Shooting A Short in 48 Hours...

Have you ever had to get a project completed in two days that should take two weeks to work on? If so, you know what it is like to do a 48 Hour Film Project.

Living in Hollywood East - the city of Atlanta, there are many friends that love to make movies. This year was no different as several of my friends came together to work on the 48 Hour Film Festival (48HFF). This was my second year doing a 48HFF project.

Last year's project turned out great and got me hooked on the process. This year I stepped up as a Producer as well as my Director of Photography and Sound Design duties.   

A 48HFF project starts at 7:30pm on Friday night and ends at 7:30pm on Sunday night. And this year was no different as Team Iron Shadow got our film submitted with six minutes to spare.   

Our entry finished with a run-time of four minutes and fifty-five seconds - that's a good bit of shooting for one day! Our short was filmed in two locations. In location one we used a friend's basement and built it out to be a police interrogation room. The City of Hapeville offered to let us use a real police interrogation room, but it was so small at roughly eight feet by eight feet that we couldn't have gotten much of a crew and cast in there. No wonder the interrogation rooms in the big screen movies and T.V. shows are so big!

Thanks to our Production Designer, Robin Hall, and her crew they were able to build the set out in less than three hours. Our second location was on a street corner in Hapeville, Georgia. Overall, we ended up shooting a hard 12-hour schedule.

Once we got a little shuteye, we started editing first thing Sunday morning. Luckily for us we had a great editor and visual effects guru, Randall Tolliver, to help us organize and get the first draft done on Saturday night.

It seems like with post production there's never enough time. I worked on the sound design and color correction while the director, Matt Green, kept working on final edit and scoring. With less than an hour to go we hit the final render and export button and crossed our fingers that the export would finish in time.

There's nothing like hitting a deadline!