I screwed up royally. I’ve been going on at length (in the real world, anyway) about participating in next spring’s 48-Hour Film Project. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, production teams are given one weekend to produce a short film, starting from a randomly drawn genre — say, “film noir,” “romantic comedy,” “musical,” and so forth — unique to each team, and with a mandatory character, prop, and line of dialogue, drawn also at random but applying to the entire competition. All creative work — writing, rehearsals, casting, shooting, editing — must be completed within that 48-hour window, and the completed films are shown at a screening at Visions Cinema the following Monday evening. The competition doesn’t take place just here in Washington (though it originated here), but in cities around the country. “Best of” shorts go on to compete nationally.
I’ve been spending my off time working out a lot of the details to make this happen, from assembling a team to arranging for equipment. But one thing we realized was that it’d be a great idea to do a “practice run,” a test to iron out the kinks before the real thing. Of course, not having a real deadline makes it a little less exciting, less urgent, but at least it’d be something. Well, in my lack of attention (well, more like my emphasis on my real life), I never noticed that there was a fall event! Aparently, they’ve got an affiliate competition, the National Film Challenge. Imagine the exact same competition but on a nationwide scale. Everybody does it simultaneously; instead of hand-delivering your finished tape, you FedEx it to the national competition site. You don’t have the local screenings, but you’re still competing.
And it happened the weekend of October 17th through the 20th. We missed it. All because I couldn’t be bothered to keep on top of things.
I am so not happy right now.
