chess piece, at least one of which had to be integral to the plot and not just set dressing. Additionally, we needed to establish that it was Halloween (because Debra Hill co-wrote and produced Halloween, of course, among other things), and we needed to establish a theme of “unlikely hero,” “grace and forgiveness,” or “escape.”

If it sounds kind of insane, well, it is. But I figured I’d learn some things by doing it that I can go on to apply to other projects, so I enthusiastically dived in. And it was hard and challenging and exhausting, but I did also learn a great deal over one weekend that I can apply both to future 48-hour contests (assuming I’d ever do that again … ask me after I get caught up on sleep) and projects with a longer lead time. Now that we’re done with the project proper and revamping and tweaking our short to submit to festivals down the road, I thought I’d write up some of these lessons to share with the group; if you have your own 48-hour film contest lessons to share, comment away. I’d love to learn from your experiences, too.

Time Management

So first, let’s talk about project management and problem-solving. I was a project manager in my previous life, so organization and problem-solving come naturally to me. And time management is an issue in filmmaking, whether you’re shooting a 48-hour deal or a project with a couple months of lead time: You need to know how much time you have to work with, make a to-do list, and break down large tasks into smaller chunks that are workable.

With a 48-hour competition, your timeline is going to be very compressed. In this case, we basically had Saturday to shoot and late Saturday night until Sunday afternoon to get everything — everything — done in post. We started out with one script in progress up until almost midnight Friday, then that one got essentially scrapped and another writer started a new script at that point, which wasn’t in first draft form until about 4AM. But we’d had to send out call sheets to cast and crew the night before so they knew when to show up so we could get started, and had told everyone to show up at 7AM sharp.

When we got to set at 7AM, the director wasn’t completely happy with the script, so we ended up spending hours on the set rewriting it before we could tell the art director exactly what to do on her end, and the DP and his crew what to set up on theirs. Not that you don’t want to shoot with a decent script, but spending hours honing it on set when you’ve called everyone to be there at 7AM? Not something I’d do again.

If I was doing another 48-hour project like this, I would allot six hours, max, to the writing and fine-tuning of the script. Which means we should have had at least a solid draft of a script in the hands of our cast and crew by roughly 8PM Friday. This would have allowed our actors time to wrap their heads around the story and characters and start learning their lines before they showed up on set, and also given adequate time for a 1st AD to do a scene breakdown, for the art director to do a breakdown at her end to start pulling props together the night before, and for the DP to be ready with a preliminary shot list.

Did I mention we didn’t have a 1st AD? We didn’t, and that was a huge, huge lesson to learn: Never be without an experienced 1st AD on your set, because the director and the DP are focused on getting the shots they want. You need someone keeping everyone on task and a timeline.

Because we were still working on the script at 10AM, we didn’t start really getting close be being ready to shoot until lunchtime, at which point everyone was hungry and grumpy and needed to be fed. So we didn’t even start blocking the actors and setting the lighting until after 1PM. I do not recommend pushing it that late in the day when you only have a day to shoot. Which brings us to …

Note to Self: Cast and Crew Do Not Like to Sit Around Waiting

So because of the problem we were having getting to a shooting script, the crew, who had been called to the set at 7AM, were all sitting around getting more and more frustrated as the time ticked away. I think the most important lesson I gleaned from this whole experience is that it really drummed home for me how quickly a crew’s minor grumbling can turn into imminent open rebellion.

Shortly before we broke for lunch, the DP took me aside and told me, in no uncertain terms, that he was leaving at 7PM — the promised “absolute latest” time at which we’d be wrapped. He was angry and frustrated, and I don’t blame him at all. We had a lot of experience on that set, and they did not appreciate sitting around twiddling their thumbs for so long, no matter how excellent the coffee and craft services we had set out to appease them.

In one of her books, Christine Vachon talks about the dangers of a grumbling crew, and this was an opportunity to see that dynamic happen first hand. When you leave experienced crew hanging that long, the message you are sending them, intentionally or not, is that you don’t have control of your shoot and that you don’t value their time that they are putting into your project. So don’t do that.

Keep it Simple

With any short film, you have a very limited amount of time in which to tell, essentially, a complete story. Yes, there are many shorts that are just a “slice of life” thing, but even so you need to tell a story that doesn’t just feel like a scene. Pare down your story ruthlessly to the essential elements of what your story is about: whether it’s a simple dialog between two people or a group of people waiting out the zombie apocalypse or reenacting a Civil War battle or having a dance-off, you still need a story that’s going to engage your audience quickly.

In this case, we were constrained to a three-to-five-minute time limit, but even if it wasn’t a 48-hour contest, with a short film you really need to be able to tell your story in under ten minutes. No audience wants to sit through your 39-minute meditation on the meaning of life when they’re expecting a short. I’ve watched hundreds of shorts over the years, both just watching shorts programs at fests and jurying shorts competitions, and for me the six-to-eight minute mark tends to feel just about right: long enough to tell a story with a sense of completion and some character arcing, but short enough to feel, well, like a short.

Also under the heading of “keep it simple:” On a 48 hour project, I would not work again with a script that required more than one location. You just don’t have time, with one shooting day, to pack up all the gear, move everyone to a new location, and set back up again. Tell a story you can tell in one house, one factory, one restaurant, whatever. If you want to get added production value and your crew is willing to work late enough (and has the experience to pull this off), getting in a night scene or two is a better way to go about creating a sense of higher production value than trying to shift locations. But be mindful that shooting at night isn’t easier, it’s harder from a lighting standpoint.

Because we were running so late, we did end up with three outside night scenes in our short for this contest, but man, it was down to the wire. And raindrops were sprinkling us for that last scene at 9PM, so we were working fast to get it done. Somehow, we pulled it off. But we ended up scrapping the second location and finding a way to work around that. Which leads us to …

Think on Your Feet

At a certain point in shooting the second scene, I knew there was no way we were going to make our time estimate in the scene breakdown if we wanted to also get the coverage we needed of this very crucial scene. We needed to figure out how to start cutting and getting creative … and that’s exactly how we ended up pulling it off. While the director worked with the DP and actors on getting that essential coverage, I grabbed my copy of the script and started looking for what we could cut.

Okay, we could live without these two scenes, that’s about an hour. Great. But still not enough. So we ended up cutting the entire opening scene and starting the film at a later point in the story. And in the end, that opening, I think, is actually a much better place to start the film. We lost a lot of weighty exposition and tightened the story considerably because we were under the gun and had to lose that scene. But it also meant we didn’t have to go to the other location — a nearby woods — to shoot that scene, so I started looking for what else we could do with the other woods scenes to lose that location altogether.

The most crucial of these was a flashback scene that shows the death of a character who’s already dead for the entire rest of the film, and we really needed that scene for some flashbacks. What to do? A quick survey of the backyard gave me the idea that if we framed very closely, we could fake a ravine in the backyard. If we could pull it off we could lose having to move locations and could actually get through everything else, more or less on time. The director approved, so I pulled the art director aside to show her what I was thinking.

Then the actor who was playing the brother for the flashback scene scouted around a little bit, and pointed out that the rockery behind the next door neighbor’s house would actually work better than the backyard of the house we were shooting at. But we’d need a location release to pull that off … would they let us shoot there? I quickly spoke with my friend who’d very kindly allowed us to use her house for our set and asked her if she’d ask her neighbors on our behalf, since they have an existing neighborly friendship. She asked, and lo and behold, they said yes. We got a signature on a release form, and a couple hours later, shot the flashback on their rockery by framing close. You’d never know from the final film that we weren’t shooting in an actual ravine. It worked great, and it meant we got through all the scenes we actually needed to be able to cut a story together.

