48HFP 2012, Day 3

Saturday 06:00 – November 3rd, 2012

Our dear editor, who was planning to leave sometime around midnight so that he could get some sleep before reporting for work on Saturday, was still with us. Pots and pots of coffee, mini-naps taken while some transitions were rendering and a gritty determination to finish a job he had started saw him through. By the time he left, the video edit was complete! Only the music and some sound effects needed to be blended in, and the credits. Simple, right?

One of the team members had managed to rope in a friend to come in and help with the music. He was scheduled to arrive by 10:00. I decided to catch some sleep. I think I must have dozed off around 07:30 and woke up at 10:30 to start work on the music. I wasn't the only one though, sleepless nights abound during the 48Hfp.

The friend turned out to be a whiz, and he locked down the music in a matter of hours. However, it was a laborious task for me to start laying in the music into the timeline as I was very concerned about mucking something up in the edit. The thing was, our editor was comfortable on one software, and I had previously worked on another. So I had to negotiate a new software more or less from scratch. However, we had sufficient time, or so we thought.

In spite of constant remonstrations from the team that we needed to get things moving, I very gingerly went about fixing the music. By around 17:00 we had the film complete. Now all that remained was to add the credits. Not wanting to take a chance, I fixed the credits in the software I was comfortable in, rendered it separately and imported it into the main timeline. We were ready to export our film on to the disk by 18:00. The dead line was 19:30 and the drive would not take more than 15-20 minutes. A trial export we had done of the rough cut in the morning hadn’t taken more than 15 minutes including transferring to a flashdrive so, we had time!

I exported the file and sat back in relief; only to receive a message: “General Error (39)”. Pardon my French, par apni to phati!

Frantic calls were made to all and sundry. Advice streamed in from everywhere as to what should be done. But nothing worked! We decided to send out one team member with the rough cut—just in case. He raced to the elevator, only for it not to work  as well. Murphy’s law was on us with a vengeance! He raced down 11 floors via the staircase and made his way to the submission point. He called along the way warning of a traffic snarl. Never a break!

Meanwhile, I was trying to stay calm and go through everything systematically. Turned out all I needed to do was render the timeline in-program before exporting. And I did, and the film finally started exporting to disc. When we were done, the whole team was ready to dart off. It was past 18:30 and we were running out of time. None of us wanted the rough-cut submitted. I still thought we should give ourselves another 10 minutes, to watch the film before submission. Just in case.

And sure enough, some of the music hadn’t rendered! When I investigated, it turned out I had made the mistake of importing the music directly from the flash drive. Thus, in the rush to get the rough edit out, some of the flash drive connections had severed.

I methodically re-imported the music files, saved them on to the hard disk and re-connected the music links into the edit timeline. This took precious minutes, and the entire team was waiting with bated breath. To stay calm at this time, with so much on the line, was perhaps my single toughest task in all the 48 hours that were so close to elapsing.

Final render and export and transfer to flash drive happened at around 18:55. The lifts were now working and as the team hurtled towards the submission point, (in separate cars, each with a flash drive—just in case) we saw that the traffic too had cleared up.

The storm clouds were finally dispersing, and the sun was shining brightly upon us. Well, figuratively at least, it was past twilight otherwise.

And at 19:20, we had touchdown. Absolutelynoscope presented its short film “Ebb & Flow” to the organizers of the Dubai 48 Hour Film Project 2012 on time.

I think a tweet by one of the team members early on in the 48 hours summed up our journey best: “@trulydj: Genre is Romance! We need to wrap up this romance in 48 hrs... Looks like the reality of today.”

And wrap it in 48 hours we did, just about! But I suspect our romance with this little film may continue for longer.

48HFP 2012, Day 2

Friday 07:30 – November 2nd, 2012

The morning shoot was planned at my place, and I woke up bright and early to get a head-start on the revised script before everyone turned up. The previous evening’s experience forced us to re-think the original visualization. In about an hour or so I had pared the script down to much more manageable proportions. The added advantage was that we now had a bound script. Well, of course, things would change on the fly, but we had a tangible structure with dialogue on which the crew could work.

We had some more excitement overnight as one of the cast members had to back out. Everyone had scrambled for a replacement and we finally succeeded in convincing a friend to take the onus on herself. We all breathed a sigh of relief when she agreed, and duly turned up on time in the morning.

I must make it a point to mention here that, throughout our shoots, both for this year and the last, the above is more the rule than the exception. People have always gone out of their way to help us, and whenever we faced a roadblock, someone unflinchingly rose to the challenge. Heartening indeed!

