48-Hour Film Project Recap!

It's officially the Tuesday after the 48-Hour Film Project, and we're all still alive! In fact, we're alive & better than ever--more inspired, more motivated to make better videos, and more excited about working together as a team.

Over the course of the 48 hours, I vlogged our journey, and posted it to our YouTube channel. See the vlog here:

On Friday night, we got assigned a genre. I was all ready to do a coming of age movie or something similar, so I was super surprised when our choices were detective/cop movie or martial arts movie. We were also assigned three required elements that our movie had to include: a character named Rachel Hammersmith who worked in pest control, a manila envelope, and the line "Where did you find this?" We bounced around ideas for a while about a detective story, until we learned that the actress working with us actually knew how to do martial arts! It's like it was meant to be.

I then spent the next few hours writing the script for Mite, a feminist martial arts movie about a young female exterminator standing up to sexual harassment. Then I handed my script off to Jake, who shot-listed for us. By the time the sun rose on Saturday morning, we were ready to start filming!

We then spent all of Saturday filming our movie. We created a nice variety of scenes, including fight scenes and training montages, mixed in with more emotional scenes of interpersonal conflict.

After we finished each scene, Cice would begin editing on the spot. We developed a really efficient working system, and Cice was able to finish a rough cut by midnight, leaving us most of Sunday to finish post production & sound design.

Around 5:00 pm on Sunday, we left to turn our movie in to the drop-off location in the South Loop. The movies were due at 7:30, and in order to be eligible for judging you could NOT be late. We were surprised to be the first ones to get there. It's obviously not a race, but we were still excited.

Over the course of the weekend, we also developed an Instagram account for our production group. We'll be working on a Facebook page and a website/blog as well.

This weekend was super exciting for all of us for a lot of reasons. Cice & I have been making YouTube videos together for about two months, so we already knew we worked well together. But this weekend, we just had a super strong team of people that all worked together beautifully and fit perfectly into our roles. We're really looking forward to making lots more videos together as a team, and expanding our channel.

Our movie, Mite, will premiere at the Music Box Theater in Chicago on Sunday, September 10, at 6:30 pm. Tickets are $14. I hope that everyone in Chicago will be able to make it!

Anyway, we're already excited for next year! And for all the movies we're going to make in the future! I'll be sure to update everyone once we have more stuff set up & ready to go. Right now I'm working on some new channel art to replace our more cartoony stuff from before.

Hope everyone's having a great week. I've needed about 10 million cups of coffee to get through it, but it could be worse!

Love,
Savy