48 Hour Film Project

I had participated in the 48 Hour Film Project challenge back in 2019 when I had first moved to Toronto (before heading back to Ottawa during the pandemic). It was a really fun experience and I was excited to do it again with my “Ghost Writer” teammates. This was everyone’s first time participating in the 48HFP and we expected to pull all nighters for the entire weekend. However, our process went much more smoothly than expected. On the first night of the challenge, our writer and I went to the kickoff at the Madison Avenue Pub to receive the prompt and choose our genre. We ended up getting Doppelganger/Mistaken Identity as our genre. The next step was to think of a storyline that needed to include a character named Max Remy who is a busker, a metal key that would be used as a prop at some point, and the line “Is this for real?” We spent a good hour at the pub coming up with ideas. We finally settled on a good one and then basically called it a night. The writer went back home to write the script while I was in charge of making the shot list. The first night might have been the closest we had to an all nighter since it took me until 3am to finish the shot list (and clean the apartment to make it “camera ready”), but we actually still got some sleep in the end (which was more than what I got the first time I did this challenge in 2019).

The next day, we started shooting at my apartment around 9:00am. We managed to get the majority of the film shot in that one day and even went home at a decent hour so everyone could get some sleep again. I was impressed by how efficient we were. When everyone went home, I did an assembly of all the shots we did and made a rough draft to show our team. It was great that we had time to edit half the film so that we wouldn’t be rushed to edit the entire thing the next day.

This was my favourite scene to edit ;)

On Sunday, we met up early in the morning at our next location and finished shooting much earlier than scheduled (which was fantastic!). Our editor got straight to cutting while another team member handled all the paperwork. We were super organized and I was stoked we were gonna have lots of time before the deadline. But of course, we encountered some setbacks. The sound needed a lot of editing and at one point, DaVinci Resolve crashed while I was colour correcting. We also took a lot of time finessing the cut in Premiere. On top of that, I also needed to add credits at the end of the film, and at that point we were getting a bit too close to the deadline. The last hour was the most stressful, at least for me. I was the last one to have a go at the edit of our film and made sure everything looked good. In the end, I was actually able to deliver it with lots of time to spare, but it sure felt like I was racing against time.

Overall, I think we did an amazing job making this film, especially in only 48 hours! I’m super proud of what we produced. It’s not perfect, but the fact that we accomplished everything we wanted for the film, and were even able to get sleep during this period, I think we can call it a success.

Enjoy our film Winfall!