An Epic Weekend

Me. DIRECTING.

In 24 hours (or so, depending when you're reading this) I and my team-mates in ICW Productions are gearing up, once again, for the utter madness that is the V48 Hours Furious Filmmaking Competition.

A quick explanation of the Competition: each year teams across NZ are challenged to write, shoot and cut a short film (of 1 – 7 minutes in length) over the course of a weekend. On the Friday night each city’s worth of teams are given a character, line of dialogue and prop that must appear in the film. Each team is also assigned a genre to work in. Come 7pm on Friday you are released out into the night to brainstorm, write, argue, shoot, collapse, act, explode, import, edit, argue again, crash, re-edit, race and finally, deliver, your short film. They must be handed in at 7:00:00pm on the Sunday night. One second late is too late.

In previous years we’ve worked in Musical, Buddy Film, Based on a True Story and Time Travel. Each has offered up its own challenges and frustrations. But I think, every time, we’ve come out with a pretty decent little film. Yeah, they haven’t been perfect – you only have 48 hours after all! We’ve not made it past the initial Heats but, frankly, that’s not why we do it. We don't do it for the fame or the prizes or the glory. Nah, we just do it for fun. And to make a movie like this: 

Adding to the challenge this year is that we are somewhat bereft of most of our usual collaborators: they’re all out of town or otherwise unavailable. So we’re down to a core team of three; the Indian, Chinaman and White Guy of our team name. We’ve lucked out in getting a couple of wonderful actors in to help us, but the rest of the weekend will be down to us. I think it’ll give us the chance to perhaps be more flexible and hopefully lead to quicker turn-around in set-ups and shooting. For the first time we’ll be shooting on a DSLR camera and, also for the first time, the preferred hand-in method is on a USB stick.

It should be a fun, exhausting and challenging weekend and I’ll also be adding an entirely unnecessary extra challenge for myself: live blogging. I can't promise up-to-the-minute updates, but when I can I will!

And as if all that wasn’t enough, the Paramount cinema begins its David Lean season this weekend! Over the coming weeks they’ll be showing Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter and A Passage to India. I’ve taken Monday off work to recover from the 48Hour and I’ll be getting along to Lawrence of Arabia in the afternoon. I understand they’re all prints as well.

Perhaps I should finish it all of with a pint of suitably Epic beer. 

What about you? Are you involved in the 48 this year? Have an epic cinema weekend planned? Or just fixing on having an epic weekend of epic proportions?