My 2014 Rialto 48 Hour Challenge Experience

The Rialto 48 Hour Challenge of 2014 was a completely different experience than that of the previous year for my team, Umbrella Fortress Productions. We had vast differences between our team, our preparation, and also our execution.

This year I played the role of the producer and as that my task was to organize releases and contracts, keep the crew on task, and to prepare locations to film at. Our crew was a small unit of merely four second year students in the Digital Media class at the Southern Institute of Technology. The decision to keep our crew small was a pre-planned and calculated one. The previous year our crew consisted of about 8 or 9 students in the first year of our course and we felt that because of the amount of crew that we had, we made our task far more convoluted and difficult than it needed to be. The director, Lana Black, and I discussed the points at which our team fell flat the previous year and the large crew came up and so we eliminated that risk this year by keeping our crew nice and small and concise.

Another point that came up in the discussions about 2013 was not having a clear idea of the story that our team was telling. We came to the conclusion that this had been due to a lack of pre-planning and a very complex tale filled with the thoughts of our entire team. We decided to take a risk and make 2014 work completely different. For the months leading up to Rialto 48 Challenge weekend Lana and I thought out and wrote down ideas for most of the basic genre’s we thought might be thrown our way; Comedy, Musical, Crime, Horror, Adventure, Fantasy and more. We wanted to be prepared for almost anything that we could be given. We also made the executive decision that our writing team would consist of the smallest amount of people as possible. This was so that when it came to writing it, there weren’t too many cooks in the kitchen I suppose you could say.

By the time the weekend of potential doom came around we felt far more prepared than the previous year. Upon receiving our text with our genre we breathed a sigh of relief. We had been given Mystery/Puzzle. We flipped back to our notes and the idea we came up with for the Crime genre a few weeks prior fitted perfectly into Mystery. “Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?” So we got to work. We finished plotting the story to fit our genre with just myself, Lana, and our ‘soundy’ Kim, who expressed a keen interest in being involved in the story process, present. By about 9pm on the Friday night we had our story planned and plotted, and our actors hired and organized, we ventured down to the Mac Lab at SIT Downtown to get onto Final Draft and begin writing our story out. I took charge of the script-writing while Lana (who had bravely taken on the roles of director and cinematographer) got to work on rough story boards along side me. By 11 that night we were finished, packed-up, and on our way home to get a good night sleep before we began filming at 8am the next morning. I felt absolutely no stress at this time because we had specifically planned the story for only one day with no night shooting involved whatsoever, and only one location, which meant absolutely no travel time. I was pleased to say the least. Most of my job was done with the fact that we already had our location; our own home, and scheduling would be easy as we were shooting in the same amount of time as the story unfolded. Actors were organized to be picked up in the morning and I had prepared some catering in our previous grocery shop. It was on our drive home on that Friday night that I thought back to that time in 2013 and realized that while I was on my home now, back then I would have still been sitting in our team’s headquarters planning the plot without even the smallest grasp on the intended story. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Shooting commenced at 8am on the Saturday morning and as the first shot was being taken I hashed out a quick schedule, making sure to overschedule for every shot in order to know the latest time that we could possibly be finished that night. Even then we were scheduled to wrap at 8pm that night. There were times throughout the day where we ran just slightly behind schedule because we were attempting tricky shots on a shopping trolley following our main character from point A to point B and the trolleys wheels didn’t take to our carpet very well. It was hilariously fun to try and work these out. We had tested it out slightly the night before when we got home, Lana pushed the trolley and looked at the screen of her iPhone that I was holding and informed me of how she wanted the shot and we thought it would work with our Canon camera the next day. Once again, Lana controlled the trolley while I sat inside it and controlled the camera for her and in the end the time we spent on it definitely paid off. We had two pretty professional looking track shots in our small amateur film. Our next shots following ran very smoothly and jumped us ahead of schedule in no time. We ended up having breaks galore throughout the entire day when we had to wait until actors were free to be picked up and things like that. We had a pretty relaxed day all up. A lot of this was due to how well our crew worked together. I loved that as soon as a shot was done Matt, our gaffer, would quickly jump in and get the next shot ready with the help of Kim when he needed her. Lana worked with the actor and set up the shot quickly, and as soon as she was ready so was Kim, holding the boom, ready to go. I thought our team was just absolutely brilliant!  By 7pm I was serving dinner of pasta to actors and crew and we only had one small scene to shoot afterwards. Once that was all done with we cleaned our house and headed into the SIT Downtown Campus to begin a rough edit.

This is where we ran into our first problem. Lana took control of the edit and I waited until it was ready to grade, making coffees for her in the meantime to keep her awake and stress free. Around 10pm Lana had gotten half way through the rough cut when her computer decided to freeze on her. We waited and waited for it to unfreeze but when it seemed obvious that it wouldn’t, we restarted the computer again and Lana had to start her rough cut over. However this wasn’t too stressful. The year before we were still shooting at that time and so we felt still cheery and that we could in fact get it done.

We left for some sleep and returned in the morning to begin cleaning the cuts and making the grade. I worked on our team intro and our credits while Lana chopped at our edit with skill and precision. By 1pm I was onto the grade. I decided to go for a very de-saturated grade similar to that of Saw during all the detective scenes. I thought this fit the Mystery genre well. The grade took a while to render but by 5.45pm we had completely exported our film ready to send.

Upon sending the film in the post to Dunedin to be entered and judged we were ecstatic. It was a far less stressful ordeal than the previous year had been.

I am incredibly proud of our 2014 48 Hour film; Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar. I think that we did an amazing job to keep stress-free and create an awesome film in 48 Hours.