Team, the 48hfp committee allows filmmakers to add comments to the DC page about this year's contest. You can read some experiences from other teams, add a comment on your own, etc. I posted one last year and did again this year. You can catch the blog on the DC portion of the website here: 48hfp DC Filmmakers Blog
My entry is below. Thanks to everyone for another fantastic year! Here's to hoping that some screening groups had zero good films and that we can still eek into the Best of DC round!We just watched “High as a Kite”, our second 48-hour film on the big screen last night (Group H, South County United). If possible, we had more fun filmmaking this year than we did in 2009. As our Director so eloquently stated at our screening last night, this is the second year we’ve had naked men in our films!
As the Production Manager, I was concerned about our growing cast & crew size this year. After we did so well in our freshman year (18th overall out of 100+ films), we had a bandwagon onto which people were jumping.
With only 8 cast & crew members last year, many of us had multiple roles to play, but we were an efficient team. This year, we almost doubled our team size with 15 people. I was worried about too many extra people muddying the waters and getting in the way. But as it turns out, they brought an extra dose of energy, creativity, and passion that was a fantastic addition.
Each one of our new cast/crew members contributed something significant to this production – whether it was operating the main camera, making an onscreen appearance, singing a background vocal in our fun original song, producing an original trombone hat and other fantastic props, or hoisting really heavy gear from set-to-set – every person on our team worked their tail off this year and our final film quality shows that fact.
As we drove home from the screening last night, with half of our cast & crew in one car, our Director was already discussing his vision for next year. He’s switching up the roles, creating new ones, eliminating some, consolidating others, and adding a new pecking order of responsibility. We have about 51 weeks to think about it, and a few of us on the team will think about it a lot over the next year.
Our film didn't place as high in the screening order this year as we’d have liked, but our team still loves the film we made. Our friends and family think it’s a great film too (don’t they have to say that?).
But the best reward of all, by far, is hearing the audience full of people we don’t even know, laughing out loud at all the right spots. As we walked away from the theater last night, someone from the audience caught up with us to tell us how much he just LOVED our film, and said that the “weirdness” is what made it great.
Thanks, guy! We’re just high as a kite.
