Tonight, while you are all enjoying the Calgary Folk Music Festival, the company of loved ones, drinks, or any other assortment of pleasures I'll be working hard against a deadline.
Film Racing. 24 hours. From 10pm tonight until 10pm tomorrow night. A crack team of professionals will create a 4 minute movie using a theme and prop that is unknown up until the 10pm start time. Mind you, the professionals I'm working with tonight are web designers and poets, not a normal film crew. But that's how we roll. And we damn well almost swept the awards last year.
I've done a handful of Film Racing over the past two years. The Calgary Underground Film Festival holds a 48 hours challenge every year, and FilmRacing International is back in Calgary for its second year. The goal of a Film Race is to create a movie in its entirety within the time given.
Script has to be written after the starting line. Music has to be written, recorded, and mixed in during the race. All of the acting must be shot during the race. All of the editing and rendering has to be done before the deadline. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, four minutes of final product (or six with the CUFF Movie Making Challenge) is really hard to pull off. Each race has a different secret ingredient that's not made know till the starting line. This keeps people from building the movie beforehand. If you just shoehorn in the prop and theme into something you've already written the effort is visible, and there is normally no doubt that you’ve cheated.
This is similar to the 10 Minute Play Festivals that Ground Zero used to hold at the High Performance Rodeo every year (Downstage Theatre will be heading the festival this year), in that you create in 24 hours starting with an unknown. The difference is that it's a 10 minute performance, not a DVD submission. If I may toot my own horn, Aislin Winsor and I performed a solid piece that almost took the win this year. The piece, Super 8, written by Charles Netto (yeah, his name comes up a fair bit) and Mark C. Hopkins was picked up by the Stage 1 festival over at Lunchbox Theatre.
So I'm familiar with the blank-slate turning into a finished product in 24 hours. It's a hell of a rush. It really challenges you to tell a single simple story, and tell it well. When you do it right, the work really feels like a professional product. When not done right, it feels like kids in a basement fooling around with a video camera.
Last year our piece "Do It Yourself", directed and edited by the amazing Gordon McDowell, took seven awards. Again, I hate to toot my own horn, but, well, toot toot. Seven awards, including Best Film of the Calgary Film Race. There may have been matching Best Lead Male and Best Lead Female awards for myself and the natural and nuanced Rachel Gertz. Maybe even a Best Acting Duo award. Maybe even a writing award for the script penned by Rachel and myself.
You get the idea. We represented Calgary in the international circuit with that submission, strongly.
We didn't place.
So, think of us tonight while you're out drinking and partying. We may be drinking, and it's a crazy amount of fun. But it's hard work. We may be found in the parkade at 4 am trying to flesh out a shot, or sweating away in the sun late tomorrow trying to fill in the last few shots. Or blowing stuff up at five am just to wake ourselves up. Or eating pizza and drinking beer staring at each other as the sun comes up, wondering who we would kill first.
I'll let you know how it went on Monday. Crash and Burn!
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