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We’re not talking cute animal videos or funniest home videos here. We’re talking a four-to-seven-minute movie complete with story line, dialogue, and action. In the 48 Hour Film Project, each team in cities around the world rushes to create a movie over a weekend. Like running a marathon, it’s structured as competition but the great achievement is to finish.
All a team is allowed to do before the Friday evening kickoff is register, scout locations, and assemble cast, crew, and equipment. At the kickoff, teams draw lots for genre and learn the required elements: a specified character, prop, and line of dialogue. Then begins the fun of plotting, script writing, costuming, shooting, editing, and submission. The films submitted Sunday evening will screen before a live audience in a local theater. Like National Novel Writing Month, the 48 Hour Film Project can teach perfectionists the concept of “good enough.” Unlike the novel-writing challenge, the film-making challenge requires collaboration—and, I suspect, the willingness of creative people to cede individual control. Forty-eight hours is too short to thrash out all your decisions till everyone gets their way.
8 Comments
Lisa
6/10/2019 08:51:32 am
The contestants would also learn a lot about their own creative process, I think. Good thought, Lisa. Individual creative process and how those individual processes interact. Seems like it would help to have team members who have worked together before. I'm used to creativity that has more solo elements, or at most two or three people working together, even when it involves the interaction of writing for clients or volunteer organizations.
Lisa
6/10/2019 09:46:28 am
Writing is largely intellectual. You can do it with a pencil and paper. Film making requires technology, people on one side of the technology and something to film on the other side, maybe props, maybe costumes, at the very least working out how to physically arrange the pieces (camera, people, thing being filmed). Not to mention some paper and pencils! Inserting technology complicates things. Lisa, technology certainly complicates matters. Thanks for the image of people on both sides of the camera. Barring selfies, even goofy home videos require at least two people (or person and pet). Also, the technology demands more variety of skills. Script writing would differ from other writing because it has to take all those other people and visuals into account. Wonder if script writing for a stage play - no camera - is more like narrative prose or more like film-script writing. How about graphic art: do pencil and paper suffice?
Lisa
6/11/2019 09:21:21 am
I think there are a few, a very few, illustrators who don't use the computer. But, their final images need to be digitized (at the very least, scanned) to be incorporated into a magazine, catalog, whatever. Sometimes I come up with a rough drawing using the old illustration techniques and then execute it on the computer. There's always a client, even if it's only ourselves, so I think there are always at least two people... even if the two are simply ourselves on either side of the table. Our client self may WANT to do a certain thing but time, money, or skills don't allow, says the executor of the product.
Even writing, whether or not it starts out with pencil/pen and paper, needs to go on a computer to get submitted anywhere, go to a client or agent, or even live in my permanent files if I decide it's a keeper. Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. Archives
March 2023
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