So, we took part in the National 48 Hour Film Challenge. We must have been mad. At least four members of the team got no sleep. The rest of the team averaged single-figure total hours for the weekend. It was intense, hard and often quite tedious and pernickety work. People were ready to kill each other. And what for? This.

We were given the title (“An Association”) and the genre (“suspense”) at 10am on Saturday. The plan was to knock out the plan and script by lunchtime on Saturday, then do the bulk of the filming on Saturday afternoon and evening. Editing could then start on Sunday morning, and the remainder of the filming done in parallel with that, to be finished by midday sunday at the latest. I would work on musical ideas in parallel with the filming, and then as the edit came together on Sunday afternoon and evening I could turn these ideas into the score and sync it properly with the action. Editing could then continue until it was finished, and we’d all get a good night’s sleep before handing it in on Monday morning.

Pffffft.

I think the last rushes came in at about 10pm on Sunday. Bits of effects footage (for the bomb timer) were still arriving at gone midnight. The editing continued right through the night, until the film was eventually handed in 20 minutes before the deadline (1pm on Monday), with most of the editing crew having had no sleep. You can’t really account for things like discovering most of the footage for the final scene is basically unusable at 3am, or the presence of Brian’s ass in most of the office scenes.

I was originally brought in as the composer, but I was also pressed into duties as audio editor, as the sound captured from the office scene was nearly unusable because of the massive amounts of ambient noise. Working with a certain popular shareware sound editor (whose name shall not be spoken lest it appear again, which is something I don’t want to have to do) and a rubbish noise reduction plugin I made the best I could out of a bad job, taking several hours to cut as much noise as I could from 2 minutes of dialogue. And it still sounds like they’re talking in a metallic tank underwater.

The music went better, though. I’d knocked out a few generic thematic ideas during the preceding week, so it was partially just a case of fleshing them out and stylising them to fit the film. I wrote a couple of extra bits and bobs during the editing process, too. Having the 24 DVDs on hand for inspiration was handy, too 🙂 Overall, I’m pretty happy with the music (thanks to Lori for the very kind comments on the previous entry:), given how long I had to do it in; I’m less than happy with the dialog and some of the other sound, but lack of decent equipment and software along with inhuman time constraints prevented a more satisfactory result.

But, all that aside, the entire team is very, very happy with the result. We’re not particularly bothered if we don’t win anything. We’re not that bothered if everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, either. We’ve never made a film before, and given the time constraints, lack of experience, lack of decent quality equipment and availability of things like, say, actors and locations, we’re dead chuffed with what we did. Plus, once it’s shown in the AMC in a couple of weeks’ time, we can get our own entry on IMDb, which is pretty damned cool, if you ask me.

And to those who still scoff at our handiwork, I say: Okay, you try. Next year. We’ll see you there.

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