How We Made an Award-Winning Short Film in 48 Hours
48 hours... 48 hours to conceive, write, shoot, and edit an entire short film. That was our challenge entering the Livermore Valley Film Festival’s 48 Hour Crush Competition (http://www.livermorefilm.org). To win something like this, you have to be willing to push the limits of your creativity and caffeine tolerance.
On a Friday night, the competition kicked off with having entrants draw random film genres and find out four elements to include. We drew comedy and had to include: “where science meets art,” Pluto, a food item being crushed, and a foreign phrase. 48 hours later, we had to deliver a short film, using only footage shot within that time.
Coming up with a narrative with this criteria was not exactly easy. My initial ideas required building epic spaceship sets, which we obviously did not have time for. Mike and I came up with some decent skit ideas, but I wanted to focus on something story driven. A few beers later, we came up with this idea of a man building a cardboard rocket ship to go to Pluto. Throw in an incredulous daughter, some classic sci-fi movie parody, and a poop joke, and we suddenly had a story, or something vaguely resembling a story. All we had left to do was write a script, buy props, find alphabet cereal, build a rocket ship, plan an entire shoot, dress the sets, shoot an entire shoot, and edit for about 20 straight hours.
So, Saturday morning, I wrote the script and we gathered all our props before our cast joined us at noon. Our actors, Aleks and Mark, both ended up outstanding in their roles, receiving very high praise from the judges. Mike’s casting process (i.e. accepting whoever responded to a Facebook post) proved infallible. The film crew included only Mike, our assistant Hannah, and me.
Preparing to shoot, I knew we would have to forgo much of our regular process to get through the script in just six hours. For comparison, I’ve had 16 to 20 hour shoots for five minute films, and that still wasn’t enough time. So, forget actually planning shots and story-boarding. Forget make up. Forget lighting everything right. I knew we couldn’t take the time to get every shot perfect. My lighting setup involved throwing an LED panel in the corner and forgetting about it.
Note the light in top left. That’s high-level cinematography.
Filming comedy, I wanted a buoyant, tracking camera, punctuated by a few stable shots representing the Dad’s perspective. I think a floating camera like this adds levity to the situation, and I tried to use the more dramatic effect of anchored, steady shots to satirize how the Dad thinks.
Though the filming looks simple, the process was far from it. Flying a 100mm(equivalent) lens at wide apertures introduces a slew of difficulties. It’s very easy to go from fun and whimsical to downright nauseating. Even though nausea is now an accepted standard for blockbuster action movies, that’s not the look I wanted. I ended up making the actors do countless takes of each shot, just to ensure we had smooth, in focus, coverage of every part. The most complex shot of the entire shoot was revealing the Dad staring down into his cereal bowl. My camera is more than two inches long, so I had to cheat perspective. We found matching small and giant bowls, so we could start with an average sized cereal bowl and switch to the larger one to get this angle. Then, we replaced the table with a much shorter stand to put the giant bowl on, and I tilted the camera up from the floor. This idea resulted in one of my favorite shots I’ve ever taken.
Since we purposefully shot without the need for any effects work, we spent most of our editing time on audio. We needed the perfect sound effects and music to sell the visual comedy. Not wanting to spend any money licensing music, we resigned ourselves to using whatever we could find for free. I immediately thought of classical music swells for certain key moments. I had Mike look for “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (aka the 2001: A Space Odyssey song), and “O Fortuna- Carmina Burana” (pretty much the most epic thing ever). Fortunately, we found a great version of “Zarathrustra” and an even more fitting piece than “O Fortuna” from Kevin MacLeod of http://incompetech.com. Mike then asked what to look for to score the rest of the film. I turned to him and replied something like, “Beep... beep... be-boop bop bop.” Mike raised an eyebrow, then nodded and said, “Ok.” (This is how you know you’re working with the right person.) Once we laid the music, we discovered we made the most hilarious short film of all time! It was 5AM though, and apparently everything is hysterical after working for 22 hours.
Needing fresh eyes, I slept a whole two hours before getting up to continue editing. We kept working on the film until we basically ran out of time. I didn’t have time to finish fine tuning, but, just like a college essay, we had to turn it in and hope for the best.
In summation, here was our basic 4 step process to winning:
Thank you to everyone involved and the competition organizers! Hope to see you next year!
Pro tip: Get the title of your film right when you submit it
Assistant- Hannah Eugster
