Well, I believe I have officially recovered from the wonderous, near sleepless 48 hours of film making last weekend. From the great turn out of over 75 participants, I nabbed a solid crew, as I am sure many of the several other teams did as well. I'll attempt to give a spoiler free yet interesting recap from the production.
After the drawing of genre and sponsor, we were left with Crime & Gangster/Film Noir. We commenced pitching ideas and picked up the second idea pitched from my teammate Michael Spalione. As we all wrote, teamster Brian Buck storyboarded along. He also sketched up this nice logo for our production team.Story writing moved along extremely well with aid from Shaun Daniel and Kathleen Almquist. I was amazed with the quality of ideas, backstories and psychology that went behind our story. We hashed out a script with enough filler material to write a feature length, but condensed into a nice little concept. By 12am we were out of White House Coffee with a film tentatively titled "Delusions of an Idealist" referencing Nietzsche's poem of the same name.
Our shooting went fairly smoothly. We did need to find a rotary phone (which was donated thanks to Dawn's Delights), which held us up a little, but it worked out fine as we set up our scene in a house and waited for our younger actors, both of whom did a superb job. From there we moved on to Serendipity whose owner was over the top amazing and allowed us to use the location for a tux fitting as well as using the upstairs for voice over recordings.We did some quick rewriting replacing the lower ranking mob members with one. It turned out fine and the story didn't have to change a bit. I also nabbed a patron of The White House Coffee House to play a body guard along with my father to play a low ranking mafia don. We wanted to have some Spalione blood in there with a grandfather and father, but couldn't swing it in the last moment. Turned out nicely though, in one take even with me experimenting with a new shot! I think that is one of the coolest things about 48 hours is the freedom to experiment with your film with little guilt. I hope to see some intriguing techniques from some of the other teams at the premire.
We had some moments of hilarity and corpsing from some text message suggestions from a member who wasn't able to be with us. It happens after a long day. We recorded a take, but ended up not using it. I think the best part about our large writing team was our ability to throw ideas into the ring and our ability to shoot them down. At the end of the day, one quick rewrite of the voice over gave us a name for our film that we felt encapsulated the whole thing: One Monster Down.
Over the course of the film we dented my friends car door in a scene of violence, I directed with my hands literally tied behind my back, and our car almost didn't make it to the gravel pits. Also, in this shot we forgot about something very crucial that allowed us to practice our masking skills. Whoops. Very small hiccups, making for a great day, with aid from over 18 people on my team between team and friends. Other than some muddy audio I feel like the final piece came out quite nicely for our short time period. But you can judge for yourself Friday, Aug 20th at 10pm on Depot Street where all of the films will be shown. I can't wait to see the others. Come early for some live music!- Luke Zwanziger, Director
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