Making Film IS TOUGH under pressure, but we DID IT :) WATCH NOW

Last weekend I directed this rather strange war film (CONTAINS SWEARING):
https://vimeo.com/groups/60hourfilmchallenge/videos/232283492

I was part of a team who were doing the Colchester 60 hour film competition which works like this:

On Friday evening at 9:00 every registered team receives a brief which contains

              1. The TITLE of the film you have to make
              2. a LINE OF DIALOGUE which you have to include
              3. and AN ACTION which has to be filmed

If you've ever tried making a film, you probably know that there are all sorts of nightmares involved which stand between you and actually creating a finished product, so to cram this in to only 60 hours seems from the outside like a bit of a stupid, masochistic thing to do. But from the INSIDE, its much, much worse.....

We had decided to do a war film because we had some coloured smoke bombs at our disposal, and access to a local Government Surplus store with loads of random militaria.

With this in mind, we found ourselves a nice spot in some foliage and set up a little military camp, knowing full well that we might not even use it, depending on the brief we were given.

If theres one thing I learned (which there wasn't; I actually learned loads of things......) then its DON'T have too many people
during the idea conception phase because what happened was that we were still up at 3:00 in the morning arguing about how the hell we were going to shoe-horn 'Someone watching TV in a dark room' in to this war film....one of the ideas still being; how about we don't do a war film?

• It really is a horribly miserable situation to be in because you know with every passing deliberation, goes the chance to put you're energy in to the VERY necessary preparation for the weekends shooting.

Anyway, because I had been asked to Direct the film, I was trying to be decisive and go with the idea that eventually resulted in the final film, but the Producer (who had pulled the whole team together) was really not on board with it. He thought the content would be too surreal, too ambitious, and too inconsistent but he hadn't yet settled on an alternative, so we all went to bed entirely unsure about what we were going to try to film the next day. Not a good start.

In the morning, we all arrived at location for 7:00 and began to finalise the set, while I did a couple of hours of rehearsal/improvised devising with the cast. There was no script, and no story board to work from so it was always going to be a little on the fly...
Unfortunately the Producer had double booked himself to drive some friends to Gatwick Airport which was going to take him away at midday for at least 6 hours....But instead of conceding that we should probably go with the idea we already had, he was busy brooding over other ideas during the morning and FINALLY exclaimed that he had THE IDEA we needed to shoot, RIGHT before he left!
Now, this was a demoralising moment for me, because we had already been rehearsing for quite a while, but there was no doubt that he'd had a good idea, (possibly and perhaps probably a better idea, with simpler, more viable, competition worthy content). The whole crew was split, with some feeling positive about the new idea and others feeling that we had already made good progress on the first idea. The producer was about to leave so there was no time for deliberation, and I told him with heavy heart, that we would try his idea.
That was a bad move because it was exactly what we didn't do.

After he left, there was a brief and painful discussion after which I made an executive decision to go with the first idea, and the one that you can see in the finished film. It was a horrible feeling. I felt like I was betraying his trust in me. All I can say is that it was for the good of the teams morale at that point, as there was TOO much to discuss about his new idea, and time was ticking by!

I won't go in to details about the shoot. There were various good points and awkward points along the way as with any film shoot, but after 6 or so hours, the producer returned JUST as we were about to set off the smoke bombs, which was a key component of the first idea which he had assumed we WOULDN'T be doing. Oh god, did I feel ill. He was not best pleased and the rest of the weekends progress happened under a very dark cloud.

Im not a very technically minded person. There were a lot of shots missing that we needed and the final film is something of a frankenstein in that a lot of fresh creative decision making had to be made in the edit and the film was finally submitted to the competition at 4:30 on Monday morning. Im still not sure whether he forgives me, but despite the HORRIBLE STRESS of partaking in this insane competition, Im actually quite proud of everything we achieved in such a small amount of time. (despite the obvious lack of some necessary blood stains in the final shot - please don't feel you need to point this out, I REALLY know..... there just wasn't time)

Here I am directing

And here is our beautiful camp from a wide angle that I stupidly never shot footage of..... whoops :(

Anyway, I definitely wouldn't jump in to this situation again. I think its a great exercise for a film making team to have some fun and test out working together.... but think how much better it could have been if we'd just taken our time...!

Be good to each other Steemies! This life is so much more worthwhile when we support each other!

x Basil