Film Werx
Over this past weekend, some friends and I participated in a 48-hour film festival. The idea is pretty simple; get a bunch of teams of people together and each team tries to make a short film over the course of a weekend. To ensure that the films are created in that period, they give out a list of “ingredients” at the beginning that all the shorts have to contain. This year’s ingredients were:
- a plunger
- a case of mistaken identity
- a line of dialogue repeated 3 times
These projects are a ton of fun as everyone scrambles and works together to make it all happen. The teams are small and time is short so people often serve multiple roles. I had a small acting role (“Johnny the Human Dynamo”!), I was the AD, one of the producers, and I drew that tatoo of the skull with batwings on roller skate wheels (oh yeah….).
If you ever get the chance, I heartily recommend you try it. Or heck, just grab a bunch of friends, a camcorder, and shoot something over a weekend. One piece of advice: leave plenty of time for editing. It takes longer than you’d think.
