Trial 48 hour film

As a fledging team in the 48 hour film competition, our team has decided that we needed to test ourselves by trying to put together a 48 hour film between 7pm Monday and 7pm Wednesday this week. I asked Sam and Luke to provide us with the ingredients and genre just to add the random suspense element. Sure enough, I was provided with a sealed envelope which I opened at 7pm on the dot with the writing team (which is really the bulk of the team who aren’t away on holiday or busy). Our ingredients were: Character – Lynsey Rogers – a compulsive risk-taker Line – “I’ve done this a million times before.” Prop – toothbrush Genre – Reality TV We started brainstorming ideas, first talking about Reality shows we could put a spin on and then making up some crazy new ones. We quickly decided that we wanted to focus on the host or hosts of Reality TV and combine behind-the-scenes with snippets of the actual show. For a while we were certain that we were going to have two hosts – one the adventurous, risk-taker and the other more business-minded and practical. As we talked through the storyline it seemed that it was proving too difficult to have two opposing hosts that work together to pitch a new show yet are in conflict over their different styles. The non-risk-taker character also seemed hard to pin down. Thankfully one of the team made the really simple suggestion that it would be clearer if there was one host. We decided that the other character was the manager. That meant that the manager could be conservative and business minded but still working with the host for the pitch. The rest of the storyline and structure came together quickly after that. We decided to cast the Geography teacher as the manager. She has a broken leg at the moment so it meant that we would mostly have that character sitting down for interviews and one hand held shot of her hobbling after Lynsey at the end. We also wrote the broken leg into the script by having a scene of Lynsey tandem-parachuting with the manager where we could use the line “I’ve done this a million times before.” This would show Lynsey being a risk-taker outside of work as well. The main reason was that one of the team member’s husband is a sky-diver and we knew we had the gear. After about 50 minutes of brainstorming and then planning the story outline plus a few key scenes and how we might shoot them, we started writing. It felt good to have the first scene in the first draft going as the clock turned 8 o’clock. Our premise was that Lynsey is a host of many risky B-grade Reality TV shows and after being out of work for a few months her manager and her were having a reality show made about their attempts to pitch a new show to the TVO network. It would be done as a combination of interviews with Lynsey and the manager, clips of her about to pitch and flashback segments from her previous shows. Matt was good at making sure we discussed practical considerations (how would you film that, what would the audience actually see to understand what was happening) as we went. It was easy to get into some pretty crazy ideas for reality TV shows but we tried to keep coming back to ideas that would be easy enough for the audience to ‘get’ from a few second clip. Either the title had to convey the idea and/or you needed a strong visual to portray the concept and feel of each show. We finished the first draft just before 10 and people were getting tired and wanted to go home. We quickly discussed costumes, props and locations and arranged when and where to start the first scene the following morning. A few extras we were using were texted with times and places. After the others left, Matt and I went through and storyboarded the key scenes and flashbacks. The storyboards forced us to be very specific about what we had in mind for how each scene would be shot and cut, and hopefully that time will pay off in terms of shooting and editing. Technically it shouldn't be too hard (well the interviews are just piece to camera style), we just have a few crazy set-ups and costumes for the flashbacks to shows. There are only a couple of scenes that have slightly tricky camera movement. I then packed up a crate of the props we needed to take and Matt designed and printed out the TVO logo and another picture that was needed for a scene. We are pretty much a team of 5 this time with an assortment of various people coming in as extras for different flashback scenes. I’m looking forward to the shoot today but I’m actually quite nervous considering it isn’t the real thing. Matt and I both woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep before 6.30, which, in the holidays, is definitely sign of nerves or excitement or both.