Team Feijoa's entry into the V 48hours 2010 filmmaking competition
The 48 hours is an annual, furious filmmaking event that afflicts one in every 10 New Zealanders. Write, shoot, edit and deliver a short film in less than two days.
I've been wanting to have a go at this for a couple of years and the kids have been wanting to make a short film too, so we formed a little team.
We drew the random genre of Time Travel and also had to include: the line of dialogue "Well if you look at it that way"; a broken toy; the character Sydney Manson, a fabricator; a dolly zoom (camera move).
I think I can speak for the whole team when I say we had a blast making this film!
Trivia
(best read after watching the first time)
Costumes were mostly from the Wellsford Theatre Club wardrobe. I popped in and had a look the day before the competition started, not knowing what genre we would draw, but wanting to know what costume possibilities we could count on. Turned out it was a very worthwhile visit. Knowing the constraints and options available helps when it comes to making creative decisions :-)
The beach scene was shot at Te Arai beach, while Rachel was away auditioning for a real acting job. The cuts to her were shot in my backyard the next day. Rachel was a great lead and is to thank for any continuity we managed between shots!!
The eye monster was made with a motorcycle crash helmet with a cardboard box taped to the front. I painted the front of the box (needed a flat face for tracking) black with a big white cross so that it would track easily. Tracked it using Mocha for After Effects and comped the eye in. As the 48 hours tends to be fairly hack and slash, no time for tweaking anything, I got to this shot at 3:30am on the Sunday morning. I had intended to shoot one of the kid's eyes as they are quite beautiful, but they were all asleep. So, yes it's my eye at 4am Sunday, after less than two hour's sleep since Friday morning. I actually think this fits the monster concept quite well!
The line of dialogue has quite obviously been dubbed - I didn't notice until I was almost done with the audio that one word in the line Jacquie delivered was wrong, so in a mad panic she overdubbed into the mic on the MacBook I was editing on. The computer's fan was spinning flat out, the desk was covered in external drives adding to the noise, so the final sound was rather harshly treated with noise reduction in a 2 minute dash to get it in place. Not the greatest treatment of an overdub! To her credit, Jacquie was able to pace the soundbite pretty closely to the original and despite the poor sound quality it matches OK (well for the 48 hours anyway!).
Phillip's scene as Cro-magnon Man kept me going throughout the long editing and audio hours. I laughed every time I watched it. His costume was 10 very high quality furs that had been donated to the Theatre Club over the years. They would have been worth thousands of dollars back in the day and are rather un-PC now. A perfect outfit for Mr Cro-mag. Phillip is an experienced singer and actor, with many hours of Gilbert & Sullivan experience that really show in this scene :-)
This whole scene was shot in literally 5 minutes, before Rachel had to dash off to Auckland. I had originally intended to use a small patch of native bush but we ran out of time to get everyone over the fence and organised. The long grass worked out better I think - it hides Phillip's trousers poking out from under the bottom of his mink nappy.
I would have like to have the time to desaturate the bit of blue tarp to the right of Rachel in the dolly zoom shot - it sort of breaks the illusion of pre-historic times! Ah well, hack and slash, come back and fix it if you get time - never happens in 48 hours :-)
It's easy to think of the hundred things that could have been done better, things I would have liked to get done with a bit more time (especially some camera shake with the bomb explosions in the war scene), but it was huge fun, great to see it on the big screen at the Academy when finished.
Massive thanks to everyone who came to be Team Feijoa!
Not sure that I'll enter next year, but then just maybe...
|
