POSTCARD from Richmond 48-Hour Film Project

Jon Shelley filed this report on the process...which is definitely worth a read. The abridged version, however, is that they completed the project in time, and their film, "It Takes Heart to Make Sales," will be screened along with others at 4pm, Saturday, July 21 at the Byrd Theater, $10 (cash only) and open to the public. You can view the trailer for a sneak peek.

A quick explanation on the process: Representatives from every team meet at The Camel to be given the details required for their film. Each team draws a genre out of a hat (with the option to draw a wild-card genre if they don't like the initial drawing), and then all teams are given the same line, prop, and character to use in their film. Each team is given from 7:00pm on Friday until 7:30pm on Sunday to write, film, edit, export, and deliver their 4-7 minute film downtown. Any film handed in after 7:30pm would be disqualified from the competition.

At 6pm, I arrived at The Camel with representatives from 42 other teams to learn our fate. Team Class Axe ended up pulling "Vacation or Holiday Film" out of the hat, which our main production team decided would work out (after a few moments of concern). We were also given a flashlight as a prop, a traveling salesman named Adam or Alana Nicholson as a character, and "Why am I always first?" as a line of text.

I scurried back to campus to meet up with our main creative team of Drew Colon, Austin Spivey, Whitney Stott, and Annika Wooton to write our script. From 7pm until about 4:30am, Whitney wrote her heart out with guidance from the team, and we ended up with a 10-page script called "It Takes Heart To Make Sales" that we were absolutely excited about. We battled for a little while on who would play our four main characters, but finally reached a consensus on who could play each part and where our main locations needed to be. From 4:30am-6:00am, most of the team got what little sleep they could while Austin and Sarah Towler finished organizing and sending out notices to our actors and locations about when and where we'd all be meeting. Then we all split up until 8am to finish gathering everything we needed (along with our wits) to film.

From 8:15am-11:00am we filmed our 4 major outdoors locations, scurrying around the west end of Richmond with a team of 4 lead actors and 14 various production staff members, doing everything we could to film what we needed to before the rain started. At 11am, we walked into our first indoor location, and just in time! The first major deluge of the day began outside as we loaded in our cameras and equipment. The next 8 hours proved to be the first major test of our entire team, as the first wave of exhaustion hit our team. There were a lot of minuscule details to pay attention to with the indoor locations, from bad shadows from lighting to reflections of production staff and equipment in windows to continuity details with costumes and bloody knives (yes, I said bloody knives....). Fortunately, we had a few fresh minds show up around noon, and that gave us the clarity to keep fighting through!

By 7pm Saturday, we finished filming our script. We made our way back to HCA for a meal of chinese food that couldn't be beat, Drew Colon finished uploading all of our footage by 11pm, and we watched the "dailies" (which is the fancy way to say we watched everything we had filmed that day) until about 1am. Drew started to put together a rough cut of the footage that we had, while the rest of the creative team got together and discussed what we had just watched. We made the realization that our footage was a little thinner than we hoped, and that we needed to film more to tell our story the right way. After a few phone calls and text messages, we made plans to send teams out in the morning to capture more film, while others stayed back to keep editing what we had. At 2am, I sent the rest of the team to sleep while Drew and I had plans to fight through the editing in shifts overnight. Drew kept editing away, while I sat down to read and clear my head.

Sometime around 6:30am, I was woken up from my accidental slumber to learn that everyone had fallen asleep. Fortunately, Drew had managed to put together an incredible rough cut of the footage we had. We quickly gathered up the troops, finished arrangements for the morning film sessions, and sent our teams in various directions. After filming 8 locations Saturday, our teams filmed somewhere between 8-14 more locations Sunday. They went absolutely camera crazy! Drew and David Crutcher had proven Saturday to be camera champions, and captured some awesome footage on Sunday with Austin and Annika. I stayed back and continued to upload and edit while the rest of the team filmed our last footage. I put some fine touches on Drew's rough cuts, Annika and Austin made some minor script adjustments, and we synced up the audio from multiple shots to make everything sound as good as possible. By 6:30pm, our team had finished putting together a 6 minute, 54 second movie (before credits) that our entire team was proud of!

Then everything went wrong.

Our 4.7G (also known as a rather large file) high-definition video file wouldn't transfer to the flash drive we had. It was too large to burn to a data DVD. Our DVD burning software had gotten corrupted at some point, and wouldn't write the file to a playable DVD. I can't even describe the sense of dread that washed through me at this point. We had a completed movie, 1 hour to deliver our film, and absolutely no way to get it off of the computer.

Fortunately, our team never gave up. Crutcher ran to his house to find a different flash drive, and Austin and Archer ran to Staples to buy a new one. I frantically began to export a lower-quality file while searching the web to find out exactly what "Compiler Error" really meant. David sprinted back in the door with a compatible flash drive, and I discovered what went wrong with our software. By 7:05pm Sunday, we had burned our movie to a DVD, exported to a flash drive, and had approximately 75 pages of waivers and releases in our envelope to hand in.

Luck was on our side, as somehow we missed every red light and had no traffic between Collegiate and downtown Broad Street, and I sprinted in the door at 7:19pm to hand in our film with 11 minutes to spare.

This was an amazing weekend. I couldn't be any more proud of our entire team. I truly believe that we have created something pretty special, and we hope to see as many of you as possible at the screening on Saturday, 4:00pm at the Byrd. To give you an idea of what you'll see, we've created this trailer to give you a hint of what's in store. We hope you enjoy!

Stephanie Linas

Molly Rhodes
David Graham

Austin Spivey

Annika Wooton

Whitney Stott

Drew Colon

Drew Colon

Madalyn Crews

David Crutcher

Archer Brinkley

Andrew Fernandez

Lillian Fu

Thomas Hardy

Tori Spivey

Sarah Towler

There is a list of 12 extras as well, but to be honest, I have no idea how many of them are Collegiate-related..... you'll just have to see the movie to find out!