V 48 Furious Film Making Competition "Candi Patrol"

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Let me begin by ranting at my camera. In the last hour it managed to corrupt nearly every photo I'd taken this weekend as I was saving them to the computer. I have but 7 photos from more than 200 taken over the course of 48 hours. I nearly smashed the thing to pieces…. There that’s out of my system. Now on to the fun stuff.


We’d been building up to the 48 hour film making competition for the last few weeks now. Well this weekend we were put to the test and for being the first time for any of us I think we did a damn fine job with our film.

Premise of the competition is you are given 48 hours to write, film and edit a 1-7 minute short film. You are given a genre, character, prop and line of script that must be included in you film. You’re not given these until7pm Friday night. You then have until 7pm Sunday night to complete your film.

We had: crime genre, Kerry Post (a perfectionist), brush and the phrase” wait a minute” that we had to include in our film.

I met Jolly at the competition headquarters where we were locked in a room with all the other team representatives. What a room full of experienced and creative people. I could pick out of the audience the past few year’s winners, recognizable NZ TV/Film starts and celebrities - all there for one purpose - to make a fun film.

Friday night started out with the writing team agreeing to a story and Deirdre, Suz and myself searching for filming sets and characters. One of the toughest characters that we were asked to find was a transsexual. As it was a Friday night it was the perfect time to go to K-Road (one of Auckland’s Red Light Districts) to go searching for a person perfect for the role. We quickly located our first target out smoking a cigarette between show breaks. This was a tall individual whose height was further accentuated by stilettos and a body frame of a 12 year old. He/she was engaged in conversation with a few other people so we patiently waited outside an adult toy store. We were commenting a few dominatrix outfits that they had hanging in the window when the transsexual called out to us something along the lines of “hey girls, which one do you want him to wear?” Well there was our in, we made the move and got chatty with her. It got to the point were I had to give her a bit of a hug to convince her we were legitimate, she copped a bit of a feel and would let go…. ugh. She agreed to let us film her between her house across the street and the club where she performs. She got so chatty she invited us up to film her getting into costume. In the end we elected to keep things simple and get one of us to dress up in drag, more embarrassing but less of a logistical nightmare….

Writing and storyboarding didn’t end until well after 4 am Saturday morning. Saturday morning was collecting actors, wardrobe and props and setting up the first film sequences. Our apartment and surrounding streets and alleys were used for most of the filming. I can’t divulge details of what we filmed, so you’ll have to wait until we can put the film out in the public domain (youtube etc…) we can’t do this until they show our film at one of the local big screen cinemas week after next Tuesday night. We’re going to make it a red carpet night and watch our names up in lights. That should be fun.

Saturday was dedicated to filming, which we didn’t complete until well after 9pm. After filming was complete we went back and record voice work and inner dialogue etc… unfortunately in our final film we have one section specifically where the audio is too quite. Too bad. We crashed for the night and were back up Sunday morning to begin editing film.

During the editing process those things that can go wrong did. First we discovered the camera had switched its time coding during one shoot and we lost most of the takes, fortunately we were able to piece together the scene. Around this time we also discovered that all the audio was not synced correctly with most of our filming. While we could adjust this in the editing software it consumed valuable time. I also had to go out with Craig to record some sound effects. When you hear the steps on stairs etc…. that’s my feet making the noise, not the actors, ha ha ha…. Finally, just when we thought all was in order 2 hours before our deadline we discovered that we couldn’t save the cut film back onto the correct format (mini dv) we tried so many things but couldn’t get it to work, despite testing this before the competition. Eventually we came up with a way around this problem, but we lost video quality with this method. As a back up we put the camera in front of the TV and tried to record the edited video in high quality but failed to get a better image.

We arrived at the final destination where the tape was due 15minutes before the deadline. The facility is a small hardwood floored meeting hall. Down the center of the room they marked off a narrow path were people were not to stand. On either side of these lines people that had already arrived were stacked up cheering people on as they entered thru the doors and ran up to the judges to drop off tapes. We jogged up to the table and triumphantly handed over our labor of love, that perhaps only a mother could ever love. No, that’s not true our film is for a first effort very good especially considering the limited amount of time and restrictions. At 7pm they closed the doors and allowed no more tapes in for three or four minutes, after which they let teams drop their tapes off, but they won’t be considered for prizes. The first guy that came thru the door was nearly in tears.

We left after a while of watching/participating in the room full of tired looking people celebrated with beer and energy drinks…..

Later that night after leaving the group I walked down to queen street to find dinner. I was so tired and delusional I just started to laugh thinking about the film and could stop for a good 10 minutes. I’m still suffering a bit from the sleep deprivation and bad eating and drinking over the 48 hours.

I’m sorry there aren’t more photos. I’m actually a bit depressed that their gone. Oh, well.

I’m glad I had an opportunity to work with my close friends on this project. I remember this time last year actually mentioning to someone that if I was still here I’d participate in the competition and I have and will do it again if I’m still here a year from now. What an awesome experience. It was actually difficult to go back to the same old work after such a creative and stimulating release that came from the challenge of the competition. I wish you were here to attend the screening, but I’ll make sure I post the video online for your pondering, entertainment and criticism.

Cheers and all the best. I miss writing long blogs I must do this more often.

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Photos

Our group at 7:15pm Friday Night
From L to Bottom Right: Craig (camera, sound and editing), Kate (writter), Marcos (writer), Deirdre (catering, props, actors and venue organizer), me! (producer, assistant with props, actors and venue organizer), Jolly (director, camera and editing) and todd (writer). Note Jolly's look on his face.... I don't think at this time he thought we'd pull it off. See the after photo he looks pretty happy we beat his expectations.

First dress rehearsal - Sat morning
Nearly all of us were up thru the night with little to no sleep - writing, preping costumes and props and locating venues for filming. Here we have Luke (in police costume) rehearsing with Deirdre at my place

The Lead in Our Film
Luke: AKA - Kerry Post, KP, K-post and Kandi Patrol. Check out the paper thin mo. It looks fantastic in the film. Note the conflict of the cop shirt.... for some reason the costume shop only had shirts with New Zealand logos on the upper shoulder, but on the arms the patch was for Virginia...?

Jolly getting into his - well - his transvestite costume
It took a lot of convincing to get Jolly into this. I’m just glad it wasn’t me. We originally were going to use a real transvestite; going as far as walking the red light district late Friday night where I was felt up by a transvestite (Aunt Felicia), she agreed to be in the film but in the end we decided they all had to many restrictions for filming purposes so we did the scene ourselves.

Deirdre Acting Out
The crew got bored while the actors and camera crew were preparing for shots so we had to find ways of entertaining ourselves...

Most of us at the end of the 48 hours just after submitting the film
We look pretty good for little sleep between 6am Friday morning and 7pm Sunday night. Bonus: we were still talking to each other at the end of the day.

Comments

[Uncle Cliff]

Hairy NZ Beasts
Poor Jolly, nipple hairs sticking out over the breast line of his dress. straight razor time. leave the nipples please