The Project
I have entered into a 48 hour film festival recently and it was a fun experience because of the situation. I was working with a small team that I did not know half of and only one member I actually worked with before which was my actor friend. What’s even more exciting is how we executed this whole project while having fun and worked so well together. The film is about a man having an affair meanwhile his wifes best friend knows about it and is debating with telling her through a letter. The man that the husband is having an affair with writes a letter, sending it to the house and the wife reads it, beating the best friend to the punch. The film is called Letters and there were a few things that needed to be in the film. One was the name of a character and there profession another was a lint roller as a prop and the genre had to be a scandal.
The Team
The director, editor, writer and sound guy was Alex Hawthorne. I met him off of www.stage32.com and we connected back in the spring time earlier this year. Throughout the months we have been in contact and been planning on working together until back in early October he reached out asking if I wanted to join in on a 48 hour film festival. I agreed since I always wanted to participate in one. He brought two friends of his Mark Henley and Lisa Croce which were both very good actors. I brought my friend Jonathan Villanueva as an actor and he brought Sarah Spanudis as the main actress. They were all very good and we finished way before we expected.
On Set
This was my first time in a 48 hour film festival and doing it without preproduction is out of my realm of work. But when you have a small window you have to make decisions on the fly! I used mostly my LED lights because they are bi-color and didn’t have to worry about using any color gels. They also don’t overheat and I didn’t want anybody to sweat on set especially since we didn’t have a makeup artist. We shot on the URSA Mini 4.6K and yes it was all shot on 4.6K. I used my 24mm Xeen lens for the entire shoot because Alex wanted to keep everything going without delays of switching out lenses. So we shot wide the whole way and in post he punched in so that it looked like we had a tighter lens. I shot mostly on a T 2 400 ISO or 5.6 800 ISO and played with the color temperatures just to give it the feel of another day. For day one it was in the kitchen tungsten balanced with blue light coming from the windows but the characters were lit by tungsten lighting. For day 2 it was all daylight balanced.
My Thoughts
It doesn’t matter what equipment you have or if you are working with a skeleton crew. We literally put a team together of people that have never met before but we made it happen. Now we are all connected and because of a great experience are willing to help each other out. Go out there and film something no matter what it is. Don’t be afraid because you might not know if the outcome can be great.
