This past weekend I gathered up a bunch of amazing people and we participated in the second annual This is a spoon Blood’n’Guts 48 hour film Competition . For those not in the know a 48 hour film competition is where you are given some surprise elements at the beginning of a weekend and then you have to Write, Cast, Set dec, Film, Edit and deliver a short 5 min or less film that incorporates those surprise elements. Wait haven’t you done like a tonne of these? Well this is the second annual Blood’n’guts version. Meaning it is your regular 48 hour film with a flare for the thriller/horror genres!
We all gathered at the studio on Friday night and waited for the elements to be handed down from the the #BNG19 team via a livestream. and the elements were!
No Cliche Rule: Nobody Tied to Chairs, Nobody Gagged
Prop: Stuffed Animal/Plushie
Line Of Dialogue: Stop Touching it, It will turn Yellow!
Theme: Technology
This years team was a mix of people I have worked with before, folks that I have wanted to work with, and folks that I have never worked with before!
When we got our elements we sat down to do some quick brainstorming and came up with a whole list of ideas that we all thought were amazing. So amazing that we put them on the board and voted on which one would be the best. we all vowed that we were going to do amazing things after the competition with all of the ideas that we had put on the board.but legitimately looking at it even the next day we couldn’t remember what many of the ideas even were :-)
We settled on a fun-loving lovely if not slightly OCD roommate who acquires the proverbial roommate from hell. This odd couple grouping was our general premise and how we were able to include the stuffed animals effectively. We wanted to have a twist which resulted in the movie that you will see above. (The movie won’t be there until after the gala screenings so if you want to see it before then buy a ticket to the gala details forthcoming)
We had a great premise and we had a great writing team so there’s nothing left to do but sit down and write it while the rest of our team worked out some new details, like where we could film it, how we could film it, and what would be the best way to capture it.
We let everyone who wasn’t actually writing or planning go home and get sleep as this was going to be a long weekend of shooting and every bit of sleep would count. The writing team worked until 3 or 4 in the morning getting everything into a workable script that we could break down first thing on Saturday.
Saturday morning came way too soon and we met here at the studio and our lovely actors started getting into hair and makeup well we worked out the logistics of shooting this film. The first thing that we realized is that we were going to have an extremely hard time shooting this for under 5 minutes, but shoot it we would and make that a future us problem :) That is after we’ve got all of the logistics together which took a long ass time. We didn’t actually start rolling until 2:30 much later than we had anticipated so we already have we’re off to a rocky start.
Took a few tries to get the first scene rolling but once we were shooting everything started to fall into place and work like magic. The team was amazing, the actors always on and we were well on her way to shooting everything that we needed to with the exception of one of the outside scenes which we early on conceited would have to be in the morning.
The biggest problem that we had was making sure that we could get everything that we needed before any fake blood ended up being used. So we had to split the script into a pre blood and post blood but then that messed with some of our inside outside daytime nighttime splits that we had when we set up the shooting script.
We shot until 3 a.m. that night and had almost everything in the can and we were very happy with what we had grabbed.
All of our blood scenes we’re all done pretty much at the same time at 3 a.m. which resulted in exhausted giggling at our makeshift blood pump and the fact that I have incredibly poor timing and somehow took and short moment of offense to being spit on despite telling Erin to do it!!
For the blood pump we literally filled a ramekin with fake blood and sucked it up into the back of a hand pump balloon infiltrator thingy and I laid on the floor with the camera on a tripod right in front of me and pumped blood up into the air trying not to ruin my house, carpet, or anything like that. My horribly bad timing at the pumping resulted in having to do the take a couple of times. The other fun accident was I left the camera shooting at 60 frames per second which wasn’t our intent but man oh man does it looks so cool in slow motion. We each tool turns getting covered in blood with quick moments to strip and garbage bag all of our clothing and jump in the shower to make sure we didn’t spread the blood everywhere and by 3 a.m. we had all of our blood scenes done.
Three locations total one outside to in we managed to get everything that we needed by 10 a.m. Sunday morning.
That left less than eight and a half hours to edit it all together. While we were a canonical in our shooting and only shot things that needed to be shot we still ended up with nearly 800 GB of footage that was x number of minutes total.
But with the exception of a small hiccup of time code not syncing in some of our last scenes we were able to import it into Premier and be ready to roll within an hour leaving I’m your 7 and 1/2 hours to edit everything we needed.
Thankfully the premier gods were well appeased and we had no computer or premiere crashing issues and and I was able to rock out a rough at it by noon that clocked in at 7:52 nearly double what are 5 minute limit was.
The next couple hours were trimming things out that didn’t need to be there to try and get us under 5 minutes which I managed at 3:56 p.m. leaving a mere two and a half hours to colour correct soundesign and do a rough sound mix of the entire film which I managed to do with a few minutes to spare to do a quick music round using filmstro for the final scene. while it wasn’t perfect it was what we could do in the time allotted and a film was delivered with three minutes left on the clock.
I am beyond proud of what our team accomplished in such a short time with ambitious goals and can’t wait to work with them again on something that perhaps doesn’t have such a strenuous time limit. This film is an example of what a dedicated small group of people who want to do nothing more than create great art and have fun doing it can accomplish
Film Credits
Producers: Noah Brunn & Reilly Lievers
Director: Reilly Lievers
Story by: Noah Brunn, Stephanie Bueckert, Reilly Lievers, Brandon McKay, Erin Morgan, Ruth-Ann Reich, and Riaan Smit
Written by: Brandon McKay & Riaan Smit
Candace: Erin Morgan
Bonny: Ruth-Ann Reich
Make Up Artist: Stephanie Bueckert
Production Design: Riaan Smit
Sound/Boom-Op: Brandon McKay
Script Supervisor: Riaan Smit
BTS Coverage: Abhinandan M Iyer