At last, I directed a short film this year. Just last week, in fact. If you've never heard of the 48 Hour Film Project, it's an international competition, taking place in over 80 cities across the world, where aspiring filmmakers in each locale scramble to write, cast, shoot and edit a 4-to-7-minute film in less than - you guessed it - 48 hours. As you might imagine, competition in Los Angeles is fiercer than in most other cities, or at least more plentiful: there were around 70 submissions in LA this time. My film was one of them. The rules of the game are inspired by improv: Last Friday at 7pm, my team (I directed, Party Pooper star Dom Zook produced, Party Pooper costar Tyler Rhoades wrote the script, and his wife and Party Pooper costar Erika Godwin joined him as part of the cast; five other actors and three crew members were recruited) were randomly assigned the genre of science fiction. We were given a line of dialogue, a character name, a vocation and a prop that all had to appear and/or be spoken on screen, just to prove that we did in fact make our movie during the 48 hour period. Ambitious as we were, we wound up making two short films, combining them into a sci fi double feature we imaginatively titled Double Feature. Tyler delivered the finished film(s) right on time on Sunday night and we screened publicly on Tuesday with ten other entries. We were well-received, even by our competitors. I think ours was the best all-around film in our screening group, with the strongest performances and the tightest script, but it's too early to tell whether we will win any awards in the competition - if you hear nothing more about it here, then assume we simply had a good time and aren't up for any further accolades. If you're curious to see the results, in a few weeks I will post the film on this site, after we take a few more hours to clean up the audio. In any event, it was an invigorating experience, and just goes to show you what you can accomplish when you get off your ass and start working. It's a good prelude to my next personal short film, which I still plan on shooting before the summer's over.
An android (Michele Venlee) malfunctions in Double Feature