48HFP 2012, Day 1

Thursday 18:00 – November 1st, 2012

Reached the kick-off point after some last minute hunting for cables, sound equipment (I know, sound issues will never leave me be!), and some very strong coffee. This year saw a much larger turnout, and the atmosphere was palpable—charged as it was by a bunch of very wired, very creative filmmakers. Teams picked genres by lot, and our pick was ‘Romance’.

As before, there are wild card genres that can be picked as well, details of which are here. I gave these options very serious thought. Romance is not my thing, I thought. The team consulted and decided that the only reason to change genres should be if it were completely impossible to fathom how we could proceed with the genre in hand.

And was it impossible? Well, um, no. I realized that I actually liked some of those soppy romances. I mean who doesn’t like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry met Sally”, right? After a bit of brain-storming, a seed of an idea began to germinate. Long story short, we stuck with Romance.

At 19:00 on the dot, the mandatory elements were announced: Prop was a pillow, character was Hind or Hani Khalaf,--a nutritionist, and the line was, “I can’t believe you bought that one.” The satellite team at the kick-off venue moved to a nearby café where the rest of the team was gathered. By 21:00 we had an outline we could agree on and finalized the cast. There were concerns on the scale though; and the members of the team who were part of last year’s project were apprehensive about our ability to get everything done on time.

To try and speed things up we decided to shoot one scene immediately so that we would have something done and out of the way. It was a bit risky to shoot a scene without a bound script in hand, but I guess gorilla filming is all about doing things on the fly, right?

The first shot was in a restaurant. It was to be an hour long shoot and we were to even try and shoot some B-rolls thereafter. “The best laid schemes of mice and men,” as they say. The shoot went way over-schedule, the gracious restaurant that had allowed us access to their premises started to get justifiably annoyed as staff had to wait over-time. We finally wrapped up the scene close to midnight and had no option but to call it a night. As many as could be spared departed for a well-earned night of shut eye in preparation for the Friday madness to follow.

A small team gathered at my place to start the edit of the scene already canned. And boy was that a revelation! The scene, as it was envisaged, clocked over a minute.  A minute! This wasn’t even one of the crucial scenes; and we’re talking about a four to seven minute short film here. A minute was just too much! Drastic changes were in order.

We were already into the wee hours of the morning, and last years’ experience had taught us that some amount of shut-eye, however brief, was indispensable. And all of us were so exhausted that, unlike last year where the excitement and anticipation resulted in much tossing and turning, sleep welcomed us with open arms.