48 Hours done…

No need to be dramatic about this – we missed the 48 Hour Film Project deadline by 15 minutes. My goal was to have my students take part in a real challenge – make a movie in two days. That we accomplished. And there were lessons learned…mostly by me, but also by them.

They learned how to use prosumer cameras properly. How to use the manual iris, focus, and white balance. They learned how to improvise when plans had to be changed. They learned that making a movie is a LOT of work…but there is fun to be had along the way.

I learned that a two hour trip into San Francisco is not a good time to finish editing the movie. Adam Nino got motion sick.

We couldn’t export our final movie to tape after numerous tries, so exported as a video file. Now you know and I know that five minutes of video takes up one gigabyte of hard drive space. Sure – it doesn’t. Our final video was about 4:57 – and 1.3GB.

At 7pm we went for a quick cut – took about :10. Still too big. Finally whittled it down to 4:35 and an 857mb file that would fit on a 1GB flash drive.

On delivering our movie, we found out we weren’t the last – there were still six or seven teams still out. Elena Cruz, the San Francisco coordinator, said about 20% of films come in late on average.

So the bad news – we were late and can’t really compete.
The good news – our movie will still be shown in San Francisco in a week to a real live paying audience AND we are still eligible for the audience choice award.

Sweet.