What happened to the weekend.....

I think I may have finally recovered from last weekend. For want of something better to do I took up the offer of joining pete’s team for the V48hr film competition www.48hours.co.nz/2008/. Starting friday night we had 48hours to write, film and edit a short film. I was invited to help with the writing and story ideas.

7pm Friday we get word that our story must include the following elements - a brush, a character called Kerry Post who is a perfectionist and our genre was Mystery. All teams have the same elements but the genre varies - probably to make it more interesting for the judges who have to watch all 600 films at the end of the day.

After some brainstorming and a very democratic voting process the story outline was chosen - a murder mystery. With my extensive training from watching a combination of CSI and Midsommer Murders I was happy to spend the rest of the night working in the story team.

Sleep deprivation means timelines for the weekend are a bit hazy, some time around 3am Saturday morning I went home to sleep, at about 8 am Saturday I returned to mission control to help out and see wider reaction to the story draft. Over the course of the day we filmed and I spent a lot of time writing and re-writing dialogue. Somehow our house and garden became a film set and the words Action! and Cut! were repeated numerous times. In the thick of it all the guy from Telecom turned up to fix our broadband.

While I managed to stay out of the limelight, Pete took a starring role, he played a detective. Late on Saturday night Pete and I made it home for some food and a couple of hours sleep. By 3am we were back at work setting up a re-shoot.

As Sunday progressed tiredness and technical problems made the team dynamics really interesting. Tired, passionate people under huge time pressures are not always fun to be around. Once the key story elements had been saved from the editing I retired to the background, resurfacing 20 minutes before the deadline for the final dash across town to hand in our tape.

For the next week our final film is under wraps - a condition of the competition. As soon as it comes out on general release (aka YOUTUBE) I’ll post a link.