The DSI 48 Hour Film Project Team at the Screening in Greensboro
Last weekend I spent 48 hours creating a movie from scratch as a member of the DSI team in the Greensboro 48 Hour Film Project. Through this competition, teams receive a genre, character, line of dialogue, and prop at 7 PM on Friday evening. The goal is to write, film, edit, and hand in a completed short film under seven minutes in length, by Sunday at 7 PM. This project is an epic challenge in creativity and teamwork, here are the lessons I learned over the weekend!
The beginning of the weekend is very heavy on the creative process. Once you receive you genre the race is on to develop a strong idea and write a script. While this portion began as a fun process of brain storming and generating ideas, as time goes on the stress increases and the push to finalize a script grows. During this portion it is important to put a lot of structure into your creative process. While that generally is not my preferred method of creation, it is definitely necessary under such time restraints. Our head writer, Kim Andrews, did an excellent job of placing structure over the process. Kim’s process involved developing general overall thematic decisions, then bringing it down to the narrow of what our 7 minutes would contain.
This is also the portion where my favorite moments of the weekend occurred. One of my favorite things about improv is how one little idea or line can totally blow up a scene or idea and create an amazing scene. This is what happened during our brainstorming session. We were listing the wants of hero versus the villain and we had a good old list running, when I said hero wants to participate in a flash mob and evil wants to eliminate free expression. At that moment everyone laughed, and in typical improv fashion, we decided to follow the fun! That is what our story was based around, a simple statement, I love when the simple becomes a great theme. This is when good improv and good storytelling is at its best.
One of the biggest things I learned over the weekend was to give people defined roles. As we got to the later portion in the writing section of the evening the roles got a bit undefined. It felt like we were really spinning our wheels instead of getting into the actual writing of the script. Very soon we changed course, and knocked out the final product. Another area where we could have been more successful is brining a few more people in for the day we spend filming the movie, and giving people more defined roles during that time. While this is only our second year in the competition, I believe this could be our greatest area of growth for future years.
The 48 Hour Film Project is an awesome opportunity that happens across the country and the world. Creating movies is a fun and interesting process, and something you will have on film for years. It is also an awesome moment to see yourself up on the big screen. In only our second year of competition, I am really impressed with the team we put together and the product we put in the can. While we were not the best film in our screening group, I think our quality and story were definitely in the top third of the films we saw. I want to also give a quick shout out to our awesome director of photography Bernie Bohigas, and amazing producer/director Amanda Scherle! Once the film gets cleaned up a bit and posted online, I will post it to the blog! Until then I hope you finish your Wish List!
