Race Against Time
Written by Sara Faith Alterman | Posted by: Anonymous
When Improv Boston’s Will Luera called me in April to offer me the chance to purge my filmmaking chops of years of rust and stunted ideas, I was totally flattered and emphatically interested. Sure, I went to film school (well, film studies, if you want to get technical), but besides a brief stint in wedding videography and a few weekend gigs as an art department assistant, my post-graduate filmmaking career was pretty short-lived and decidedly unglamorous. So I jumped at the chance to take Will up on his offer; to write a short script and be part of a production that involved a cast and crew of people I know and respect, both personally and professionally.
"What do I have to do?" I had asked. "When do we start production? How long is the shoot?"
"Well," came Will’s response, "the shoot is in a few weeks and we’ll have 48 hours.
"To shoot?"
"To shoot. And edit. But first, we need you to write it. Oh, and we’re trying to win a contest."
Founded in 2001, the 48-Hour Film Project provides a forum for amateur filmmakers to showcase their talent, creativity, efficiency, and ability to substitute sleep with sugar and caffeine. Held over various weekends in major cities across the country (and, recently, some international metropolises including London, Paris, and Melbourne), ambitious cinemaphiles are provided a few simple guidelines and allotted just two days to complete a seven-minute masterpiece. Or, at the very least, seven minutes of footage. Armed with the mandatory inputs of film genre (such as ‘Horror’ or ‘Sci-Fi’), a line of dialogue, the name of a character, and a prop, teams have from 7:00 pm Friday until 7:00 pm Sunday to incorporate these elements into their entries.
Our team was comprised of people with a spectrum of talents, most of whom were cast and crew members at ImprovBoston, an improvisational comedy troupe located in Cambridge’s Inman Square. We had a few pre-production meetings, but as the contest weekend grew closer, we realized that, beyond accumulating equipment, there wasn’t much we could prepare for other than the exhilaration of flying by the seats of our pants.
Boston’s start date was Friday, April 8th. Teams had to send representatives to Boston Beer Works, where our inputs were revealed at seven o’clock on the nose. We sent our producer/editor, Matt McLaughlin, while I sat with my cell phone, pen poised to paper, ready to work myself into a frenzy of creativity. Matt’s phone call was giddy. "We got ‘mockumentary’ !" he hooted, "can you believe it?"
A ‘mockumentary’ embodies a farcical filmmaking style initially made popular by Rob Reiner’s infamously cheeky "This is Spinal Tap," and kept alive by Christopher Guest with quirkily genius productions such as "Waiting for Guffman." Traditionally, the cinematography is raw, the dialogue mostly improvised, a truth which my co-writer Matt Mosher and I celebrated with high-fives and hearty swigs of coffee. I mean, our team was ImprovBoston. Yee-ha!
The plan was initially to spend from seven until 11 on Friday night writing the script, assembling the cast for a midnight read through, and seizing the day bright and early on Saturday morning for as much shooting as we could cram in before McLaughlin snatched the still-warm tapes from our DV cameras.
The rest of our inputs seemed fairly easy to incorporate; a string of pearls as our prop, ‘Jay Withers, former child actor’ as our character, and the line of dialogue "I’m not really like this." Almost immediately, there were unforeseen obstacles. You’d think that contest guidelines would have helped shape our story by imposing limitations; instead, Mosher and I were flooded with dozens of ideas, using each others’ notions as spring boards and brainstorming pages and pages of possibilities. This speaks well for our creative chemistry, as we’d never even met prior to 7:15 on that very first night, but didn’t exactly make for speedy scriptwriting. No matter; we finally settled on an idea and began to flesh out our characters — contestants, we decided, in a professional ‘Go-Fish’ tournament.
Saturday’s initial flurry of activity crescendoed as the day progressed, and by five o’clock our set was buzzing with the furious energy of a serendipitous Nor’Easter. We filmed at the Farragut House in Southie; as luck (or planning) would have it, our script, though loosely written, called for only one location, so most of our shots were set-up by shifting equipment and actors. The whole experience seemed to whirl around me — writing jokes and dialogue off the top of my head, watching the director and cinematographer make crucial composition decisions in the blink of an eye, laughing silently behind my hand as the actors improvised brilliant scenes and monologues that, sadly, were too long to be used in their entirety. When the final scene had been shot and we sent the cast home, (I really couldn’t tell you what time, though it was definitely sometime between sundown on Saturday and sunrise on Sunday) it was time for McLaughlin to work his editorial magic. By eight o’clock on Sunday morning, we had a rough cut.
Still, it was a race to meet the deadline! Seemingly tiny adjustments ended up taking chunks of precious time, and I’d be lying if I said the post-production team didn’t want to kick each others’ heads in at times. This project stretched beyond an exercise in filmmaking; it was a test of my ability to collaborate, and, at times, to acquiesce. Finally, we laid our egos (and grumpiness—no amount of coffee can pacify two days of urgent fatigue) aside and finished the cut, laying original music composed by Hans Indigo Spencer. The last thing we needed was a title. A title!
We made our decision with ten minutes to spare, and "Card Sharks; Hooked on a Game" was mastered to DVD and raced back to Boston Beer Works in record time. How the hell we made it from Southie to Kenmore Square in six minutes is completely beyond me. McLaughlin drove like a bat out of NASCAR hell. But we made it, film completed and friendships intact.
Despite the fact that our film didn’t win anything (as we later discovered at the ‘Best of Boston’ screening later in the month), the 48-Hour Film Project was a constructive and thrilling experience, and I couldn’t be prouder of my team. And our film! The actors did a terrific job, the crew was a dream to work with, and the final product was, in our opinion, damned funny! We had such a good time that we’re already talking about next year. Get ready, Boston!
