Two years in a Row

It's been a hell of a week.

I would like to share with you Normal, Best Film 2010, FilmRacing International Calgary Selection. (Warning, possibly NSFW: Sexual suggestive language).

Travis, Rachel and I met up at District at around eight pm Friday night to enjoy a bucket of bacon, Black Pilsners, and our last hours of peace before the race started. We did what paper work we could and sent text messages to possible help to make sure we had support.

I had not slept the night before at all... I had started hacking together a web interface for a contest I was helping out with down at DEFCON in Las Vegas the following weekend, and well, it got away on me that night. Going into work at 6 a.m. I tried to get some sleep at about three in the afternoon. I slept about an hour and spent the rest of the time frustrated in bed, listening to people start up their Friday nights with deep base and loud conversations all over my block. I put in ear plugs, but the bass made me lay there with my eyes open staring at the ceiling.

Travis had spent the day watching short films online, trying to get himself aligned with the task at hand. Joining the team this year as the director/camera-guy/editor he was taking on a huge responsibility. It's very hard to divide up editing on a short movie like this. You can have multiple people edit different sections, but to keep the whole of the 3:30 max length video under control, it's best to have one individuals eye on it. Actors basically do their job acting and then can only run support for the editor, joe-boy'ing, by grabbing coffee or pizza and what not.

We were all in agreement as the tab came to the table. One simple story, told well. Don't take in any ideas that we had during the day with us, and start fresh when we get our theme and surprise element. There was about five minutes till we found out. We headed to the cars and made for home base. While in the car the starting line was crossed, and the e-mails hit our phones.

Walking into home base, we knew what we had to write about.

Theme: Obsessions.

Surprise Element: Looking out a window.

Beers came out of the fridge. Recently acquired chocolate treats from Australia were handed out. Brain Storming started. What type of obsessions exist? Which ones are less obvious? People pitched ideas around. I got fascinated by the idea of writing on the window, so that we could have a shot of someone looking out the window with dry erase marker all over it chronicling their weight (personal obsession). The shot may not have worked, but it morphed. This idea of chronicling or documenting an obsession all over a room helped, was a nice visual that we could pull off. But we didn't want to use a common or obvious obsession.

For some reason, I got the idea of watching from a doctors point of view, and then it hit me (yeah, I'm going to shamelessly claim credit for the idea). We didn't want to be obvious, and there are way too many over stated obsessions out there. I wanted to take a marker and write all over The Gertz's glass cabinetry, their place serving as our home base.

I wanted to collect other peoples obsessions. The idea took. I tried to script write, but the team had a good feeling that it would be best if we just jammed it out. It was only about 1 a.m. at this point, and we started to film the interviews right there on the spot. We were moving.

We wanted our final shot, the reveal, to be amazing. Protospace, the local hackerspace, provided an ideal space with a projector that we could use to achieve a killer effect. A quick text is fired off to another Protospace member, who was also FilmRacing, to see if he was using the space. "You're filming?" Not only were we already filming, we had only about two shots left at The Gertz's, and then one scene in Protospace. It was around 2 a.m. 20 hours to deadline.

After 3 a.m. we broke into teams and headed over to Protospace to finish up. It required two trips for me. A wiring issue was possibly kyboshing the use of the projector. The lack of sleep the night before and the current lateness was catching up with me. I was getting twitchy and erring faster. After a second trip back up to my place to grab another adaptor, the Protospace basement had been changed into our cave of obsession. Two hundred or more of my personal polaroids, hundreds of hand written post-it notes and A4 sized paper everywhere, and the looping raw footage of interviews shot earlier. The only item missing was me standing there in my Dink Pyjamas and a creepy look.

5 a.m., we are done principal shooting. It's all up to Travis now. We head home, planning on meeting up at noon to regroup after a few hours of sleep. I can't fall asleep till eight am. I watch "The Green Zone" on my phone while the sun comes up.

1 p.m. Nine hours to deadline. The Gertz call me. In finally falling asleep, I forgot to set an alarm. I hurry over to discover that Travis had not slept all night, and already had a rough cut assembled. I watch, and am blown away. He has a look and style, and it works well. There's not much Rachel or I can do. We relax. Rachel dyes her hair. I work on importing google doc spreadsheets into a MySQL database (part of the project that had killed my sleep two nights before).

5 p.m. Five hours to deadline. Final Cut Pro crashes. Travis looses all his work back till noon. There are a few concerned looks. Travis plows through. Most of the work done in the last five hours was experimental trying to chose how to do something. Now that he had chosen, he could just go after it.

8 p.m. Last minute ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) requires one line to be put in. Rendering starts. We want to make sure that there is time so that we are not rushing to the finish line.

9:30 p.m. Thirty minutes to go. We cross our 'I's and dot our 'T's, making sure all our location releases are signed. We package it all up, putting together a manila envelope with our final product in it. We head to The Kensington Pub.

With about fifteen minutes to spare, we hand in our product. We decide that we probably will not be doing much that Saturday night. We high five, smile, and head on home.

Final outcome?

Normal, by Team Dink Pyjama Party, winner of

Best Film
Audience Favourite
Best Direction
Best Female Actor
Best Ensemble Cast
Best Cinematography
Best Writing
Best Editing
Best Set Design
Best Makeup

Two years in a row. I hate to toot my own horn but, well...

Toot Toot.