So we had an interesting weekend here at the Creativity to Spare studios (my house) this weekend. We entered into a short film contest where you mush complete a movie in 24 hours from concept to final edit. It was for the A3F (Almost Famous Film Festival) here in Phoenix, AZ.
At 12:00 noon on Saturday the guidelines for the movie are released: The theme – A Quick Escape, Prop – A knot (someone ties/unties a knot), Line of Dialog – “I have a bad feeling about this”. By 12 noon on Sunday we had to turn in our short. We spent the first hour and half coming up with the concept and working out who was actually going to be available to act and be in our small crew. The next hour we had to figure out all the logistics of where to shot how to shoot it. Now we had 4 hours to actually get it in the can as they say, before our light ran out. Next was a short dinner and then Log and Capture in Final Cut Pro. We used 2 cameras a Panasonic DVX100B for all the A roll main footage, and my Canon ZR for B roll: shot about 45 minutes on A, and 25 minutes on B. Log and Capture took about 3 hours, a nap was taken once the computer started grabbing the A roll. Got up at 1:30 AM to start a rough edit, by 5 AM I had most of the raw edit together, KK had helped unearth some sound effects. Another short nap was taken, at 7 AM we needed to get some more sound effects so we went out to do some foley with a portable recorder; H4 from Zoom and a shotgun mic AT4073. Ingested the new audio and had to make it mono using Audacity (free simple audio editor). Finished the main edit by 9:15 AM. Sent the project into Logic Audio to do a final audio mix and add some music (hopefully). The audio import does not go as well as I wanted, and I spend 45 minutes fixing crossfades and levels. Now I have about 30 minutes for music, before I have to bounce to disk the audio as a Stereo Mix and bring it back into Final Cut Pro to output the whole thing to tape (miniDV). Oops need some titles and credits, get that done along with a name finally. We live in Chandler and the Drop Off is in Downtown Phoenix, we have planned to leave at least by 11 AM just incase of road closure or bizarre Sunday traffic. Output to tape is finished just before 11 AM and now just have to watch it on a TV to check that it plays all the way through one more time. Just after 11 we are in the car and on our way to turn it in. And we have an early lunch.
Whew.

Sorry for not having a cast this weekend I will post a new episode later this week, and hopefully another by the weekend. We will find out Friday, if we made it into the top 20 films and the screening will be on the next thursday at an AMC theatre downtown. Out of 47 teams only 32 finished in time. Wish us luck.

UPDATE-
We premiered this thursday and won for best use of Theme. Here is the movie- profanity beeped.
Enjoy