IT WILL BE HERE SOONER THAN YOU THINK...

Get ready for Extremefilmmaker's 11th Annual 48 Hour Film Festival!

The screening is coming up September 2008 at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

Submissions will be due by August 31st, 2008.

Interested in making a film? CLICK HERE to find out everything you need to know!

My First Two Adventures In Making A 48 Hour Film

by William Kallay

The film business is difficult. There are difficult hours to work. There are some difficult individuals to work with. There are difficult times for a lot of would-be filmmakers, actors and screenwriters to make even a single break in this crazy business. Yet it still attracts many of us into its alluring clutches. The pot of gold is seemingly always at the end of the rainbow.

And that’s what makes movies so fun to make for the three guys who founded the 48 Hour Film Festival. Mark Kochinski, Keith Matz & John Parenteau, all professional visual effects makers with extensive feature film credits, started this festival in hopes of making their own big break. What grew, to their surprise and delight, was a legitimate film festival that is in its 8th incarnation. T here is a spring festival and a summer festival.

This is where, I, an aspiring filmmaker, if you will, came into the picture. Like a lot of frustrated writer/directors toiling away at a computer keyboard filled with potato chip fragments, and cursing at my buggy video editing software programs that spit out messages like “This program has experienced a FATAL ERROR,” my filmmaking psyche was peaked when I heard about this festival.

It had been a few years since I made a legitimate short film, or at least one that I was proud of. I had an ultra-deluxe, semi-professional camcorder and a computer with buggy editing software on it, sitting rather idle on my desk. The computer was used extensively for web browsing, of course, but I also put it to good use by producing a feature-length screenplay which was optioned by a producer with television credits. Unfortunately, after the option was over, the script still hasn’t been sold. Bummer. So what to do?

I spent a lot of time with my family, because that’s more important than anything else in the world. And I wrote about and researched films, and interviewed a number of talents in the film industry for a magazine or two. This had been truly a highlight for me to meet some of my idols and talk shop.

But my own filmmaking mojo was stirring. I had the urge to direct. I needed to figure out a way for my computer not to crash, so I could edit, create fancy graphics and make movie titles in 3-D. I had to put all of this fancy equipment to use and convince my wife that I was not a deadbeat.

Something was urging me on. It was as if the film gods sitting up on the Hollywood Sign were telling me, “Get off of your butt and make a movie. You have the goods. You have some talent there somewhere inside of your head. Do it!”

A friend of mine sent out an email telling me, and some of his other contacts in the “cc” column, that his son’s film had been chosen for this event called “The 48 Hour Film Festival.” What was this about? First, I thought it was awesome that his son had been inducted into this festival. Second, I thought I’d take a chance on it myself. The rules were simple: make, edit and complete a short film in 48 hours. I thought, “Hey, I’m a filmmaker…sort of. Why not take a chance and make a film for this festival?”

What an intriguing idea to make a film within a 48 hour time frame. Put up or keep on complaining about those “hacks” getting deals in the film industry. Show what kind of films you could make.

I read the rules. Nothing too hard or too strict. Reasonable. Make a film and have fun doing it. Just don’t try to pull the wool over the judge’s eyes, ‘cause you can’t shoot a 35mm film with elaborate visual effects and get away it. It’s impossible in 48 hours. But, you could attempt to make a very good film in that time.

There were other pluses to this festival, too. Mark, Keith and John made films for it. The “Advisory Board” consisted of real legit Hollywood players, like Bonnie Curtis (Producer, “Minority Report”), Harrison Ellenshaw (Visual Effects Supervisor and Acclaimed Matte Artist), Robert Meyer Burnett (Writer/Director, “Free Enterprise”), and Bruce Sandzimier (V.P. of Post-Production at Universal Studios). So this wasn’t a fly-by-night film festival. And, if my film was chosen, it would be shown on a huge movie theater screen in front of 300 strangers, just like at the megaplex. Talk about having to overachieve to make a film worthy of their notice.

So I decided to make a simple, easy film within the 48 hour time span; an animé-style samurai film that takes place in the 16th century with stunts and digital rotoscoping (painting on live-action video) and “psuedo-Japanese” language. And there were going to be English subtitles and a homemade matte shot of Mt. Fuji at the end of the film. Easy enough.

I set out with my martial arts teacher, Master Shawn, my friend Mike, my brother-in-law, Dominic, and Karen, a lady who did our Kabuki-style makeup, and drove up to Anaheim Hills on a very hot August morning. Since I couldn’t find an actor to play a guy with red makeup and knew some minor Kali stick fighting, I reluctantly volunteered. I hadn’t acted since high school, and that was as the comic relief.

I had written a simple story in which a samurai comes home from war, but has one last battle to fight. Since I didn’t know how to speak Japanese, nor did anyone else I knew, we decided to speak “psuedo-Japanese.” Our intent wasn’t meant to insult or ever slander the language or Japanese people, and luckily with the finished project, no one objected. You can even see foreign language “jiberish” in “Team America.” Hey, maybe we were onto something.

We shot for the next five hours, rushing not only under the time frame of the festival, but also to get out of the park before 5 p.m., otherwise our cars would be locked inside of the parking lot. I had two cameras running simultaneously, with their LCD screens matted to create widescreen effect, adding to the complication of framing the film. Master Shawn and I also had to do our own stunts. He had his fingers hit with my bamboo Kali sticks more times than I’d like to admit. It wasn’t because I was sloppy; I was nervous to stick fight with a master fighter, plus I was trying to keep the show running on-time!

Since none of us had a watch, gallant Mike raced through acres and acres of parkland to get to the car and check the time. We wasted no time and did more play fighting with our poor attempt to mimic Japanese. I was sweating so much, makeup was dripping from my forehead.

Mike ran back to our set and said it was ten-minutes till five o’clock. We quickly packed our equipment and rushed out of the park. We shot the opening scene up further into the hills as the sun went down. Master Shawn, and not out of anger, got his painful revenge on me for whacking his fingers with bamboo. I played another role of a soldier he kills in the beginning of the film, and after he stabs me in the gut, I fell onto hundreds on tiny rocks imbedded in the ground.

The film was in the can and we set out to edit and digitally rotoscope it. The video, sound and music editing was done quickly, but it was the digital rotoscoping that took the longest to do. Thankfully, this festival allows for filmmakers to do their projects piecemeal, as long as the entire film is done within the 48 hour time frame. A lot of filmmakers have day jobs and it can be very difficult to make a film in this time period, so this is a saving grace.

To get our colorful picture to mimic the animé-style, I had experimented with Adobe Photoshop prior to going into production on this film. I came up with a look mixing some filters together. I’m not an artist. I can paint a wall white, but ask me to color my daughter’s coloring book, forget it. I don’t stay within the lines! So I let the computer do the work for me. By breaking down the footage into film strips in Adobe After Effects, then importing those strips into Photoshop, my brother-in-law and I had the computer color each frame. This process didn’t take super long, but it was rather tedious. Once every frame was colored/rotoscoped, we tweaked the color in After Effects to give the entire film a richer, more Technicolor look. We then completed the picture and sound in Premiere.

I sent off a copy of the film to the Mad Science Labs and crossed my fingers. I figured, if anything, we had a good time making the film and it turned out well. If it didn’t get accepted, I’d drown my sorrows in a beer and try again the next time. Right?

My film was accepted. How’d I find out? By looking on the www.extremefilmmaker.com site a week before the screening! Holy cow! I think I notified everyone everywhere. This was awesome news. It would be shown at the Raliegh Studios in Hollywood on a big screen.

The screening was held on a cool February night. I had a small entourage of my family and friends there with me. It was nerve-wracking. Will they like it? Will the audience like it? Will I survive the slings and arrows of an audience that hated my film?

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Interested in making a 48-Hour Film?

The rules are simple: Make a film, any film, in 48 Hours from the first frame shot to the final edit!