48 hour Film Competition finally over!

Well it's all over. An exhausting, challenging and fun filled weekend is finally over.

We ended up making a film called 'Rope Burn' about an insane hypochondriac who goes on a murderous rampage against all the doctors who cannot identify the source of his pain. It's violent, crude and smutty... but more on that later.


We had a team of about 14 people... Naomi (from my work) was our Producer.
I directed.
Neil was doing the cinematography.
We brought in the Improvisors - a professional group of actors whose specialty is improvisation - perfect for the competition.
We had Mike Nelson helping Neil and doing lighting - and he brought in a hell of a lot of gear!
Tony Spear did our sound for us with over $80,000 worth of gear!
Paul Story from Weta Digital did our visual fx. Paul has worked on every Peter Jackson film since The Frighteners, including LOTR and King Kong. He was the guy who created Gollum! He used software Maya and Shake for some of the fx shots in the film.
Naomi brought in a lot of her friends to be extras and to help out with production too... and they were roped into doing things that I wouldn't normally ask women to do!

So... the competition.

Prior to the weekend we had put a lot of things into position to give ourselves options during the weekend. We had secured the use of Wellington High School, a brand new office building on Wellington's water front, a cafe, a restaurant, 3 houses of varying quality and a few other locations too. We did this so we didn't have to do it all at the last minute!

Like the locations, we had also organised the entire crew and the FOOD too! Food is very important because people get REEEEAAAALLLLLL shitty when hungry. So, I had managed to get sponsorship from Subway, Domino's Pizza and Strawberry Fare for the weekend. Each of these companies supported us in return for a graphic credit at the end of our film... which they mightn't be too happy about given the genre!

I also got a shit load of Shiseido make-up donated to us from Life Pharmacy. Downstage Theatre happily gave us access to their costume department as well - to save us having to hire stuff and generally we found that a lot of companies are happy to support something like this, which is something I was real pleased about, but suprised by.

We were given the genre 'Grindhouse'. Look it up if you don't know what the grindhouse genre entails. The prop we had to use was a rope. The line of dialogue we had to use was 'What do you call that?' The character we had to include was a hypochondriac named Jerry Reed.

Home base for the weekend was at my work, Propeller Productions.

We brainstormed ideas for 1 hour with our entire team on the Friday night. Then, we sent everyone away, while the Improvisors, Naomi, myself, Neil and Paul stayed to write the script and flesh out ideas. It took us until 1:30am to have a rough story nailed. We did not, however have a complete script written out. We were also calling in extra props and actors as we needed them for the story on Friday night.

Neil and I slept at Propeller on Friday night, but got very little sleep.

Saturday morning we were under way by 7:45am. We filmed the climax of the film on the roof of the Embassy movie theatre first. After that we filmed another scene at the Sanfrancisco Bath House (strip club) at 11am. We had the use of the bar until 2pm. At 2pm we went up behind the Propeller building and filmed a scene in the carpark with the help of Wellington Motorcycles who gave us a Harley for a couple of hot biker-chick lesbians to make out on (are you starting to get a picture of the final product yet!?). At 5:30pm we shot a scene inside a car using a green screen to block the windows. At 7pm we were back at Propeller to film some doctor office scenes and a hallway chase scene. At 9pm we were recording some voice over tracks in the tape library room. By 10pm we had finished shooting.


The shoot was really exhausting, but really really enjoyable too! Aaron from the Improvisors was our script writer for the weekend and he would be constantly handing me new pieces of dialogue and script as we were shooting throughout the day. We would turn up on set at each loaction just having finished the script for that scene.

This made the process a bit complicated and quite challenging. But it worked out ok, and as Aaron is a creative genius he was able to work around any concerns or holes we could see as we shot. He was also able to explain to our actors better than I could at such short notice what exactly we were trying to achieve in each scene. Then it was kind of up to me to interpret his script visually and figure out how to shoot it.


So, very challenging and somewhat complicated, but at the end of the day we got through it ok with a minimal amount of stress and tension. Also, everyone just really worked together well. All our actors and assistants really went beyond the call of duty in their assigned roles. It was a great thing to experience and see.

While all this was going on we were funnelling tapes back to Propeller for our editor Shahir to start digitizing and editing. Shahir was also supervising the visual fx for the film and was giving Paul fx plates to begin work on as the day progressed. So, by the time we had finished shooting, we actually had all the scenes roughly cut and nearly ready to be assembled into an overall story. Our actors went home. Our production assistants went home. The only people left at the end of a mad day were Naomi, me, Shahir, Neil and Paul, and his wife Ruth who came along to generally look after us all weekend.

