When you make a film, in your mind it has the potential to be absolutely massive. It can get overwhelming, you could be making the next Citizen Kane. It’s going to change the media landscape in a way that nobody could ever possibly expect a short film to. People are going to talk about it for hundreds of years, perhaps even thousands. It has to be perfect – so to be safe, it’s often a good idea to keep putting things off until you find the perfect idea.
It’s not the first time I’ll say it and it won’t be the last – I love constraints. Just like ✓ Project Bucket List, of which this is a part of. I believe that restrictions are the key to both creativity, but ALSO to getting things done.
And so, I’d like you to meet The Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge, an event in which teams of filmmakers around the world compete to make the best Sci-Fi short film in just 2 days. The challenge was set up as a way to enable creativity with small budgets, and resources – most people will imagine a Sci-Fi film as something shot on a massive Hollywood soundstage, with James Cameron level budgets and years of post production. In reality, you just need a camera and some editing software!
For a lot of filmmakers, this here challenge is a strand of hope in a competitive industry. The success story thrown around the room is Gareth Edwards, whose career of Godzilla, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park all started with this very festival. For me, however, it’s always just a bit of fun! I’ve wanted to participate in this for nearly a decade, but every year there have been last minute cancellations, drop outs, and we’ll-do-it-next-year‘s . It’s very difficult to arrange a full weekend as an adult, where everybody has different schedules and commitments.
This year was the year that Kymberley moved in. We had a free weekend, so we agreed to give it a go – and it’d be our first time working with my fiancée on a film! Every time I hear somebody say “power couple” an angel gets his wings, so if you fancy saying it right now, you’re doing right by ole’ George Bailey.
An hour before high noon on the first day of the challenge (always a Saturday), all participants get sent a different brief. The idea is that you cannot work on anything for the film before the 48 hours start, so you receive a title, a prop/action and a line of dialogue that must be in the film, kind of like a cool anti-cheat system. At 11am on the dot, we received ours, below:
We got started, throwing ideas at the wall thick and fast. We looked for ways to interpret the title, (was it therapy that related to soundwaves, or therapy that was of good quality?), then, settled on a simple premise. It’s two scientists, and they’re arguing about going to couples therapy. One of them uses the time machine to keep resetting the conversation to get their own way.
We keep spit-balling, before we realise that, hey you know what would be funny? Not only does the time machine not work – it’s actually just a radio. At this stage we’re chuffed to bits, we’re barely an hour in and we’ve got the skeleton of a script set out. We map out story beats, then keep padding in dialogue until it’s got a structure, then rewrite the dialogue to sound more human and less expository.
We got a bit stuck at figuring out what the music was going to be. We wanted a specific old timey piece, but it wasn’t in the public domain yet. Ideally, we had this dumb idea that, at the end, a person would come out of the time machine. Problem is, nothing Frank Sinatra or The Artist (Formerly Known As Prince) did is in the public domain yet, so we looked older. Ragtime, nae, older. Beethoven.
Luckily enough, I happen to own a pair of marketing agencies, so I have access to a big pile of film kit. We agreed pretty early on, this one wasn’t going to be pretty. It’s just going to be a few reverse shots and some wacky lighting effects. Let’s not overcomplicate a shoot when there’s just the two of us.
We waited until dark to shoot (not because I left batteries at the office and had to go back for them), and in the meantime we built a time machine prop by strapping some wires to a metronome.
Filming was fun, Kymberley did a great job, especially considering she’d not operated a big camera before. We had an FS7 with a Canon 24-70mm lens on, a soft box, and an LED panel light – pretty bare bones kit, and the way we shot it, we could’ve used something even simpler – hell, my trusty Osmo pocket would’ve done.
The most intensive part of the production was blasting a little smoke machine and a USB sunset lamp at a metronome. Honestly, Sci-Fi is a breeze.
We shot for about 3 hours, and finished up a little past midnight.
The next day, we woke up bright and early at like 10am and started work on the edit. I’ve been meaning to make the move to DaVinci Resolve over the past year. I’ve been an Adobe fanboy since I was 12, but it’s got more bugs than a man who goes around Yemen collecting locusts and putting them all in his pockets. So I took the opportunity to trial it with this project. We shot sequentially, so it didn’t take more than a few hours to cut, then we made like Mystery Inc, and split up.
Kymberley started work on the music, Logic X Pro, for those scorers out there. She took inspiration from Beethoven, and built this entire piece that sat underneath the edit, building up what the characters were saying. Meanwhile, I dived into the VFX (I defaulted to trusting After Effects for this one, Fusion looks scary), and just smacked all the tricks I keep in my back pocket onto the metronome shots. I literally shit glitter everywhere. Ah, not literally. What’s the other one? Figuratively. Not literally – I’d probably call a doctor if I was literally shitting glitter.
I mean where would it be coming from?
By 5pm we were slapping the finishing touches, a few sound effects and a little guitar motif for the cowboy section of the film (of course there’s a cowboy section, duh). Then, before we know it, the film is uploaded, delivered and done!
I had a look on social media for other teams, and saw such an amazing variety of BTS photos. Crews ranged from fresh-faced film students to weathered teams full of every role on a film set. I saw camera kit starting at Canon DSLRs going all the way up to ARRIs – this festival seems to have attracted such a nice spread of passion. The one thing that stuck out to me in every single photo, was how happy and excited everybody looked.
As I write this, I actually remember why I used to feel so passionate about filmmaking. I think I lost it somewhere along the way, but this stuff is fun. Hanging out with people you admire. Starting with an “ahah!” idea, and developing it onto something that looks beautiful. Seeing how so many people embrace storytelling, in their own special ways. The pride in their eyes as they stand with their crew and a clapperboard, with the little alien doodle on the side.
And so, I’m proud to show you the film that we made in just 30 hours (including a nap, and a trip out to the shops to get some lunch); Sound Advice!