48hr. Project

I'm Teddy Wilson of Theo-Imagery and VPADMEDIA.  I've come up with some useful guidelines to follow in organizing a 48hr. Project hoping they can lead you to a successful outcome.  I'll be doing shorts and practice for 48s in the coming weeks so contact me if you'd like to join in (917-603-9194) or leave message on Contactme above. 

Every year 48hr. Challenge (Projects) take place in many cities all across this country and many others countries.  They are high energy, fast pasted film making exercises that truly put your skills to the test.  Great planning makes all the difference to your success or failure so I'm sharing the process I follow.

• Give yourself at least two weeks to plan if not more to find your actors and come up with probable script plot lines that can be quickly adjusted to different themes.
• Set up and share a Google Drive location to organize information and keep everyone on the same page.
• Trust skill over high technology.  Simple equipment allows you to move faster with less downtime.
• Practice shooting a short with the actors you'd like to use before the actual Project or use different actors to practice structure and timing with your production team.
• Once you register and know the categories, begin writing short scenes based on the storylines organized earlier.  work them around most of the category areas.  When you know what choices we'll be given you'll already have some character development and storyline to start with.
• Editing and color grading will need more time than the actual shooting so everyone needs awareness about the story clips ahead of time so shooting can start as fast as possible.
• Writers should get started immediately and post newly updated script so everyone can read it from their cell phone or tablet.

The idea is to learn a script that can be adjusted to represent many different themes by minor word changes so it won't be a lot of new content for the actors to digest at the last minute.  This approach works with most story ideas except comedy.