The day was an endless series of shoots; setting up the equipment, getting the shots right, packing up, and re-locating. We minimized the locations and at times tried to use the same location in a way that we could get away with it seeming like an altogether different place. This strategy worked well and we had the film in the can by the end of the day. We just about got some day shots in before it was too dark, but for the most part, we were pretty much on schedule and wrapped up shooting by around 22:00.

It was still a shift of over twelve hours and the exhausted team dispersed for the night. A small core team stayed back at my place for the main event: Editing. After our experience last year, we had made up our mind to separate the editing function; that was the only way to stay ahead of the curve. And this too worked well; the only problem was that our editor worked Saturdays so he wouldn’t be available to finish everything.

Again, it is worth mentioning here that each and every person on our team participates on a voluntary basis. Each of us has a day job and sometimes, when you sit back and reflect, it is truly astonishing to see how much can be achieved by a dedicated team of like-minded people banding together.

Getting back to editing, the thought of how much would be left for Saturday was freaking us out. Sleep? Well yes, that was the last thing on our minds as the bewitching hour faded into memory, and the submission day loomed ahead.

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.

48 HFP Dubai 2012, Screening of "Ebb & Flow"

Well, if the genre we got this year were time travel, it may have proved apt as the blog now skips straight from last year’s 48 hour project to this year’s edition. I still may upload the earlier film and we shot another short ‘Ransom’ in between—which was essentially just to flex some of the new equipment. I intend to get all those posts up eventually, so please bear with some anachronistic blogging in the future. (Yes, that means all three of you.)

Our short film for the 2012 Dubai 48 Hour Film project “Ebb & Flow” is to be screened later today at The Fridge, Dubai. It has been a roller-coaster ride and I will be putting up each days events during the crucial 48 hours shortly. 

For now, here is the poster of our film:

48 HFP 2011, Day 3

Exhausted and drained from the days exploits, the team dispersed after a quick dinner. In front of us loomed the monster: Editing!

A quick shower, pots of coffee, and matchsticks in the eyes were the order of the day, or in this case night. In between editing, I had to shoot a scene from the balcony of the traffic. Somewhere along the way, I decided to forego sleep for that night. Again, in hindsight, that may have been a wrong decision. If I had managed even a couple of hours of shut-eye, I would have been in a far better frame of mind come deadline. I was simply mortified by the possibility of over-sleeping and having too much to do once awake to allow myself to sleep.

By the by, our final figure for cast and crew was now 21, out of which 20 were on screen; not to mention the families and friends of the cast and crew that constantly chipped in during the process with tons of help and support.

Come morning, and the rough edit was complete except for the scenes from the night before that were to be intercut with the scenes yet to be shot. The edit did throw up one nasty surprise though: A crucial shot in the establishment scene with the mother and baby had not been recorded! This, in all likelihood, was because the @#&% shooting the scene had forgotten to press record. I mean, how daft can anyone get? It’s that big red button on the screen, dodo. No prizes for guessing that yours truly was behind the camera at the time.

Frantic calls were made to the poor Mother who we had accosted on the street and who had so graciously helped us out.  Basically, erm, could she be available again, at the same spot, in the same clothes? I mean, if it isn’t too much of a bother. Wonder of wonders, she agreed!

On to the shoot: There were two locations, one in the parking lot behind our building and one on the terrace, not counting the re-shoot of the pram scene, which was in an altogether different place. By noon, we wrapped up all the shots as per our schedule. Only the re-shoot of the pram scene was left. A team went off to shoot that scene as I started to wrap up the edit.

By the time the satellite team got back with the rushes, I had the edit almost ready. The music was being worked on simultaneously, but we ran into major hassles with transferring data across computers. The music was being worked on a pc, the editing on a mac. Getting the two to play nice with one another became a nightmare.

Editing got done around five in the evening. The first edit, predictably, had many crinkles to iron out. I was hopeful that we should be done by six, but there was still the music to bring in and the sound to be cleaned. In about half an hour, we realised that things weren’t moving fast enough. A mad scramble to get things fast-tracked simply made things worse. Renders were skipping frames, clips were getting mixed up; it was just crazy.

Even if we got done, there was still the drive to the hand-over point, in traffic. It slowly started dawning on us that we weren’t going to get done. Our sound was in deep trouble and that would take some fixing. The edit was done, and if we rendered it as is, we could still make a mad rush to get there in time. The event organisers had announced a half hour grace period. So there was still hope.

This was the crucial moment. We had to decide then and there what course to take. For me, it was more important to be happy with the finished product than to submit it half baked. Luckily, the team agreed. And we decided to finish the film properly and hand in a late submission. At least it would get screened for the audience polls, even if it would be out of competition.

