The 24 Hour Blog: Recap

Note: I’ve collected all the posts from the 24 Hour Film Festival and condensed them into the following timeline. Here’s our posts, from beginning to end.

The Assignment

Here's the specs for the film:

Theme: Two Can Play This Game

Prop: Thermos

Line: "We're paying you to sing, not share your thoughts on life." 

Location: Under a Table 

We've got 10 people around the table thinking of ideas. 

Will keep you posted, literally. 

The Plot Thickens

It's 2:13 a.m. on Saturday morning. 

After 5 hours and 13 minutes of debate, we're on the same page. 

It's a bit wild. It's time to take the ideas and make a script. 

The crew is setting up gear, nobody's asleep. 

Tears of Laughter

Welcome to 3:39 a.m. 

Derek just had us in tears with his voiceover on the line. 

Tears of laughter.

Hopefully it's still funny (later today). 

5:43 a.m.

The script is finished. The story is put together. We've spent over a third of our time developing the idea behind the piece. We feel peace. We're loopy. Actors will arrive at 7 a.m. for an 8 a.m. shoot.

The Morning Sun

Both our main actor and actress arrived at 7 a.m. Dax came in from Lansing, and Jill is with us from GVSU. 

It's a quarter after nine, everyone is wide-eyed and ready for the day. 

We're into shooting the second scene, a voiceover was completed in the studio, and I'm working with the musicians downstairs. Graphic designers are plugging away. Photos have been taken. 

It's a beautiful day. 

Sound and San Chez

The shoot is going well. The video team is headed around the corner to San Chez for a new scene. The band and I've been busy in the studio writing a couple new tracks for the film, including the jazz-influenced, "My Inbox is Full."

Our lead female Jill says, "Estoy muy bien." 

Si.

Chaos

It's been awhile since the last post. It's 5:33 p.m. 

Three and a half more hours.

Controlled chaos. All around. 

But it's the best. We love it. 

Now, all we have to do is shoot the final scenes and edit...and deliver... 

Miracle on Division St.

It’s 11 p.m. At 8:20 p.m., we were starting to get a bit nervous. 

We'd captured the majority of our ambitious story plan, developed two fantastic characters and scored four all-original songs in the audio studio. Two on the crew chose to remain sleepless, while the rest of us took an hour or two here and there. 

And we pressed the buttons to compress the video for the proper format.

The clock begins ticking. And the file is taking forever. 

Thoughts start entering your our minds about the last twenty-four hours, and how difficult it would be to put this much work in and fall one second short. After abandoning any hope of an in-person delivery, by some sort of miracle, we delivered "The King of SPAM" via an FTP site at 8:57 p.m. 

We're in. 

As soon as it went through (it looked to be two-thirds completed before it finished decoding at 8:57), we cheered, and I quickly ordered video and still cameras to take a snapshot of the feat, yelling, "Where's time.gov?" 

Needless to say, it was intense. On the quiet drive over to Compass, I reflected on what our team had accomplished, and I'm proud of our work, whether we'd been able to have the judges gauge or work or not. 

It's been an interesting and amazing 24 hours, thanks for following along. 

A big thanks to our excellent actors and crew, who worked tirelessly for some pizza: Dex, Jill, Andrew, Matthew, Dustin, Dominic, Ella, Anna and Robert. A huge thanks to Matthew for composing and running the audio studio for hours on end, and Courier members Matthew, Dan, Andrew and Katie for developing an really impressive score, and San Chez for allowing us to film on location. 

Can't wait for you to see it...