The 49 Hour Film Contest or The Anatomy of Failure
So, we entered a 48-hour film contest called Bloodshots Canada 2009.
(I suggest following this to YouTube, and watching it in all its HD glory)
The contest is pretty fun, and we had a pretty good time doing it, and some of the other teams produced pretty excellent films.
Our film was submitted somewhat later than the 48 hour deadline, and was thus disqualified. In this, and other matters, lessons were learned. Some of these lessons really would only apply to future time-limited short film contests, others we can probably use generally. Here are some of those lessons:
Editors are important… if you are directing and acting in a film, and you have a 48-hour deadline, you must not also be the editor This can actually be generalized to a number of problems we encountered. In my excessive enthusiasm, I tried to take on as many roles as possible. It turns out, that starting to edit after having spent your entire previous 24 hours generating the raw footage behind and in front of the camera, leaves you with neither sufficient time, nor mental energy to do a particularly good job of editing. In these time-constrained scenarios, it is really vital to have someone dedicated to editing who starts that business up while you’re still shooting.
Dialogue is not your friend… or, Don’t Make it Better … we started with, I think, a very solid script that was almost entirely visual, with just a bit of dialogue in the scenes that bookended the visual middle… the dialogue wasn’t exactly catchy or natural, but it was functional. While we were shooting the middle, wordless section of the short film, Jordan was rewriting the dialogue, making it snappier, making it more show, and less tell. This seemed like a reasonably efficient use of everyone’s time.
Do not do this!
You end up with more dialogue than you can fit into the 7 minute time limit, and with more dialogue than you can memorize in the amount of time you’ve allotted to shoot the dialogue bits and finish up, and with an actress who arrives already prepared to speak the lines from the original version of the script and so on. When I got Jordan’s updated draft I tried to pare it down some, suspecting that the dialogue expansion might spiral into massive schedule damage, both during the shoot, and in editing. I was right on this account, but paring down wasn’t the solution. The correct solution would have been to revert to the original script. Not because Jordan’s draft wasn’t better, but because with the kind of time constraint we were working with, “making it better” is a pale third-tier priority, placed well below “getting it done”.
Even in the dialogue heavy 48 and 24 hour shorts I’ve seen, there is a common thread. One is that they all had Editors (something we really do need to fix for next time), and two, the dialogue was rarely good. Often functional, sure, but not much beyond that… and with good reason. They had to write the thing, and then they had to shoot the thing, and then they had to edit the thing. The script needs to be done as soon as possible and into the hands of the actors as soon as possible.
The Show Don’t Tell thing is bullshit anyway. Show and Tell, prioritizing for effect or efficiency depending on the situation… in the case of a 48 hour short film contest, generally prioritize efficiency.
Sounds need a sound-person… also, it’s time to buy a shotgun microphone … this is just a result of really poor planning and general lack of cleverness on my part. We had no one explicitly and exclusively responsible for sound. We did not have a good shotgun microphone. The sound quality of our short film is, as a result, quite sucky, all the way through. This cannot be helped now.
Oh, so that’s how fat I am if you choose to star in, and then edit your own short film, and were not exactly 100% aware of how fat you are, you will be. It will be rendered quite clear. I could say that it’s leftover Thanksgiving weight, but it’s isn’t. Not primarily, anyway. Although the early October reintroduction of Eggnog into store shelves in time for Thanksgiving certainly didn’t do me any favors.
Take your fake blood seriously our one really good blood spray scene, at the film’s climax, loses some of its effect because the fake blood is not red enough, and too translucent… it shows up as a semi-invisible purple-pink spray on the original footage, and with heavy colour correction in the final version, is only a little better. The initial thought, here, was that excessive fake blood thickness would have clogged the super soaker, so we emitted our standard opaquing agent (chocolate sauce)… I’m not sure why we assumed this without testing. We might have also loaded the supersoaker with some of our store-bought fake blood, which is fairly fluid, and unmistakeably blood-coloured. The shot is alright, but it could have been amazing.
When you are going to have a shot of red blood dripping onto a green shirt please remember that your cinematographer is red/green colourblind … this is pretty much self explanatory. All of the footage from the first half of the day looked so good… I forgot that there wasn’t much in the way of red/green contrast to challenge Gordon’s vision. Our final shot is of red blood dripping onto a green shirt. Only the red blood is black. The exposure could have been adjusted to fix this, but I was in front of the camera, and Gordon is colourblind.
Test everything testable before you start … the deliverable format of the movie was a DVD playable in a standard DVD player. I’ve never really done this. Ever. I haven’t rendered a film of any kind on my computer in quite some time. Months, if not a year. I have, maybe, forgotten some important settings. I have perhaps lost my intuition for how long certain renderings should take. Somehow, I thought that everything would just work out, when editing was done.
It did not.
We had renderings of video without sound. Renderings of video with sound far too quiet to hear. DVD burning software stating that the DVD had been burnt and popping the DVD out of the drive, but with the DVD still magically blank.
Awesome.
This is all stuff that can be tested ahead of time.
Camping … Steve’s house is very close to where the DVD drop-off point was meant to be. I should have camped out at Steve’s house to do editing. This way, I’d have only had to jog down to the place to deliver the DVD… I might have actually made it on time… also, Steve would have been there to trouble shoot the DVD burning bullshit issues, my mind having already been completely fried… we could have definitely had the thing finished and handed in on time.
The sound would have still been pretty terrible.