Two Weeks’ Notice

No, nobody’s quitting anything. But in just two short weeks, we’ll be kicking off our sixth year (and our seventh short film) with the 48 Hour Film Project! (Well, technically, as of this writing — Sunday morning — we'll be deep into the editing process.) A lot of elements are coming together, but we still have plenty to work out (as always) before the big weekend.

With that in mind, I’ve got a couple of quick questions for everyone:

One, are there any makeup artists out there (established or aspiring) who’d like to join in? While making our actors look their best is a real concern, my greater interest is in gauging our ability to pull off something in the horror genre. I’m not talking Rick Baker effects work, but at least dressing up a ghostly apparition or two.

And two, I wanted to know who we had out there with quick-working musical skills, should we draw the dreaded “musical or western” genre card. Nepotism accusations aside, both of my daughters are actually really good at writing music and lyrics, but we don’t have any quality recording capability. Assuming we could cobble together some kind of “click track” to work from for the shoot, do we have any guitar players, keyboardists, or even GarageBand experts who could lend their skills to our efforts? (In fact, even if we don’t make a musical, it’d be a real bonus to have an original song or two. We’ve done it before.)

Speaking of genres, here’s the list of genres for this year’s competition:

Buddy Film, Comedy, Detective/Cop, Drama, Fantasy, Film de Femme (i.e., film with strong female protagonist), Holiday Film, Horror, Mockumentary, Musical or Western, Romance, Sci Fi, Superhero, and Thriller/Suspense.

Should we opt not to go with our assigned genre, we can go for a “wild card” pick. Potential wild card genres are:

Fable, Family Film, Foreign Film, Ghost Movie, Historical Fiction/Period Piece, Martial Arts, Silent Film, Stoner Film, Surprise Ending, and Tragedy.

Once again, the competition has worked out an agreement with SAG so that we can use union actors. (I’m glad, ’cause we were kind of counting on it.)

And finally, I’m toying with the idea of Twittering our progress on the big weekend — if so, updates will be at my Twitter feed, @coughlan. No promises (don’t know if I’ll have time), but it certainly seems like a possibility. Maybe we’ll have a designated Twitterer...