On Friday night we were given the genre. On Sunday night, we gave back the movie we made.

Ah, the 48 hour film project! A fun nightmare, really. At 7pm Friday night, the DC groups showed up to choose their genres out of a hat. The group I was with, Bad Media Productions, chose "Historical Fiction." The writers sat down immediately and started writing out their story. Shooting was supposed to start at 3 am Saturday morning.

Notice I said, "was supposed to." Here's the hitch. The 48HR Film Project has this nifty way to make sure that you really only use 48 hours to make your movie: three elements must be included and you don't know what they are until they announce it at 7pm on Friday! The rules this time:

Character: Eve or Ivan Pagoda

Prop: ID Card

Line of Dialogue: "We're hoping things will change."

These three elements have to appear in the submissions of every group's 4-7 minute film. So the writers furiously pounded away until they were done... which wasn't until 8 am. Er- now we were five hours behind schedule!

Those five hours were made up by myself and Wil Kristin, the editors. Wil and I stayed up all night on Saturday and edited until we felt sort of half dead and our fingers had gone numb- we were awake for almost forty hours straight.

Trammell Hudson shot the entire movie on his Canon 5d Mark II, a seriously awesome still camera that has 1080p high def video recording capability. Unfortunately, the audio isn't so great, so, they rented a sound mixer and put a fat boom mic on the end, which Wil then synced to the video.

Um, just a minor glitch, that. Actually it was terrible, and we had to convert the original footage down into 720p because it would crash our laptops otherwise. One of the downsides of editing on a MacBook is the smaller processor. Wil and I worked on different scenes at the same time, and toward the end we combined them all into one coherent sequence that we were going to turn in.

When there was only 20 minutes left before submission time, Wil's laptop was still chugging away on the compression (in order to put it on a DVD). Wil, Trammell, and the two producers (Robert and Moses) were standing in line... with the laptop.... which was still chugging away!

Actually there were a few other teams standing in line, looking nervously at their own laptops, which were also merrily chugging away. I find that pretty darn funny :)

The movies were screened on different nights at a theater in Silver Spring. May 5 was Group A, so Bad Media Productions and ten others were all shown at 7pm. Based upon laughter, I'm guessing that we're going to win "best use of prop."

Without further ado, I present Bad Media Productions' 48HR Film, "Nowhere, Man."