Don’t Forget the Details

Even when you’re on a fast-paced 48-hour shoot, there are details that have to be taken care of. I wouldn’t shoot a project like this again without an experienced script supervisor, because the lack of detailed notes cost us time in post looking for shots we knew were buried somewhere in our footage. I’d also make sure that all the release forms were signed as soon as everyone hit the set. We didn’t even have them printed, and had to get them printed up on the fly. That should have been ready to go when we got to the set — another lesson learned.

Post-production push

On a 48-hour contest, you have a very limited amount of time to get through everything you have to get through in post to get your film uploaded by the deadline. Because of this, time management is also crucial in the post process. In this case, the director was also editing, and he wanted it to be as close to perfect as we could get it. But if I had it to do over again, I would have set a hard and fast drop-dead time of no less than 90 minutes before deadline to lock video and sound, start rendering everything, and get it uploaded.

You don’t want to push it to the very last minute, because if you run into any technical issues at the last minute you are going to be screwed, and all the work you’ve done up to that point will be for naught. As it happened, we had two major problems on Sunday during post: Seattle was hit by high winds, and the entire quadrant of downtown Seattle in which the director/editor and sound guy were frantically working lost power. By they time they moved to a location with power and were able to upload, the other 300 or so teams in the contest were also uploading, and we couldn’t get to the server to upload. But all was not lost, because we didn’t give up.

We documented everything — we had the weather report and a news story about the high winds and power outage that affected our post, and we captured screen shots of our attempt to upload within the deadline. A check on the contest’s Facebook page later in the evening revealed that we were not the only ones with upload problems — a lot of teams had the same issue. Fortunately we had documented that we had tried to upload on time, and when the contest folks were made aware of the server issue, they worked with the tech side to make sure that everyone who’d been trying to upload within the deadline had their entry accepted. Whew. We made it.

But Don’t Stop There

Now the contest is over, but we still have this film that belongs to us that we can submit to festivals if we want. The cut we submitted under the rush of the deadline was okay … not perfect, but you can see the story that’s there, and the cinematography looked great. We had a lot of production value in there for the time we had to work with, and for a 48-hour shorts contest I think it was pretty good. But if we wanted to submit it to festivals, we needed to make it better. So in the week after the contest, we looked at what we could do to improve it. We solicited feedback from some friends of mine who program at festivals and listened hard to what they had to say.

In the time crunch of the shoot, we’d missed getting some coverage, so we needed to shoot some pickups. If we were going to do that anyhow, could we tighten the ending and give it more emotional resonance? Why yes, we could. So we ended up rewriting the ending. My friends once again opened their home to us a for a day to shoot what we needed. Our DP wasn’t available to do any more work on this project, so we found another DP, used a camera that would give us a depth of field pretty close to the original footage, rehearsed the actors, and re-shot the ending. We also managed to get in a couple of pick-ups that we really needed to tighten the relationships between the characters and the story arc.

Now we’re fine-tuning the post sound, and working on the score, which unfortunately did not make it into the contest cut. We’re tweaking color correction and sound effects, identifying the weak points, making it stronger. As a result, what we have now is, I think, a pretty solid short film even given the rushed time of production. We’ll submit it to some festivals, and see what happens.

Learn Your Lessons Well

I’ve learned a great deal in the last couple weeks that I will be applying to my own upcoming shoot. One of the things the whole experience drove home for me was what I don’t know. I already knew that I lack actual set experience, and that my understanding of how the various pieces all work together was a broad theoretical understanding at best. Throwing myself into the murk and mire of this 48 hour shoot allowed me to really get a better feel for what everyone does on the set, and how it all has to flow together.

For my own short, I’ve surrounded myself with experienced crew and I’m listening to their collective wisdom as I organize, organize and organize some more in the pre-production process. By applying the lessons I learned from that 48-hour boot camp experience, I’m hopeful that our shoot will go smoothly, with as few bumps as possible in the process. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•