48 Hours later...
Apparatus ProductionsSo, Apparatus Productions is the name I give to many of my electronic media production endeavors when I am the sole or main contributor or initiator, but I’ve been fortunate enough to also work with a collaborative of creative folk on several short films in the last year or two as a part of the Maple Films group. Last year, right on the heels of completing a short sci-fi, time-travel, love story called 20th Century Man, I threw the idea into the hopper of competing in the Cleveland 48 Hour Film Project, “One of these days.”
“One of these days,” ended up being “In a few weeks” when we found out we hadn’t missed the deadline for the 2011 contest. To make a long story short, we had great success in the way of awards; including “Best Film” for our Sci-Fi Thriller, Transistor (You can see the film in my video section HERE)
Naturally, we felt compelled to defend our title, so we signed up for this year’s 48HFP.
For the un-initiated, here’s the gist of how a 48 hour film project works. Each filmmaking team is only allowed to acquire cast, crew, equipment, and locations for their film in advance. No writing is allowed before the start of the competition.
A film genre is assigned to each team at random on Friday evening and each team has 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a 5-7 minute long film. In addition, each team must include certain prescribed elements that are not revealed till the start of the competition; a prop, a character of a certain name, and a particular line of dialogue.
This year, we pulled “Fantasy” out of the genre hat. We had to use a character named “Rick or Rhonda Everett (Travel Specialist), a reusable bag prop, and the line “Who are you talking to?”
When I found out that we were assigned “Fantasy” I thought for sure it would fall together as easily as our sci-fi film from the year before.
Boy was I wrong.
As it turns out, it’s hard to write something based in fantasy without a budget, costumes, Luck Dragons or mystical worlds. The plan was to have a finished screenplay and begin shooting at noon on Saturday. I was the screenwriter on the project and at 3:00 am, without a consensus on the story’s ending, I began writing the screenplay.
The first draft was finished at 11:00 am… but we were unable to begin shooting till almost 6:00 pm that night (major set-back!). The story simply needed some tweaking before everyone on the team was ready to throw support behind it. In the end, only minor changes were made to the story, but we were 6 hours behind.
That’s when the magic happened. Our team clicked into “GO” mode and had most of the scenes wrapped by 2am Sunday. Our editor began cutting together footage as soon as soon as it became available to him and our little assembly line cranked out a pretty good little film called Abroad (View trailer HERE). I spent Sunday afternoon hammering out sound design manipulations from the Apparatus Studio, emailing updates as they became available and even composed 2 musical themes from scratch for the film.
This year’s result: We had to settle for runner up in the “Best Film” category, but also took home the Audience Screening Choice award, and I managed to nab “Best Sound Design,” an award that eluded me last year.
My conclusion: The best story tellers in Cleveland, in my opinion, have found a home on the Maple Films Team… and I’m glad that the Apparatus has become one of the cogs in that machine.
Cheers to my friends and teammates. I’m looking forward to 2013 already.