48 Hour Film Project 2010

Once again, I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project's DC competition this past weekend.  I've been super busy and stressin' about finishing my PhD, and it was awesome to just spend an entire weekend doing something compleeeetely different... even if it involved severe sleep deprivation.

This year, the required elements were...

• Character: Marco or Muffin Gabbowitz, someone who works with animals
• Line of dialogue: Do you think you can do that again?
• Prop: a horn

Our assigned genre was film de femme, a movie featuring strong female characters.  In addition to Rob, Jon, Decker, and I (who've participated in all 3 of our 48 Hour Film projects under the illustrious banner of Jungle Rules Productions) we expanded our core team to include several of Rob's law school friends.

Things turned out awesome.  Decker, as always, was amazing as our director and video editor, staying up all night Saturday once again while Rob, Jon, and I got a few hours sleep.  Decker and Rob did a bunch of projects in the fall with the GWU Law Revue, and produced a few hilarious videos, including the YouTube sensation Shit In My Pants.  Decker got a Panasonic AG-DVX100B semipro camera out of it.  It's just incredible how much better its battery life, manual zoom and focus, exposure controls, ergonomics, and resultant video quality are, compared to the small MiniDV camcorders we were using previously.

We had a fairly wild brainstorming session on Friday night, with a lot of amusing stories bandied about, but settled on a fun and feasible one by about midnight.  Rob's friends turned out have a lot of theater and acting experience among them, and did an amazing job as actors and writers.  I did a lot of filming and most of the audio cleanup, as usual, and also helped write some of the scenes.

Our movie was shown in screening Session D on Wednesday May 5 at the AFI Silver theater in Spring Spring.  Again, it was a ton of fun to see our film and those of 11 other teams on the big screen.  We've really improved since last year... especially in our technical prowess and cinematography, where we were very much at the bottom of the heap last spring.

The Betamacks, who made last year's brilliant stop-motion silent movie, Janice and Jonas, shot a hilarious "historical fiction" movie in red-green 3D this year, entitled Hörn: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet.  Citra Productions was another highlight of the night... their Tiebreaker was hilarious and beautifully shot in HD with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR.  There was another great, funny mockumentary about a haunted house, sort of Paranormal Activity meets Best in Show; I wish I could remember the team's name or the movie title.  (Can anyone find it online?)  Also, a very weird and dark funny movie involving a talking squirrel and lesbian park rangers, Shadow Tale.

UPDATE: Our short film, Koma, is now online for your viewing pleasure!