For those of you who know me, I’m a proactive kind of guy. I had been toying with the idea of doing one of these 48 Hour contests, whereby you have to write, shoot, edit and publish a short film within a 48 hour period. It’s difficult, stressful and exhausting, but so much fun.
So I put together a team for the 48 Hour Miami Film Festival. My team was comprised of the following members:
- Taylor Fogarty (Actor, Writer)
- Giselle Marie (Actor)
- Lazmel Melendez (Director, Editor)
- Eileen Faxas (Writer)
- Jozmel Melendez (Sound Design, Editor)
- Derek Latta (Actor)
- Nihshon Hulin (Actor)
- Marilyn Brito (Actor)
- Yours truly (Actor, Writer, Director)
I’m really grateful for the actors who were on my team… they are well known actors in Miami.
So, the day the festival starts, you have to draw from a hat to receive your genre. All films must include 3 elements, which are revealed after the drawing. Our genre was “sci-fi” and the 3 elements were; condiments, a character named “Anne Sterling” and the phrase “Say it like you mean it”. The 3 elements are easy to work into your script… what is not easy is the genre. We were ready to adapt several possible story ideas to a variety of genres… but not “sic-fi”.
We panicked at first. But after speaking with Eileen, one of our writes, we quickly received clarity on how we could adapt our story.
So Taylor and I spent the event writing and editing the story and planning our shot list. We met with the rest of the team at 8AM on Saturday morning and began the long day of shooting.
We rocked it… we even included a car chase scene in our short film! Pretty cool.
Our talented editors started editing and syncing audio around 1AM… and at 3:45PM on Sunday, our project was finished. One hour and 45 minutes before deadline!
But we had a problem. Upon outputting and rendering the film, the computer kept crashing at “85%” output… so we had to restart. Outputting a file this large takes time.
We did this over and over until we realized we were going to miss the deadline. We were 30 minutes late! We were devastated because we knew our film was good.
At the viewing, the crowd really cheered our movie… and of the 24 films, ours was in the top 5.