Saturday night after 10pm we sat down with the small group of us who were left and had a quick production meeting. We quickly split up our roles and then continued on into the night. Neil and Naomi worked on the credits and recorded a few lines of additional dialogue. Shahir and I locked ourselves in the edit suite and continued cutting. Paul worked until about midnight on his visual fx. Neil also searched the creative commons website for usable music.


At 3am Shahir and I hit trouble. We were so tired and had been working on the edit for so long that we had deconstructed the story in our minds way too much... to the point where it no longer made sense! We had no clue how to fix the problems we were seeing. So Shahir took a back seat to the editing as I took over the Avid. We then spent about 3 hours just laughing hysterically at how stupid some of our dialogue was. We were so tired and everything just became very funny. We were rolling on the floor laughing our asses off... not actually doing any work, but just ripping the crap out of this terrible film we had made!

Neil went home to sleep at about 4am or so.

By 7am we still had not fixed any of the problems. So I called Naomi who was at home asleep and screamed into her ear that we were screwed and that she needed to come into town asap and help us figure it out. I was of the opinion that THREE key pieces of voice over would seal the whole film. Shahir was of the mind that the film was incoherrant and that we needed to cut two entire scenes... which was something I wouldn't allow because of how dirty these scenes got. We needed dirt and smut and violence to meet the genre.

Nomes watched the cut we had and could see that it was no where near as bad as we were making out. We opted for the easy way out of recording 4 additional pieces of dialogue at about 9am on Sunday by bringing Ian Harcourt (an improvisor) back to Propeller. Ian played Jerry Reed - the hypochondriac.


So, by 9:30 we had fixed the edit. BUT, it still needed music and sound fx. Nik was coming in at midday to do the sound mix and I knew that Shahir would need to get final sequences for his colour grade in a suit next door. We called Neil back to Propeller urgently because Shahir needed to sleep and we would need to run by Neil what we wanted to happen with the grade. I quickly finished off the first scene and outputted a sequence of that portion of the film for the colour grade. Neil arrived and he and Shahir went through our After Effects plugins to come up with a style of grading. Shahir then went home to sleep and left Neil to it.

Paul arrived at about 9:30am to continue work on his fx.

I locked myself in the edit suite and told Nomes to keep everyone away. There was only 3 hours to finish and polish the edit, add music and sound fx and output the rest of the film for colour grading before Nik arrived to do the mix.


Let's just say that my hands hurt real bad from excessive mouse use by the time 1pm rolled around. But finally the edit was finished. Neil continued grading and finishing the credits all afternoon. Paul continued his fx and had them all completed by 4:30pm to be inserted into the edit for colour grading. I sat in with Nik as he did the mix and he had it all finished by 3pm, which freed up my edit suite to be used for grading. Shahir was called back at about 4pm to help finish off the grade with Neil.

By 5:30pm we had finished the film and Naomi had in her hands a completed master tape and DVD.

Because we had some time, Neil and Shahir decided to re-do a couple of grades on a few shots and beef up a couple too with some other plugins.

Nomes went down to hand in the film at 6:15pm with the first master we had made. I outputted a second master at 6:40pm with the additional changes that Neil and Shahir had done. Shahir and Neil then drove down to the finish line to meet Nomes so we could hand in the second master instead of the first.

I stayed back at Propeller to make a proper DVD to give out to our cast and crew when they showed up at 7pm for our celebration dinner at Strawberry Fare! We had an offical screening at Propeller before dinner, then went out to the restaurant to enjoy the rest of the night.

The exhausted team behind 'Floater Films' finishing up at Strawberry Fare

So what happens now...

The competition is run all over the country. Over 500 teams entered this year. Each region will begin Heats tonight. In Wellington, the heats will take two weeks to go through. The films are screened the Paramount movie theatre, with about 10 films shown in each heat. Our film is in heat 4 this Thursday night. From those heats, a 'regional finalist' will be decided, then the regional finalists will be screened on TV about a month from now, from which a national finalist will be decided.

The prizes are amazing - check them out HERE.

I am very proud of the film we have made. It may not appeal to everyone's taste... but that's not something we can help with a genre like Grindhouse!

I am not going to put it on the web yet, because doing so will prevent us from making it on the 48 Hours DVD. I CAN, however email it to you. If you can receive 11mb files, then let me know and I will send you an MP4 version of the film. My email is: lordbiggus@gmail.com

-Rich