A few hours later, all our attempts at fixing the sound proved futile. Our initial decision to not record live sound was fatal. At around ten in the evening, we gave up hope of even a late submission. In my mind, the film had to be how we had visualised it; otherwise it would tantamount to belittling the effort that so many folk had put in to the film.

And that was our 48 Hour Film Project experience. Harrowing, but enlightening as well. Will wrack up the nerve to put the film up online shortly.

48 HFP 2011, Day 2

Our first location was a cafe, followed by some mall scenes and finally some outdoor shots—all this in the first half of the day. The cafe scene was the longest scene and involved the most amount of dialogue. Our first decision, and in hind sight our worst decision, was to try and do the sound in post. After our experience with Trigonometry, I was sceptical about our sound set up and didn’t want to risk the possibility of the sound giving up on us at the screening. The decision paid off in the short run though, and we were zipping through our takes.

Cast and crew were now up to eight, including the waiter from the cafe; we roped him in on the spot.
We wrapped up our outdoor shots on Sheikh Zayed road en route to picking up our 9th cast and crew member. By the time we reached our lunch cum indoor-shoot destination, cast and crew was up to 10.

All through the afternoon shoot, we were concerned about a baby and pram take that was a crucial establishment scene. It was now getting close to dusk, and the scene was an outdoor one supposed to be in the day. As luck would have it, while we were outside shooting another shot, a lady walked by with a baby and a pram. I ran to her and entreated her to act in the movie. She looked at me in astonishment and then indicated that she didn’t understand a word I was saying. She was Russian and didn’t speak English!

We somehow managed to give her directions with hand gestures, but in about 10 minutes, we realized we weren’t really getting anywhere. I was still willing to plod on as long as we had some shots to stitch together when the mother gestured that she had to leave and would come back. That was, of course, code for, “All right then, I think I’ve had enough. Bye bye now.”

Our collective hearts sank and we quickly moved on to some other shots that needed to be taken. No one wanted to acknowledge the elephant in the room. If we didn’t get the shot with the baby and mother, what was the alternative?

Wonder of wonders, she returned with her husband, who spoke English, and helped us translate to his wife! Suddenly, a friend showed up with his family. He had dragged his kids out of a birthday party, just to help us out. We now had a full family scene that we could shoot.

Our faith in humanity restored, we wrapped up the shoot and rushed to the next location, a clinic. Again we roped in a nurse from the clinic for one scene, and cast and crew by this time was up to an impressive 18.
Cast member 19 joined us later that night to shoot a scene in my apartment. There was still the editing. And we had two important scenes to shoot on Saturday morning. At midnight, we were still shooting downstairs below our apartment block.

48 HFP 2011, pre-prep and Day 1

Absolutelynoscope took part in Dubai's first 48 Hour Film Project held in November 2011. The concept was very appealing and even though we were only one short film old and we got to know of the event barely a week in advance, I thought: heck, why not?

The only pre-preparation allowed was in terms of scoping and finalising locations, equipment, cast and crew. The rest of the work, viz. scripting, shooting, editing etc. is to be done within the 48 hour window. Whew!
The pre-prep itself turned out to be quite a task. Since we only had a few days, there was no time to get people organised. And since other teams were on the task longer, most of the tried and tested resources were already booked out.

In terms of equipment, we decided to go shotgun as with our first film and shoot the whole thing on an iPhone.

Day 1, Thursday 19:00

All teams sent a representative to the kick-off meeting, where the event organisers would announce the Mandatory Prop, Line, Character name and trait. These had to be incorporated into the final product in some way. Genre’s were picked by lot and as it turned out, we were the first to pick our genre and, to a rousing cheer, I stepped up to the bike helmet (not hat) and drew the genre: Superhero.
I was very conflicted when I picked it: The thing is, we could still opt for a wild card and pick one of the pre-listed wild card genres. However, once the wild card is picked, you can’t change it or even go back to your original pick.

As a genre, Superhero is quite tricky. To be true to the genre, the film would need some amount of special effects and the like which are difficult for Indie film-makers to begin with, and nigh on impossible to pull off in 48 hours. Still, it would be an interesting challenge. After much thought, we decided to stick with it and do our best.

Upon much brain racking, we came up with an idea that could work. The general consensus on the idea was favourable, but there were serious concerns that we would manage to complete the film within the time limit provided. Since we were going in blind anyway, we decided to give it our best. Whatever happens, well, happens. So far the available cast and crew had crept up to six people.

We decided to meet up on location bright and sparky in the morning. Problem was it had already gone past midnight and all the excitement and anticipation of the shoot meant that sleep was very, very, difficult. I think I must have dazed and stumbled into some sort of stupor around 4 a.m. All the while planning the shots, revising the script, and trying to figure out how we could manage certain takes given our limited resources, not the least being time itself.