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48 hours to burn
Don't you just hate it when everyone's going in the same direction, full of unstoppable momentum, and suddenly you have to make a complete 180-degree turn?
For those of you familiar with the 48 Hour Film Project, the National Film Challenge is functionally identical except, like the title indicates, it's national, not regional. Briefly, the rules are: you sign up, assemble your filmmaking team, and at 7:00 on the designated Friday night start date, your team is given the four necessary elements that must be included in your four-to-eight minute movie: genre, line of dialogue, prop and character. Now all you have to do is write, film, and edit a movie—and drop it in the mail—by Monday in order qualify. This is my story. Our base of operations: the glamorous Senior Citizens' Center in Rome, Georgia, arranged for us by our Rome Location Queen, Tracy Page. Promptly at 7 p.m., the information comes in via e-mail:
Genre: Action/Adventure And so it begins. A group of us gather in a room behind closed doors. We sit in a circle and pitch ideas. They come fast and furious. We have dozens of ideas that coalesce into our story, Stealing Babbette. It's the story of the illegitimate daughter of a legendary rock star; a girl the musician doesn't even know about, who, with the help of her mother, develops an addiction to stealing personal items belonging to the rock star. And now she's stolen the rock star's pride and joy: Babette, his famous rock-and-roll-icon guitar. I like it. After spending hours wrangling over the plot, I sit at the computer with co-director Jeremiah Adams and pound out the eight-page script. We start with a scene from a talk show, Where Did They Go, and follow with two parallel chase scenes. The first one is in the past—a little girl stealing the rock star's funnel—and the second one is in the present, the now-adult girl stealing his guitar. Both chases wind up in the same place, the shrine to the rock star built by the girl's mother.
We start shooting at 1 a.m. By 4:30 we're wrapped and break for a short nap before the main crew arrives at 7 a.m. Ah, blessed sleep. Not enough, especially because of the hell (not uncommon among filmmaking) that happens next. It's 8 in the a.m. at the Senior Center and we're trying to push people toward their cars. It's our first task, shooting the chase scenes. We need to get those shots early, because they're complex and we have to get them right, quickly. Unfortunately, our longtime nemesis, the patented the Sasquatch-B curse, strikes. Unbeknownst to us, the NFC people had sent not one, but TWO emails. The second arrived soon after the first, but not soon enough. We were already headed to the Senior "No Internet Service to be Found" Citizens' Center so the second email isn't discovered until Saturday morning. In their infinite wisdom, they have decided to change our genre from action/adventure to its near antithesis, mockumentary. Now let me digress for a moment and say that whoever's bright idea it was at the NFC to switch our genre needs to have their head sasquashed between Jeremiah's thighs after he's had a big Mexican lunch (you get the picture). Why would they assume people would check their e-mail a second time? Why? I'm okay. Really. Back to the story. Time for the immediate rewrite. A half-hour to regroup and rework the story. We figure the key is to find something, anything, that the cast and crew can start working on. We decide on the outlining scenes that have little or no dialogue. Seems reasonable. With the Band-Aid in place, Chris leads the team into Rome while Jeremiah and I get to work again. Within a couple of hours, we meet up with the crew where the music video scene is being set up. We distribute the new scripts and people get their first whiff of the massive changes. Small parts become large ones, large ones become small ones, and an action/adventure movie becomes a mockumentary. Stealing Babbette is reborn. So we shoot the music video scene and move on to Rome's amazing hilltop cemetery for the ending scenes of the film. Night falls and…we're not quite done. We split up to accomplish several things at once, seeing as how we're running out of time. 11 p.m., we're headed back to the Days Inn for the pivotal arrest scene. Energy running low, I manage to keep it together for the final shots. Well, almost. I have to admit, I collapsed at midnight and the rest of the crew wraps at 4 a.m. Hey man, I had to work the next morning, in Atlanta. Cut me some slack. My work here is done. Now it's up to the Sasquatch-B editors to take the rest of the time to assemble the movie. And they do. You can been see it for yourself on their Web site: http://www.sasquatch-b.com. I love film. Michael Wesley Bay is a local filmmaker, not to be confused with that "other" Michael Bay. His films include "The Last Hour" and "Rabbit Hunt" for his production company, Primal Trot Trot. |
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