48 Hours - the making of “Mightier than the Sword”.
Furious film making alright. 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film is not an easy task, and just as you try to weave conflict and turning points into your script, art imitates life and problems arises as 10 amateurs battle to just finish.
I’ve only met my team members once. I rock up at Patrick’s flat to start scriptwriting, and I’m greeted by one of Patrick’s flatmates. He leads me to the lounge where a group of people are eating burger fuel, I sit down and engage in playful banter, getting to know my fellow team mates. It isn’t until 5 minutes later I click that this actually isn’t my 48 hour team, and I’ve just sat talking to a group of random people!
Slightly embarrassed, I laugh, “I wondered why you guys were so relaxed.” and go find Patrick.
Our genre is superhero, the character is an ex bully named Bobby Young, the line of dialog is “What have you got”, and the prop is bent wire. We start to brainstorm. Two girls show up with large bottles of champagne, good to get the creative juices flowing, but in the end , the champagne defeats these lovely ladies, and they retire early.
One of our earlier ideas was a villain murdering prostitutes, and our superhero has to stop him. But we settled on something a bit lighter, a humorous piece. Our superhero, Leonardo, has the power to draw things and they materialise, but the problem is that he can’t draw very well at all. So hilarious antics like trying to drawing a picture of a super hot girl, and getting Simon in a dress that resembles a curtain, and a scare crow wig was bound to happen. If only we had some fetching red lippy to top it off.
By 4am we had a pretty good script with only one fatal mistake, we didn’t really have any solid dialog, and the one professional actor that I knew who could have improvised flawless natural dialog pulled out, so Patrick, Lawyer by trade, filled in as our main superhero.
Running on 3 hours sleep, I am greeted by a $200 parking fine on my car on Saturday morning. Confused I checked registration, fine, road user charges, fine, warrant, out by two months. With V induced eye popping, I check for the parking warden with a murderous look in my eye. Luckily he was ruining other people’s day, otherwise he would be in need of a superhero to save him. Not wanting to get another outrageous fine, I leave the team to their own devices and try get a warrant. It fails of course. So now I have wasted precious time for nothing!
I meet my team at 4pm at the Ginroom. They started shooting at midday, and only shot a few scenes, countless more to go, and the precious clock is ticking. By 11pm we are still shooting, I check with my friends, and most of them are wrapped, and started editing. We don’t finish shooting until about 1am.
However it’s not just fines, and clock watching on shooting day, one of my favourite moments was filming our superhero being bullied at school by Bobby Young in art class. Bobby hassles Leonardo until breaking point, and the scene ends with Bobby scribbling all over Leonardo’s work. On the first take, Bobby scribbles a part of the male anatomy on Leo’s page, the fastest speed drawing of a penis I have ever seen. She doesn’t even lift the pen off the page and it all links together. I’m not sure if it was lack of sleep, or stress, but this had me in stitches! Reading it now, I’m thinking it’s one of those “you had to be there” moments.
My services were redundant in the editing process, but I went round at 5pm to hand round some V, and it wasn’t without drama either. The computer was saying that it would take 2hours to render, which means that we would miss the 7pm deadline. None of us were ever in it to win it, so it wasn’t too bad, as long as we got it in before 9pm, it will still get shown in the heats, we would still be able to see an audiences reaction to it. We handed it in at 7.10 - soooooo close!
All in all, a great experience. Met some great people, had some laughs, and lost some money. I will see you next year 48 hours, you will not defeat us again!
I’ve only met my team members once. I rock up at Patrick’s flat to start scriptwriting, and I’m greeted by one of Patrick’s flatmates. He leads me to the lounge where a group of people are eating burger fuel, I sit down and engage in playful banter, getting to know my fellow team mates. It isn’t until 5 minutes later I click that this actually isn’t my 48 hour team, and I’ve just sat talking to a group of random people!
Slightly embarrassed, I laugh, “I wondered why you guys were so relaxed.” and go find Patrick.
Our genre is superhero, the character is an ex bully named Bobby Young, the line of dialog is “What have you got”, and the prop is bent wire. We start to brainstorm. Two girls show up with large bottles of champagne, good to get the creative juices flowing, but in the end , the champagne defeats these lovely ladies, and they retire early.
One of our earlier ideas was a villain murdering prostitutes, and our superhero has to stop him. But we settled on something a bit lighter, a humorous piece. Our superhero, Leonardo, has the power to draw things and they materialise, but the problem is that he can’t draw very well at all. So hilarious antics like trying to drawing a picture of a super hot girl, and getting Simon in a dress that resembles a curtain, and a scare crow wig was bound to happen. If only we had some fetching red lippy to top it off.
By 4am we had a pretty good script with only one fatal mistake, we didn’t really have any solid dialog, and the one professional actor that I knew who could have improvised flawless natural dialog pulled out, so Patrick, Lawyer by trade, filled in as our main superhero.
Running on 3 hours sleep, I am greeted by a $200 parking fine on my car on Saturday morning. Confused I checked registration, fine, road user charges, fine, warrant, out by two months. With V induced eye popping, I check for the parking warden with a murderous look in my eye. Luckily he was ruining other people’s day, otherwise he would be in need of a superhero to save him. Not wanting to get another outrageous fine, I leave the team to their own devices and try get a warrant. It fails of course. So now I have wasted precious time for nothing!
I meet my team at 4pm at the Ginroom. They started shooting at midday, and only shot a few scenes, countless more to go, and the precious clock is ticking. By 11pm we are still shooting, I check with my friends, and most of them are wrapped, and started editing. We don’t finish shooting until about 1am.
However it’s not just fines, and clock watching on shooting day, one of my favourite moments was filming our superhero being bullied at school by Bobby Young in art class. Bobby hassles Leonardo until breaking point, and the scene ends with Bobby scribbling all over Leonardo’s work. On the first take, Bobby scribbles a part of the male anatomy on Leo’s page, the fastest speed drawing of a penis I have ever seen. She doesn’t even lift the pen off the page and it all links together. I’m not sure if it was lack of sleep, or stress, but this had me in stitches! Reading it now, I’m thinking it’s one of those “you had to be there” moments.
My services were redundant in the editing process, but I went round at 5pm to hand round some V, and it wasn’t without drama either. The computer was saying that it would take 2hours to render, which means that we would miss the 7pm deadline. None of us were ever in it to win it, so it wasn’t too bad, as long as we got it in before 9pm, it will still get shown in the heats, we would still be able to see an audiences reaction to it. We handed it in at 7.10 - soooooo close!
All in all, a great experience. Met some great people, had some laughs, and lost some money. I will see you next year 48 hours, you will not defeat us again!
Thanks for a great update, wondered how you had coped. Hope you had a good sleep last night. Can't wait to see the movie, when will that likely to be? Mum xx
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