“Pursuit” went pretty well, and as planned. Saturday was the shoot, and apart from there being generally too much running and not nearly enough drinking of water, we got almost all the shots we wanted. Towards the end of the day at Reverse Garbage, we hadn’t really planned the end of the film so we used the backup “disappearing” plan and explained it in the voiceover.
But hang on, that’s way ahead. There was a smaller-than-expected meeting with about 15-20 groups present from the 32ish that had registered. A box held the genres (action/adventure, thriller, mystery, horror, comedy, western/musical, sci-fi, mockumentary) which don’t really inspire confidence. I mean action is just stressful (though we ran as much), thriller is tricky, mystery requires a plot, horror implies shlock, comedy is the kiss of death (I’ve written comedy before but not under pressure like that), western/musical (oh, the pain), sci-fi will be tacky like horror, and mockumentary kind of writes itself, but not very well.
We got sci-fi. Two poor teams got western/musical, one got comedy. That was almost all from the meeting, though there was some consternation from a Gold Coast team that a Brisbane landmark had to be included. Every team must also include Jerome Scott, Gigolo, a parking ticket, and the line “Why is there no wasabi in this sushi?”. An initial evening of mad brainstorming ensued.
Our plan included a voiceover to eliminate the pain of location sound, and music from Soundtrack/Garageband to pump it up. I wrote most of the voiceover with the core crew in the brainstorming session on Friday night, and it’s a chase film. SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING TEXT IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE FILM! IT WILL BE ONLINE SOON!
If you want to ruin it for yourself, just select the following invisible text to make it visible:
Male criminal/asylum seeker from future lands in present, female cop/agent chases him. Jerome’s car is stolen after his parking ticket distracts him, interlude while cop looks around South Bank, crim located at Reverse Garbage, final confrontation outside, The End.
So back to the shoot. It all went OK, we covered all the shots and finished just before nightfall. Went back to watch a depressing election night on the ABC. Slept, not enough, woke up, picked up Hayley for a second opinion and voiceover talent, then cut, cut, cut for about 5 hours, music for another 45 minutes, another hour of voiceover, turned the lovely anamorphic edit into (requested) crappier matted widescreen, got in the car, handed it in @ 7.10 pm, with 50 minutes to spare.
Though I’m too close to know, I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s pretty good. There are a ton of pits you can fall into making a film in 48 hours, including:
forgetting to include a requested item
writing a crap script
crap acting
not getting all the footage you need
running out of time on the edit
forgetting about music and needing it
major technical issues
And that’s just from the top of my head. Incidentally, the day after this was finished, I had some major technical issues with a firewire hard drive and my camcorder. First, the camcorder developed a firewire connection problem, so I had to use an old backup camera to get a master copy of the final edit off the computer. Right after that, the hard drive stopped mounting. If either of these things had happened the day before, we would have been royally stuffed.
But we got there. The showing is at Suncorp Piazza, South Bank on October 30 in the evening. Not sure of the time yet, but I’ll post it. It is free, and there’s a prize for the film the audience likes best, so if you’re coming, yell long and loud for “Pursuit”.