making movies--on the run

We finished up our writing session at 5am this morning, with a decent draft. Our parameters: genre--drama, character--Reginald H. Higginotham, diplomat, prop--receipt, line--"This could get complicated."

Writing in a team of four is tough, especially for drama, but we got along pretty well. I'll go into our process in a future post, because I'm interested in how these things work, but right now I'm on the afternoon crew and I need to drive to the shoot at a flower shop. It'll be another late night I think.

Making Movies--on your mark, get set...

In a few hours, I'm off to Waltham to stay up all night with three other writers (and a director hanging around somewhere), to see if we can come up with a knock-em-dead short film script for our 48-Hour Film Project team. At 7pm, we'll get the call with what genre we have to write, along with a character we need to use, a line of dialogue, and a prop. The plan is to have a story and outline in place by 11 or midnight, so the storyboarding can start, and we should have the whole thing finished by 5am or so. (We're one of 90 teams in Boston this weekend.)

It's been 20 years since I actually made movies, so I'm pretty excited by this. I'll be there on Saturday, to be part of the crew, and hope they'll let me in on the editing and post-production on Sunday, too. I'm oddly nervous, like right before a big soccer game, or before the opening night of a play. I like the adrenaline of it, and the queasy sense of the unknown.

If you're in the Boston area, you can see the results of this when our film is screened (assuming we finish, which I feel confident we will). It'll be at the Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA, Tuesday, April 8, at 7pm. It might be brilliant, it might be a train wreck, but it'll definitely be worth checking out.l

Killing Time

Next year I've got to get in on the big 48-Hour Film Project. I have a couple friends who have participated, and it sounds like much, much too much fun (a lot like May Day Play Day). Teams are given a genre, a line of dialogue, a character, and an item that must appear in the film. Then they have 48 hours to write, film, and edit the film. It's a nationwide competition--some of the winners even were shown in Cannes this year.

My friends Dan Milstein and Bonnie Duncan were on a team that make this short horror film, Killing Time. It's funny (and a little gory). They had to make a horror film, 4-7 minutes, that had the line of dialogue "call me when you get something really good", featured a shoelace, and had a character named Quimby.