From ZERO to DONE in less than twelve hours- what, exactly, does that mean and why would I do it?

Well, on the weekend of May 1-3, there is the 48 hour filmfest. That means from beginning to end of the writing/filming/editing process, you've got forty-eight hours to have a completed 4-7 minute project to turn in to the competition. So, today I participated in a twelve hour dry run so that we could see what worked, didn't work, and what just went plain wrong.

We had this test run set up exactly like it was the real thing. When the timer starts, you're handed the genre and you take off running because you've got to finish by the time the buzzer goes DING. We got handed "horror." WOW! The writers sat down and furiously pounded out a respectable script in two hours, which was their allotted time.

Then the talent arrived, and shooting began. The cinematographer, Trammell, shot some beautiful high-def footage on his Canon 5D Mark II, and then it was handed off to the editors: me, and Wil.

Wil and I put together the rough cut (I put together the exterior shots, and Wil put together the interior shots) and then after we'd given a mini version to the music composer so he could figure out what he was going to do with his magic music thingie, the group sat around and I did the fine trimming.

This involved having four people trying to give directions to me at the same time. Fortunately, I'm really used to having to sort through piles of directions being shouted at the same time, and I calmly sat there and tweaked and poked the footage (and occasionally made faces at Wil).

I had only met Wil about an hour before we sat down to edit, and fortunately we immediately got along. When both people have good editing skills, it comes down to figuring out who is better at what, so that the project goes as smoothly as possible. After about an hour of working together it turns out that Wil will be making the original rough cut (taking the incoming video and putting it together into something that resembles a movie!) and I will be taking his work and then doing the excruciating task of poking it to perfection.

Nearly four hours after we'd started, I'd made sure everyone was happy with the edit, tucked the scary music track into our timeline, had Wil plug in a second set of headphones and give opinions on levels while I argued with the audio mixer, and prepared the final output to put live on the web.

That's where it went wrong.

Me and the Compressor. We have issues. We go way back... the compressor is evil and I think it hates me. Fortunately, Trammell is also a primo computer geek. He poked it till it worked, and third time is the charm: compressed enough to put on the web, high quality enough that his gorgeous footage was still evident.

And so, without further ado, I present THE HOE KILLER: