Filmmaking in 48 Hours?

I wanted to write another short quick tip post about filmmaking in 48 hours. Yesterday’s post was more about maintaining your health during the 2 day period but I wanted to focus this article on how to approach the filmmaking process within a short time period. One of your main goals when creating a film in a small amount of time is to focus on the really important aspects of the video. The more planning and preparation you put into your videos, the better they will be.  If you are unprepared, you will most likely have to record multiple takes for just one shot, and if you have 50 shots in a video, this can waste a lot of time that could be well spent elsewhere.  That is why I continue to stress the importance of spending a few hours at the start of the competition and prepare with your entire team to avoid wasted time.

Everyone in the movie business knows about budgets and how it is really bad to go over your budget. Since most of you will not have a budget for you 48 Film Challenge, (except pizza and drinks for your team) then your budget is time. Another waste of time is being too fancy with unnecessary camera angles. The goal of filmmaking is to tell a story, not to showcase your new camera dolly in every shot. When you are under a time constraint, sometimes you need to sacrifice a time consuming shot in order to stay on your time budget. I really want you to put creativity into your shots and create a good video, but seriously consider not spending hours on a shot, unless it is crucial to the story. My advice = keep it simple to tell your story.

The same principal applies to the post production process. Every section of the filmmaking process should be generally planned out. Here is what I would do for example to deligate my teams time:

• Planning: 5-10 hours,
• Shooting: 8-10 hours (begin giving shots to editor during this time)
• Editing: 8-10 hours (rough cut is given to composer or music editor)
• Re-Shoots: 2-5 hours
• Composer: writes the score until the final edit is ready.
• 2-4 Hours before the deadline begin upload.

With this schedule you should have plenty of time for eating, sleeping, and uploading.

A lot of people have been asking me questions like, “what happens if YouTube takes a long time to upload my video and I cannot submit it in time?”  I need to be strict about the deadline and any videos submitted after the deadline will be disqualified or else it is unfair for all those who did submit in time. So make sure that you plan ahead with your upload time. I would hate for someone’s video to be disqualified if it uploads really slow.

I’m getting really excited to see your videos on Sunday night!

Keep Rockin!

Zach King