The Salt Lake City 48 Hour Film Project

What Happened During Your Weekend?

The Salt Lake City filmmakers share stories from their wild weekend of filmmaking. (Blogging ended shortly after the filmmaking weekend.)

You did IT.

To all the team competitors:
You did it, you were there. You didn't miss it, you did it.
There is always lots of talk about team work and that is true but in the end its a pile of people that did it. IT, is very difficult and each individual person should be able to say proudly to yourselves, I DID IT. Its impossible to imagine until you do and I am so glad so many pitched in this year and went out and made their own film.
Its okay, really, you can say "I did this!"
-Mick McDougall-

- Mick McDougall, 48 Hour Film Salt Lake City

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The Ward

When I sent my team members down to the kick off event, they had specific instructions. If we drew one of four genres, they were to pick a wild card. Luckily they didn't draw the ones I feared, although the thought of doing a wild card struck us all for about thirty seconds.

We stuck with the genre of Thriller/Suspense and after discussing it with the writing team, we discovered that the genre is very ambiguous. After about 14 failed scripts, it was important that we kept it simple. I felt that as the director, I wanted people to just enjoy themselves while watching. No matter what we did, I just wanted to see an enjoyable expression on the audiences. I think we succeeded there based on the comments.

In comparison to last years event, the one thing we learned was to keep it simple in all areas of production. Although we had a massive make-up unit, we decided on one location for shooting which was a massive benefit.

The experience shooting and editing this project was one of, if not the best experiences I've ever had on a production. Solar Shock shot 8 films last year alone, and to say that this one was the best says a lot to the Solar Shock team.
The cast and crew on this film was terrific. We are a well oiled machine and I would never want to shoot a movie without my team at my side. Thanks to everyone who helped and thanks to all who enjoyed the film.

- Brandon Young, Solar Shock Pictures

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Bringing Back the Musical Comedy

When we pulled "musical or western" as a genre on Friday night, our first thought was "Oh, we need to put that back and draw again." But after talking it out for a few minutes, the Crazy Parkite group decided to give it a go (even though there are only eight of us), and I'm so glad we did. All night Friday night Dee Macaluso and I stayed up writing the script, while at the same time our composer George Dymalski wrote and recorded seven unique songs for us to choose from. (We texted with him during the script-writing process, telling him what we needed, i.e. "George, now we need a love ballad, like 'How Deep is Your Love' by the Bee Gees." His reply, "Okay.") Dee, Nate Sears, and Kim Page wrote the lyrics on-set when they weren't on camera. We ended up using four of the seven songs in the 9-minute version of our film, "Chained Melody," and then had to cut the love ballad at the last minute to get the movie under eight minutes.

Even though we turned in a very rough edit, we ended up with something that we're very proud of. And to our delight and surprise, we won the Best Choreography award, which is very satisfying, since traditional musicals have a lot of cheesy dancing to go with the singing, so we're very appreciative that the judges saw we tried to remain true to the genre.

Bottom line is we had a great time and we'll do it again next year. (Thanks 48HFP staff, you guys are the best!) But the real lesson learned here is this: No matter what genre you pull, don't underestimate yourself into thinking you can't do it. If you have a great team (like we do) you'll be surprised at what you can pull off.

Thanks Crazy Parkites for another great project.

- Stacy Dymalski, Crazy Parkite

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Who says you can't have a family fun action short?

Action. Blood. Creatures. Murder Mayhem. This is what I do. Kids don't get admitted to my movies without a parent or guardian...until now. I added my name to the database. Hoping somebody would pick me for their team. My friends teased me that I would end up doing a "family short" and looking at the names - everyone was voting that it would be Vision of Zion...all 180 degrees opposite of anything I'd ever done. Sure enough - long story short the fates decided (or the man upstairs - take your pick) that the good natured ribbing of my friends would indeed come true.

So here I sit, still completely exhausted and very proud to at least get "A Change of Plans" done. We couldn't figure out how to get it out of Final Cut in the proper format in time, but managed to get a copy turned in to at least screen.

Every project I've done - I've grown as a director. This one is going to stand out in my mind. To be able to come together with a set of complete strangers and set aside any preconceived notions of anything and work together with our god given talents- now that, in and of itself is an accomplishment.

Could our film be better? Sure. The sound is funky. Some edits are jumpcuts. Some things are a bit off...but I still like it - not for what it can be. But for what it is. So come out tomorrow and vote. Group A starts at 6pm. We still have a shot at audience favorite...and for now...I'm going to go get some more sleep.

Oh, and if you do come watch it - you won't be bored...when you give an action director 30 screaming kids and squirtguns...heh...come see for yourself...

Steel Out.

- Jacque Ruffner (J.A. Steel), Vision of Zion

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