24 hour party movie
April 7th 2003 -
24 hour party movie
We did it. A 24 hour film, started on Friday at 7:30pm and completed – kinda – at 7:30pm on Saturday night.
Who
We had a pretty big turnout in the end. Chris T. and Simon A. came all the way from Canberra, and then there were such locals as Ben and Ryan, Anna’s friend Marija, Jon & Kate, Paul, and of course me and Anna.
What
It rained fairly heavily on Friday night. Ryan arrived promptly at 7:00pm or so, and we stood around and discussed what we might end up doing. Should we base the film on words randomly selected from a dictionary? Neither of us were keen on having a “sit-down-and-write-script” phase, preferring to improvise all the dialogue around some theme.
Jon was catching a train which didn’t go all the way to Marrickville, so I drove over to pick him up from Sydenham, leaving Ryan to hold the fort, and picked up Paul (who lives in that area, and had been planning to cycle over until it started raining) at the same time. By this stage, it was 7:30pm so we started trying to come up with real ideas.
Anna had bought meat for the BBQ, so despite the rain we slapped a bunch of food on, and continued trying to work out what we were going to do as the rest of our cast and crew arrived. Ryan was the chef for the evening, braving the drips of water coming down from the balcony as the rain poured down, and the smoke that hung around in a desultry fashion, creating a pleasantly cinematic haze through the dining room.
Pretty much everyone was happy to appear in front of the camera (apart from Jon and myself, and even we had a fair bit anyway) and after a bit of riffing around a couple of short skit ideas, we decided to base the film around a “Big Brother” kind of concept.
Elder Sibling
We weren’t particularly concerned with keeping authenticity (eg. pretending the cameras were hidden, or that the characters were locked into the house and yard), but we did come up with a couple of scenarios we could work through and improvise. We should show bits of the house meeting, scenes of people being voted off, scenes from the “diary room” in which we aired our private thoughts about the other house members, and scenes of the characters sitting around watching TV and being boring.
A satire of Big Brother. Well, it’s been done a bunch of times, notably by itself, but we figured that the scenario would give everyone a chance to do something, and that the format would allow us to do several independant bits of filming that we could combine in the editing suite. We had three video cameras, so there shouldn’t be any problem with getting simultaneous footage. More of concern was availability. Kate had to go to a Democrat’s meeting on Saturday morning, Anna and Marija had other plans on that day as well, as did Ryan. And Ben had to take off on Saturday afternoon. We figured this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, as Saturday would be mostly pick-up shots and editing (which turned out to be the case, happily).
More of concern was the number of DV tapes we had: 5. Just barely enough, especially if we were going to do multiple camera setups.
Where
One of the big immediate benefits of doing the Big Brother parody was that we could film pretty much everything inside our house, starting with dinner. Which we did.
We set up my video camera on the stairs looking down over the dining table, and filmed ourselves eating dinner and having various conversations. At first, Jon and I stood there watching everyone else serve themselves, but ended up abandoning the camera and tucking in ourselves, occasionally leaping up to move the camera to a new location. So far, fun and easy.
The conversation around the table was light and breezy. The combination of people really sparked, and the dinner topics became amazingly strange and varied. There was an obsession early on with getting footage of everyone being bored or boring, but after a few token efforts at dull conversation they sparked again. If we hadn’t been filming, I would have regarded it as one of the most enjoyable dinner parties ever.
Although we didn’t end up using much of the dinner footage, it was an interesting start because I think it really made people less self-conscious about the cameras being on them – and that looseness (and the wacky improvisation) only increased throughout the evening.
After dinner, we started the “proper” filming with the group meeting, in which the characters would go around the table and air their grievances. Jon and I ran separate cameras, with Jon doing roving hand-held and me with a tripod. Jon’s camera (actually, Paul’s camera, a 3ccd panasonic) had excellent sound, as it turned out, and we would have used it by preference over my boom-mike (which seemed to get into every shot in the film) had we known how good it was, except for the fact that Jon was breathing a little too noisily.
The group meeting went off a treat. The wackiness continued unabated, people inspiring each other to greater hights of silliness, Kate’s roar of laughter almost unceasing. Actually, we were all laughing a great deal, and I don’t think there’s much point trying to edit out the laughter after any of the quotable quotes. Deadpan comedy this ain’t.
I’ll put some quotes up here once I’ve watched the sucker through a few more times. Most of the humour was of the “you had to be there” variety, or just plain strange, but there was also a lot of build-up comedy as well, repeated catch-phrases and running gags.
After the group meeting, Anna created a couple of little tasks on behalf of the “Elder Sibling” – a mission to get some jaffa flavoured ice-cream, to search for damaged fruit, and to floss each others teeth. All typical Big Brother scenarios, I imagine. Each of them turned into a strange little odyssey. The “floss each others teeth” thing was done by Ryan and Ben in a sharp rip-off of the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene, the jaffa flavoured ice-cream trip turned strange when Anna was forced to find alternative ingredients, as the supermarket lacked jaffa icecream, jaffa biscuits, and jaffas. The end result dessert was extremely tempting, and I was unable to film it for very long. Stupid sugar-free diet.
