Minnesota summers are absolutely beautiful. Most of my friends get in their cars Friday after work and head to a cabin, go camping, or find a lake someplace where the week’s stress melts away with every passing minute of doing absolutely nothing. But that’s not what I did this past weekend. Instead, I assembled a talented group of friends to participate in The Minneapolis 48 Hour Film Project.
On Friday night at 6:00 pm, 60+ teams gathered in a small conference room in Bloomington, MN eagerly awaiting our film assignment. The project is very simple: teams are divided into groups (4 groups, 15 each) every team in the group draws a different genre (comedy, horror, drama, romance, etc.) and then everyone participating in the project gets a character name, character profession, a line of dialog and a prop that they have to incorporate somehow into the film. This elements are designed to keep people from cheating, either by filming something ahead of time or writing out their entire script. The drawing room is filled with excitement and tension as everyone eagerly awaits the challenge.
This year we drew the following elements:
2010 Minneapolis 48 Hour Film Project Elements:
Character: Paul or Paula Williams and professional cook and/or chef at a restaurant.
Genre: Drama
Line: “What do you want to know?” or “Why do you want to know?”
Prop: Pliers
Once we drew our genre and got our elements we were unleashed on the city to create our cinematic masterpieces. The parking lot was a madhouse as teams frantically piled into their cars, minds filling with ideas, to race back to meet up with the rest of their teams back at the designated base-camp. For me, I went to the drawing alone, as my team stood by their phones to hear the news. A flurry of short texts zipped from one phone to the next as we began the creative process of “trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do.”
Shooting a film in 48 hours is not an easy process. It may seem like a lot of time, but simple things can really start to eat into your shooting schedule. For example: let’s say that you plan on meeting your team at friend’s office conveniently located in the heart of Uptown, but then you soon discover that someone closed down several lanes of traffic to perform a bike race directly outside this office. Yeah. That happened. We immediately lost two hours of our writing time. In addition, one of our writers’ had to play a gig that night and another girl that was supposed to help had to work. Not a great way to start.
As people started to trickle in, we started to toss around some ideas. Last year we had a lot of planning meetings before the drawing day, only to draw Romance (the one category we didn’t plan for), so this year we spent much less time on pre-production (other than lining up equipment and bodies). I texted back and forth with our leading man, Jake Nyberg, who was taking the stage that night to play drums in a local band (The Sextons) just a few blocks away. For a couple of hours we threw around a few ideas, but there was one that stuck. Or at least one that we thought we could pull off.
The funny thing about collaborative creative projects is that everyone usually has a different perspective or interpretation of a concept. This is a good thing, in my mind. Creative tension tends to make ideas better. Then again, so do a few cocktails, so we tried both. There were essentially 3 really strong Creative Directors (myself, Romeo Azar from Whoop Design and Kevin Myers from Fox) in the room for our writing and planning process. Kevin had his own team last year and Romeo and I were together.
I’ll be the first to admit that Creative Directors aren’t typically the most collaborative people in the world. We’re trained and are paid to have an opinion and we rarely get to work with other Creative Directors by the nature of the business we’re in. If we had a week, I’m sure we could eventually come together on a shared vision — after hours of torturous arguments, fighting and eventual bludgeoning of one of the other members. The truth is that I love the process, especially with these guys. They challenge me to write a better story, invent better characters and create a stronger film. While it might not seem like it at the time, I do love to be challenged. Just don’t tell anyone.
We were able to agree on one thing: our competitive advantage to filming was that our leading man was in a band that was playing a show in less than an hour. If we could get some of that on tape we might be able to weave it into a storyline. We packed up some cameras and walked down to Sauce Sound & Wine Bar to catch the show. Our DP, Chelsea Jackson, joined us with a friend of hers from out-of-town. I’m not sure her friend knew was she was tagging along for. I missed most of it, but apparently after a few cocktails she really added some interesting dialog lines to the script (which were eventually vetoed by my PG-rated filming philosophy and/or prudishness).
While Chelsea and I worked on capturing some shots of Jake playing drums, the rest of the team stepped outside to riff on some more ideas. Our production assistant joined them after our failed attempts to get an underage guest into the bar (haven’t done that in ages). Our post guy (name withed) joined Chelsea’s friend in having a few cocktails … later slurring things like, “that shot is awesome” and “i want to marry that shot.” I may have made those lines up, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking them.
Jake’s band finished up at midnight, our team was still without a solid story arc and not a line of dialog was written, at least not acceptable lines. We had some ideas that were getting close and had even discussed starting from scratch. We forged on and bantered back and forth, trying to find that creative muse to guide us through the evening — and into the early morning, as it turned out.
5 hours in, no script, no title, no story, no actors. Yup, we were in good shape. Why? Because we had already started filming. Leave it to a creative team to just start shooting (or designing). We’ll find the story later on. And we would. But you’re going to have to come to the Riverview Theatre on Thursday Night (9:00pm) to find out what we came up with. After that point, I can tell you the rest of the story.
We even made a movie poster this year:
