My tips thats I ve learned For the last two 48 hour projects:
1. Don't have too many writers. 3 at the most. I ve learned any more than three - and everyone is overtaking everyone and some good ideas are not heard.
2. Keep your story short. Just because you have 7 mins - doest mean you need to use it. There are so many films were shown that are so f***king long. Unbelievably long.
3. Stay away from intro credits. They re useless.
4. Keep end credits short and simple. They ll eat up your time.
5. Did I say keep your short movie short?? Like 5 mins short.
6. If u don't have a good mic - rent/borrow one. Saves a ton of time in post when you don't have to clean up as much. Which brings to.
7. For exterior- stay away from parks and main freeways. 48HFp typically hens on the weekend so there is a ton of people travel/hang out in the park. They will be noisy and your audio will be crap.
8. If you re a director/writer/editor - you re not allowed to sleep any more than 2 hours on 1st night and 3 hours on 2nd night. Suck it up and deal with it. Be energetic because as soon as ur energy is dropped - your crew will go all to hell.
9. Drink coffee, but most importantly - DRINK WATER!! You don't want to be dehydrated , sleepy , mentally exhausted and thirsty all at the same time.
10. Take 10 min breaks for every hour of work. Trust me, it might seem like a waste of time - but your brain needs them to be productive.
11. If you re editor- give yourself 2 hours on export of the final video. I thought all I needed was 30 mins, until I start having problems with copying the file onto USB drive, which took me an hour and we turned in our movie 7 mins till the deadline. Too close and I almost put a hammer through my computer.
12. Uring the shoot - relax an roll with it. Someone will forget some prop/costume so just work around it. This would be a great time to see how flexible you can be.
13. Know your gear. This year we were shooing a western on rail road tracks, and because it was an extremely busy train track I decided to do 4 wide shots on the train tracks and the remaining MCUs and CUs on he parking lot 150 feet away. The crew freaked out because they didn't believe me that we can pull this trick off. I just opened the aperture (1.4 on 50mm lens) to get the max depth of field, increased the shutter speed ( I mean I went from 1/48th to 1/6400th! which is a big No No when you shoot stuff but this was a minimal actor movement scene) because I didn't have dark enough filter and the trick worked freaking beautiful. So learn you tools and how far you can bend the rules to get what you need.
14. Don't yell at your crew but know when to stop the horseplay. Everyone is there to have fun, especially if your crew/cast are your friends. Let them go on crazy tangents and have fun on the set, but remember - you re there to make a movie, so you might occasionally have to streets the team in a right direction. But don't be a nazi about that neither.
That's it for now. I'm sure I can come up with something else. We did two 48 hour film projects and both were freaking awesome.
Oh. Scheduling.
Finish your screenplay by 11pm on Friday, Don't shoot past 2 pm on Saturday (lots of people during the Saturday, especially of its nice out) and finish your final edit at 3pm on Sunday.
