BottleRocket Film and the adventure of the 48 Hour Film Challenge.

Check out the finished product of our 48 Hour challenge here: https://vimeo.com/63654852

Just before the challenge started picking our four things to put into the film.

Never one to back away from a challenge I decided that I was going to sign BottleRocket Film up to the London SciFi 48 Hour Film challenge. Competitors are given a title, a line of dialogue, a prop or action and an optional theme and a little over two days to write, shoot and edit a 3 to 5 minute film that they think would be worthy of festival contention. It can’t be all that hard really can it to churn out something in 48 hours, can it? But with a judging panel that has on it benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) and Guillermo Del Toro (The Orphanage, Pans Labyrinth, Hell Boy) it couldn’t just be something it had to be good, really good.

Rather than simply tell you what we got up to – though there will be a little of that – I thought that I’d try and offer some helpful hits as to how best to survive one of these 48 hour challenges and how we overcame obstacles that were thrown at us that might one day be lying at your feet.

Before the challenge

Before we even started we decided that we really wanted to try and find one location that we knew that we could use for most (if not all) of the film so that we at least knew that we would have somewhere to film everything if stuff got desperate and had somewhere that we could call our “base”. Luckily one of the members of our team (Mike Peel) works at Regents University in London that were kind enough to let us film there for the weekend. It took a huge weight off our minds knowing that no matter what was thrown at us we always had somewhere to go for the weekend that had plenty of locations that we could film in. Lecture theatres, a canteen, exterior shots etc…

After locking that down we realized that we’d need a cast. We decided to put up an advert on the Star Now website http://www.starnow.com/, which is increasingly becoming more and more useful for our productions as we are able to reach out to actors with briefs and gather, what have been to date, talented people who are looking for a break and anything that might add to their portfolio. We put out a casting call that was concrete enough so that people would be able to get an idea of their time commitments but gave us the flexibility of being able to gather loads of people from different backgrounds, ages, races, sexes. This gave us a huge bank of actors (well over 50 people replied to the post) that we would be able to phone around and it wouldn’t matter if one or two of them had changed their plans before the weekend. Being in London really helped as everyone who wants to work in media seems to head down there at some point!

What was great was that we got as organized as we could before the shoot but gave enough room to be flexible if things were to change on the day. Once we had cut the actors down to half (there was no point in having 50 people holding off on their weekend plans when we might not use all of them) we sent round a guide to how we thought that the weekend might go (having never done one of these before it was all pretty much a guess). Just something simple outlining the steps that we thought we might take to getting the film finished. It seemed to help us as although the timing was entirely off we did go through the process step by step and it was useful to see what was coming next.

Finally on the Friday night it was all about getting a good night’s sleep – as there wasn’t going to be much after this.

Saturday

In order to ensure that everything was ready at the venue most of the team headed to Regents 

University straight away but muggins here was left to do all the registration and such at the South Bank Centre. Straight after grabbing all of the stuff that we needed I was on the tube formulating ideas on the Iphone and telling the others in the team the four things that we had so that they could do the same.

Deliberating the script

Once we were all at “base” we quickly formulated the idea:

John Manhattan is the Caretaker. As the last human, he is tasked with keeping the knowledge of humanity alive. He creates projections to keep him sane during his solitary life, locking them away when he tires of them as he cannot bring himself to destroy them. One simulation escapes from the safe, or so he thinks...

Opening shots

There was no time for second guessing and by 1400 we had all of the cast in place and had begun some of the initial photography. It was a great help that we were working with such talented people who knew how to work independently, I trusted entirely, were able to be flexible and were willing to contribute ideas. Filmmaking is a collaborative art and this really is obvious when there’s a tight deadline and you’ve got a small crew together!

A few of the shots on day one.

Oddly one of my favourite moments of the whole challenge was at about one in the morning on day one when we had Joe and Hannah (or male and female leads) running around Regents University for the final shot of the day. There was a wedding downstairs that we were competing with for sound so had to film at the quietest moments. Although it was late everyone was still putting on a good performance and was keen to make sure that we got the shot right. I was really humbled to see that they were as keen as I was to make this a success!

After the first day we started looking at the footage that we’d gathered and set sound man Chris to start synching all of the audio and had DOP Mike dumping all of the footage onto the computer. Although it was late and tiredness was setting in spirits remained high and we were able to get past the wall by laughing and joking around (when appropriate – and sometimes when not!). A HUGE thing before entering into this challenge is knowing that you can work with the people that you are going into it with and that you’d trust them to do this thing themselves on your behalf if you had to. If you’re not certain that a team member is going to function well on four hours sleep try and find something for them to be doing that weekend rather than being involved in your project. I was so lucky that the team that we worked with were great, otherwise I don’t think that I would have got 

through it in such good shape.

We had planned to edit the days shoot that night but everything was rolling into one and eventually at around 0200 I couldn’t stand anymore and went to sleep (Kirsten wasn’t long after). Mike and Chris both crawled in at around 0400 – I dreaded waking them up in just over three hours’ time to start day two.

Mike proving to us that the safe is "safe"

Sunday

Because we filmed so late into the night on day one we didn’t have all that much to film on day two just one set of exterior shots that we managed to rattle off before 1200 and another reshoot of something that we weren’t happy with on day one and it was all done before 1300 and the dreaded edit could begin.

Editing fuel

In the edit we all took on various roles and each person on the team contributed to a different part of the post-production stuff. Chris took on the sound again finishing up a few things here and there, I started chopping away at the clips that we had gathered and Mike set about colour correcting everything and looking at splashing a little VFX here and there. Again we managed to keep ourselves awake and in the zone with some humour (Mike at one point was instructing me how to do something on Final Cut and thought it would be funny to try and make it delete everything by holding “command + A” and then pressing “delete” – just to see if I would do it – turns out I am that thick and, probably through tiredness, we all fell about laughing – and crying)

Overall the whole thing turned out pretty well and I’m really pleased with what we accomplished in 48 hours with no money! Check it out if you can here: https://vimeo.com/63654852

Tips for those brave enough to try a 48 Hour Film Challenge:

One of the biggest tips that I can give for this process is never be wasting a moment, if you’ve got any downtime film some exteriors, start cooking up an idea for an alternative shot, offer to make everyone a cup of coffee (believe me that helps more than anything!)

Get people involved who you trust implicitly and know that you can spend at least 48 hours with without wanting to kill!

You’re going to be tired, hungry, too cold, too warm, stressed, confused, puzzled, or all of the above at once – get over it! You can sleep when you’re dead.

An army marches on its stomach. Make sure that you are liberal with snacks and food – if you have any sort of money make sure that some of it goes into feeding the cast and crew – it’s amazing what people are willing to do if you feed them.

No matter what you are feeling when you’re shooting (especially if you’re directing/leading the piece) never let anyone know that you’re not sure what you’re doing. You’re a filmmaker god-damn it and you’re making a film, people better get on board with this – and it’s going to be kick ass.

Once you’ve come up with an idea don’t second guess – get going with it – you’ve only got 48 hours after all!