Filmfest

On Saturday, November 5th, 8 men from ACU came together to create a film in 24 hours to compete in the ACU 24 Hour Film festival. Here it is.



On Friday afternoon, the day before the competition, I asked around to see if anyone in Abilene had a boom pole, a necessary tool if we were to shoot audio in the short film. Uncle Jim called a guy he knew and asked him, and the guy said he did. So I contacted him and got the address of his business where the pole was located and headed over. Come to find out, the guy thought I meant mike stand, not a boom pole. So I got a mike stand. Awesome.

Anyway, 11:45pm rolled around, and I headed over to Jordan Havens' room, the RA of 1st north and the organizer of the Mabee Production team. At midnight we checked the ACU filmfest website for the control elements that had to be in our film and began brainstorming. 4 hours later, a rough script was ready. I went to bed to get 4 hours of sleep, trying to prepare for the day ahead.

8am rolled around, and I was less than excited (namely because I was so tired). I thought "we haven't done too much-we could just not make the film." But as I was thinking that, I got a text from Jordan asking where I was. I sighed and hustled downstairs.

Only Jordan and one other guy were in the room when I arrived, and we started talking about shooting schedule and locations. Eventually the whole crew dragged in and we were about to get rolling. The only thing was that our main actor Matt Varner was at breakfast. We texted him and told him he needed to hurry, and we headed to the library.

Our first location was in the downstairs library. The lights were off in the back part, and we thought it was a better location than a row over that was lit by florescents. Then we moved to Walling Lecture Hall, where several extras showed up. Then we went to the art building and shot the Frankenstein scene. After that, we headed over to my aunt and uncle's house, followed by Pam's Pets shop, then Monk's coffee shop. We had an hour break to get food, then we shot at Taylor Elementary, and finally the fountain downtown. Shooting was done, but editing was next.

I had a very difficult time trying to capture the tape, but eventually, eventually got it working. It had taken an hour to figure out, so now I was beginning to edit at 8pm. Jordan had some mysterious appointment and didn't return until 10pm. I wanted to be finished by 10:30pm to have more than enough time to export and upload, but I didn't end up finishing until 11:40pm. We had to have an email sent by 12am with the url in it. We clicked upload and it said 20 minutes. We freaked. As we got closer to the deadline, we began to panic more and more. As 12am clicked away, we were still not done.

We had ours submitted by 12:01:06. The committee gave us grace.

The whole time we were filming, I had a terrible feeling. I doubted that our film would be any good at all, and if it wasn't, Jordan would never want to work with me again, none of the guys on my hall would never want to work with me again, I wouldn't be able to get any actors ever again. Basically, I was not optimistic. But when the final cut had been made, I stood back and realized that we had created something of high quality. Our shots were magical. The plot was snappy. The film was enjoyable. We had done the only thing I cared about--we had made a film I was proud of.