48 Hour Film Project premiere
Thursday, September 27, 6:30pm
Paul O’Regan Hall, Halifax Central Library
5440 Spring Garden Road
$10
tickethalifax.com
The character: Liam or Lily, professional musician. The prop: An alarm clock. The line: “What a small world!” Then: Pick one of two genres.
Those were the restrictions placed on the 11 teams competing in the 48 Hour Film Project, an international event now in its third year locally. The teams had from 7pm on August 31 to 7:30pm on September 2 to conceive, shoot, edit and submit their shorts—seven minutes max (eight with credits).
“We had one team who missed the deadline by one minute,” says producer Blerina Berberi. “The file was very large so it was taking too much time.”
It was Berberi who brought the event—which occurs all over the US, in Rome, Prague, Dubai and Edinburgh, among more than 100 other cities—to the city in 2016. “It’s an opportunity to promote talent,” she says. “In comparison to other film festivals, this one is about filmmaking.” The winning film—the jury this year is Cory Bowles, Shelley Fashan and Doug Karr—screens at the travelling Filmapalooza festival, happening in Orlando in March, and an up-and-coming festival in France called Cannes.
“Our genres were family vacation or horror,” says Gil Anderson, who made Hope with Koumbie, Taylor Olson, Tim Mombourquette and Keelin Jack. (They picked family vacation.) “We added all these variables ourselves,” she adds, including “a child, a fire” and a location (Seabright) that added travel time, not to mention the actors’ respective rehearsals for plays they’re currently part of, which meant they only had one shoot day. “Keelin was the superhero, she edited the whole thing in a day,” says Anderson. The team submitted “with 12 minutes to spare.”
“With 11 short films, 75 people were involved,” says Berberi. “In 48 hours, 75 people were going crazy.”
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2018.
This project was an incredible experience to participate in for the first time. We submitted on time but our movie was unfinished. Thankfully the audience seemed to have enjoyed it. Our movie Lost and Found even won for the best musical score
Our team completed the film DECRESCENDO. But we could not finish on time due to a technological gremlin, SD card on which our Saturday’s worth of filming (had near the entire footage done, up to a few montage shots left to do) corrupted or in some way malfunctioned and we could not get any of the footage shot from the card. There was no way could either get the location back to use the next day, or all the required people together again then for it. Even if could of, of been no time enough to do the edit. So was nothing that we did that prevented our finishing on time. We had to get the location back available to use, and everyones’ schedule aligned again in order to re-shoot the lost footage, and that happened be the Sunday 2 weeks later. We shot the 6-8 hours worth of time required to get back all the footage we needed for our film, and the director Rajnesh Sharma, and Jason the cinematographer, and graphics guy, edited that together. We had kind of an expedited shooting of the footage so a lot less takes and opportunity to nail the best takes (have alternative takes to choose from). One of the most emotional scene takes we had done, happened be in the first around shooting of footage, which we lost due to the SD matter. Been cool if we could of had that in the completed film. The actress in the scene was moved to real tears, and that would of been quite compelling to the audience. Our film was screened at the showing of the other films, and was thankfully well received. It got an audience wide round of obviously sincere clapping!! Hopefully soon we will have the film posted up to youtube!!