The rest of the night went by in a bit of a daze. There were further group-meeting bits, most people did the “diary” thing (which we set in the bathroom) and at some point there was a sword fight with one opponent (Ben) on a bouncy ball and the other (me) on a unicycle. There was the voting-off scene, and the farewell scene.
At about 3:00am, Simon, Ryan, Ben, Chris, Paul and myself were sitting on the sofa, logging the DV tapes by watching them all the way through. We had recorded onto all five of the tapes, and had fully recorded three of the tapes, with about an hour’s footage left to record. Finally, everyone went home or to bed, and I got on with the laborious task of capturing all our logged footage onto the computer.
The real problem was that I couldn’t just capture the entire five tapes. I already had a great deal of footage on the computer from other projects, and had only about 20G free, which serves to hold about an hour and a half of footage. We didn’t end up using the powerbook at all, as it just didn’t have enough hard-drive space to make it worthwhile, and I didn’t have my copy of FinalCut Pro with me.
So we had to pick and choose the footage carefully. The capturing process went on all night, and was finished only at about mid-day on Saturday. It was by far the most agonising part of the entire thing – it always is – and I just can’t wait until DV cameras (or HDTV cameras, or whatever we have in five years) capture directly to hard-drive. It will save huge amounts of time and effort. In the meantime, we probably should have had a dedicated editor who could have started logging and capturing the tapes as soon as we completed them.
I went outside to watch the dawn, and went back to the capturing. Simon was snoring hugely, of course, sending mild reverberations about the house that were strangely soothing. It was kinda fun working while everyone else was asleep, though I was really beginning to suspect that there was no way on earth I was going to survive the entire 24 hours without sleep. By about 5:00am I was a shambling wreck. I almost fell asleep a number of times, and debated imbibing some caffeine or sugar, but in the end managed to hold on after a couple of 30 second micro-snoozes (I watched the clock) while sitting up in the chair. It was a surprisingly cold night, too, which may have helped.
Eventually, the others got up again. Kate went off to her Democrats meeting, and Jon started doing pick-up shots with Chris, Ryan, Simon, and Ben. With the sun up and the company, I became more alert again, and finished off the capturing in a big rush by just before mid-day, giving us eight hours to edit the sucker together.
Bugger
It is a pretty rare thing for me to curse Final Cut Pro. Adobe Premiere 5.0 and 5.1 were an absolute nightmare, crashing a lot, full of bugs, and I was cursing it almost continually during the long weeks of editing “Once Upon A Time”. But apart from a single, very badly timed crash in the making of “Bullet Hole”, I’ve had nothing but pleasure from Final Cut Pro.
Until Saturday afternoon.
For some reason, the computer was being slow. All the clips that we captured from the DV tapes were playing back at a much lower frame-rate than I’d have expected. It was very strange. Jon discovered it first. He wanted to edit the opening scene, as he had a number of ideas for it, but was unable to get the computer to work properly.
“Andrew! Could you take a look at this?”
And I did. I fiddled with the settings, tried restarting the computer, ran it with the camera attached and the camera not attached. Final Cut Pro was just running slowly, and that’s all there was to it. It was even running my old projects slowly, the ones that had been working perfectly happily the last time I looked. Was it the Hard drive? No, if I played back the captured clips using quicktime, they ran perfectly fine in full-screen mode. Was it some setting? If it was, I’ll be buggered if I can figure out what it is. I went through every setting in Final Cut Pro and Quicktime and even iMovie. The latter two worked fine. Final Cut Pro ran like a dog.
This went on for hours, and eventually we temporarily gave up. Jon tried editing with the slowed-down FCP, while I tried looking up solutions in the manuals and on the net. By this point, I was fuming. I was calm and happy for the entire shoot up until then, and just that one problem was driving me crazy. The finish line in sight! Eight hours to do the editing, and unable to do it!
Jon spent some time trying to get the first scene together, and when I took over the editing suite to try for some of the remaining scenes, I understood why. Editing was nigh-impossible. The lag was so severe you couldn’t work out what frames marked the beginnings and endings of scenes. Even with the editing suite working perfectly it would have been a very tight and quick editing job, but the lags just made it impossible. Jon only managed the opening scene by using audio cues.
So the afternoon went by in increasing frustration. People came in and out, looking worriedly at my dark expression. We decided to just string together all the clips in the rough order in which they’d appear – it was all we’d have time for, by the time my self-imposed 7:30pm deadline came around.
And then, all we had to do was transfer the footage off the computer and onto a DV tape, so that we could show what we’d done at 7:30pm.
Bastard thing. We couldn’t find any blank DV tapes to copy the sucker onto. Not a one. Aargh! There’s no way I was going to overwrite any of my existing tapes – just not gonna happen – so I was busily trying to hunt down a tape with enough remaining space, while simultaneously trying to burn the 50 minutes of footage onto a DVD (no luck there either – it would have taken too long and gone over the 7:30pm barrier).
In the end, miracles of miracles, we figured out a hack. I hooked the small television to my DV camera, and set FCP to “print to tape”, and it forwarded the complete film, without any slowdowns or dodgy frames, straight to the TV.
We watched the footage. It was funny.
We had dinner.
I went to bed.