Filming on the Edge of Reason

This weekend saw the London 48 Hour Film Project. When the wonderful Beth (producer on Out of Office and Sandwich Rap) invited me to join her team as a writer and editor, I leapt at the chance. So Friday afternoon I moved into Beth’s house, and prepared to meet a whole bunch of new people and work non stop with them for 48 hours. I was nervous, I was excited, I was wishing I’d managed to get hold of some hard drugs to keep me going …

The rules are pretty simple. You are told the genre your film should be, and are given a character, prop and a line of dialogue that have to be included in it. This is obviously to ensure that the film submitted has been produced in the weekend, but it’s also a good way of focusing the approach to what needs to be written. Or so we thought … after much kicking around of ideas, we finally settled on an idea that we felt was going to be do-able in a day’s filming, and started writing the script. From the discussion I drew out a basic outline of scenes, and then we started whittling it down from there. Jane patiently allowed me to pace up and down in the kitchen while we built the first half of the film before finally succumbing to her need for sleep (I think around 2:30ish). And then I worked with the remains of the group to nail the second half.

And finally, around 5 o’clock in the morning I finally finished the first draft of the script, and went to bed for two hours. It was clearly going to be a long weekend.

The filming went pretty well, as far as I could tell. As soon as they were setup in Brockwell Park, I snuck for a bit of a nap, so there may have been all sorts of problems, but it looked good when I started getting footage for the edit. As I started work, our composer (who was beavering away in West London) sent over some music (Dropbox was proving to be a very useful collaborative tool for us), and I started to apply that to the opening sequence. As the crew left the park, I joined them in the fading light to head back to Beth’s.

The light was a problem. We had a whole other scene to shoot outside, but there was no way we were going to be able to set up and get all the material we needed for it before darkness descended. I looked at the script for five minutes, panicked, and then culled half the dialogue and moved it inside. It worked fairly well, but I do miss the original scene; it really helped define the relationship that little more solidly than we achieved in the end product.

The edit continued into the night, and I finally had a first rough draft put together by around 4:30. A luxurious 4 hours later, I was up and back at the computer, showing the rough cut to Izzy, our director. Tweaks, shot changes, etc began, fiddling with sound (Brockwell Park is under a flight path, and we definitely had some problems there), and then finally we locked picture around 2:30pm. This gave Kevin time (just about) to tweak the timing of his music, whilst I got on with the grade.

And bang, around 5pm, we had a finished film, and I cockily said “Ha, 48 hours, we can do it in 46″. Oh how foolish I was.

The 48HFP requires the film to be 4:3 SD, and we had filmed in 16:9 widescreen. I knew all of this, and already knew how I was planning on putting it together. Which I did, and it worked fine. But then I thought, oh, I’ll just check it looks okay fullscreen. Which is when panic, and the consequences of working so intensely on it, caused me to cock things up a little.

Because it was 4:3, and my laptop screen was widescreen, the film appeared to be in a box. This is to be expected, but my addled brain froze. What the fuck is going on!?!

I then looked more closely at it. There was a thin black line on either side of the picture, something had gone horribly wrong. And there ensued many, many different ways of exporting video. After many trials and failures, I found a way that seemed to solve the thin line issue. But this required a whole new render, and it didn’t come out until 6:30pm. We played it back, and it looked great. It was fine, it was going to work.

And then about 1:30 in, the video went screwy. For some reason, several of the shots had scaled badly. Instead of being nicely letterboxed, they were 4:3, and only showing a small portion of the shot. It was 6:30pm, and everything was going very, very wrong. I needed to render again, which can take up to an hour!

It was time for a new plan. We had to deliver the film to the Curzon, Soho, by 7:30pm. With only an hour to go, I decided to send the earlier render (with the thin lines on either side issue) in. So I put it on a memory stick and half the team headed off with it on the tube. In the meantime, I’d try and fix this latest problem, and then Beth could drive us in with it.

But it was taking too long. Far too long. So I decided to copy some of the original stuff across, and I’d then try and remove the thin lines just on the laptop – I could work while we were driving.

A twenty minute race through the streets of London ensued. It was 7:20, the deadline was in 10 minutes. And my software was telling me I had 20 minutes to go on the render. In desperation, I went into the Curzon, and asked if they could test our earlier render to see if it would work. A brilliant woman (and in my mind beautiful, wondrous goddess) stuck the USB stick in her laptop. She opened up the file. And it worked. Miracle of miracles, it worked!

Much rejoicing and relief. And then Russ asked me which version of the film I had given him.

My stomach dropped. I didn’t know whether we had just tested the one I knew worked, but had the knackered shots in, or whether it was the earlier version which had the thin lines and I didn’t think worked. But by this point it was too late. There was no way of knowing.

Now, if I had written this story, it would be at this point that I would describe the brilliant screening where it wall worked amazinly well. But sadly, this is a true story, and that’s not what happened. We all got together at the screening last night, and settled down to watch it. And, 1:30 into the film, it all went horribly wrong again.

Gutted.

Fortunately, by this point I had gained a bit of perspective, and whilst I felt (and do feel) that I let the team down at the end, I’m also aware of the fact that competition or not, we did finish a film in 46 hours. A film that everyone involved seems to be pretty pleased with. I got to meet a bunch of people that I hope I will be able to work with again, I was able to write and edit under pressure, work remotely and locally, and had an absolutely brilliant time into the bargain.

I’m really looking forward to the next one. I promise that this time I will keep a cooler head, and maybe have a printed check list of steps for getting the export right first time.

[edit: The video is embedded in this blog post]