Writing Under Pressure - The 48 Hour FIlm Project Go Green

This past weekend, I just took part in Malarkey Films entry in the 48 Hour Film Project's Go Green Challenge.  If you're not familiar with the 48 Hour Film Project, it's a challenge in which teams are given 48 hours to write, film, edit, and produce a short film.  In each case you're given a set of criteria that you have to include in your film, usually a genre, a line of dialogue, a prop and a character.  In the Go Green iteration of the challenge, the genre is up to the teams to choose but the films have to have an environmental theme.

It's the sixth time I've been involved with a 48 Hour team, the third time with Malarkey.  Before I had latched onto teams, I had wanted to get involved in the project for a while but hadn't been able to find a team to join.  Eventually I discovered some co-workers of mine were involved in a team and joined up with them for a few events.  When that team lost steam, I was referred to a team run by a friend to the Malarkey Films team, where I discovered that people I knew were in the group.



The most salient part of writing for a 48 Hour Film team is obviously the time pressure.  On a Friday evening you get the set of things that have to be in your film, and two days later a finished product is being handed in.  The writer's part of the weekend is typically Friday evening, running into the wee hours of Saturday morning.  Then the project is passed on to the director's hands, and the writer's continued presence is superfluous at best. That means you must be able to write on demand to very specific criteria in a very constricted timeline, and you don't know whether you'll be able to do such a thing until the point where you have to.  As it turns out, I loved writing in this situation when I'm actually allowed to write.  Weirdly, to my experience, the script is often given the least amount of attention in these situations.

Now, with that said, here's my 48 Hour Film Project Filmography so far, in chronological order:

Secret of My Success, 2008 48 Hour Film Project, Argali Films.

My co-worker Todd was my entry into this group, which had done an entry the year before I joined.  As it happens, the one position that they didn't have someone for was screenwriter, which was utterly mind boggling for me.  Just because they didn't have an official screenwriter didn't mean that people left the writing up to the writer, though.  Five or six people presented ideas, and eventually we chose to shoot something that Todd had wrote up about a serial killer, which fit the suspense genre we were assigned.  The end result was quite good, with two good lead performances and a very creepy vibe throughout. My only regrets is that the main character reads as more of a hitman than a serial killer, and the required criteria are definitely shoehorned in.  This film didn't make the Boston finals, but I thought it really should have been a finalist.

 
The Poughkeepsie Job, 2008 48 Hour Film Project Providence, They're Using Tools

Flush with the excitement of doing a 48 Hour Film Project, I hooked up with a team in Providence to try it again.  The team was a huge bunch of folks, and the creative process was pretty much chaos from the start, with no clear direction on how decisions would be made.  The end result was OK, and everyone had fun as far as I could tell, but it really taught me that clarity in the decision making process is all important to the success of the end product.

Static, 2009 48 Hour Film Project, Argali Films

My second go-around with Argali was a lot less satisfying than the first.  I was very excited going into this weekend with the resources at our disposal. We had access to a college campus, we had added a cowriter who was a writing professor at that college, and the genre of sci-fi was right up my alley.  And yet, the process of choosing what to shoot was if anything even more muddled than the first time around.  There were too many people in the room putting too many ideas in the pool, which prevented us from really focusing on any one idea in depth.  The end result was that we settled on an idea that was handed to the writers that we didn't even fully understand, which we discovered late Saturday afternoon when we found out we all had a different idea as to what was going on, in terms of world-building.

Balance, 2010 48 Hour Film Project, Malarkey Films

The next year, with Argali on the sidelines I looked around for another team to join, even though I'd only be able to help on the Saturday morning and would have to miss the rest.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a team which had friends of mine on it.  I was even more surprised to find out that they actually gave their writer free reign to write whatever he damn well pleased!  It wasn't what I would have done (I would have taken things into a comic turn, and we had access to shooting at a conference about blogging that we didn't use), but the team really ran smoothly.  Ending the writing process at 9-10 pm rather than 2-3 am really makes a difference when time is so short.

Motivations Unlimited, 2010 National Film Challenge, Malarkey Films


That summer, Malarkey Films decided to do the National Film Challenge, the national offshoot of the 48 Hour Film Project.  The only different is that you get an extra 24 hours to make your film.  This time I worked with them as the writer, and I suggested the writing structure that I had long wanted to try.  As soon as we got the criteria, anyone who wanted to have a say about the script would go and write for an hour and a half.  We would then read the scripts or treatments, and the director would choose which one to develop.  We were done with a finished script at 10pm on Friday.  On the other teams I was on, we would still be arguing ideas at 10pm and only get to actually starting to write at 11pm or midnight.  The other plus to this system is that the first script I wrote in the initial time period wasn't quite right.  I had the safety of the time limit to start over with another script, which is what you see. 

This entry was the first to make the finals of a competition, and I was quite happy with every aspect of the film. It made coherent sense, the scenes were charming, and the extra touches added a lot of depth. I thought this film could have won the overall competition, but I don't have an issue with the film that ultimately did. 

How Mobile Apps Saved The World, 2011 Go Green Challenge, Malarkey Films

I wasn't sure that the Malarkey team was going to enter this environmental offshoot of the challenge, as Anna, one of the producers, had to attend a tech conference that weekend.  Then Jack, the other producer, thought of a way to shoot it at the conference, by setting up an interview room and shooting talking head interviews, Errol Morris style. We would use the interviews to fill out the theme, "How Mobile Apps Saved The World".  As everyone at the conference was interested in mobile apps, we were able to get them to riff on a world in the future in which their mobile app saved the world.  As far as writing goes, there wasn't much of it to do as we'd be relying on the interviews for most of the content.  I wrote the portion of the script read by the professor character, and also sat in and prompted folks on the list of future events we had come up with.  (Sadly, the Bristol Palin presidency of 2041 didn't make the final cut.)