As a creative agency, there’s a lot of things we can do, but most of the time it’s in the realm of advertising. Occasionally, we get to flex our creative skills and work on passion projects that have little to no limits. When we heard about the 48-hour film challenge, our graphics, video and even our web departments were game to compete.
The 48-hour film challenge is hosted by the Las Cruces International Film Festival. It is what it sounds like; write, produce, film and edit a movie in Less than 48 hours.
The challenge started with a meeting at Beck’s coffee. Over 20 teams showed up including production companies and students. Each team lead was given a packet and was assigned a genre. We anticipated any and every genre, except for the one that we got; Travel/Roadtrip.
Wow. We’ve done a lot of traveling and landscape timelapse for our NewMexi.co platform but weren’t sure how we were going to approach the theme “roadtrip” for our 5-minute short. We immediately had a brainstorming session and our writers got to work. The formula was simple. We would create a suspense-thriller happening mostly in a car.
Our video specialists are used to quick turnarounds with the commercial work that we typically do, but how were they going to feel about filming in a moving car?
Filming inside of a vehicle is tough, be it because of the cramped spaces, limited lighting, or the danger of actors driving while acting. Add on top of that 30+mph winds that we happen to have that day, and we had a recipe for disaster. To solve some of these challenges, we placed the picture car onto a flatbed trailer so that we could achieve the driving shots without having to have the actors drive themselves. The wind posed a difficult challenge as it made it virtually impossible to use a boom mic for sound. We resorted to using a lavalier mic in order to get usable sound with minimal wind noise.
Several hours later we completed the filming of the material, leading us into the next phase of production: the edit.
The editing of the project presented another set of challenges. With such a narrow window to turnaround the finished film, we split up as much of the post-production as possible. One person doing the edit, one doing the sound editing, one doing music and sound effects, and one doing the color. The editing took us well into the night and into the next morning. Several of us only had less than 8 hours of sleep the entire weekend.
On Sunday, we spent most of the day compiling the edit together. Making last minute changes, we set the video to export about an hour before the turn in time. Dropping everything onto a USB flash drive we sped off to hand in our project. After that, we finally took a collective breath, shook hands, then went straight home to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
Check out our directors cut below and we look forward to doing it all again for the Borderscene 48 hour film challenge happening soon.
