What a weekend!

On Friday evening, John Wright, John Graciano and myself went to the 48 Hour Film Project kick-off event. There, the organizers randomly drew the prop, character, and line of dialogue that every team would have to incorporate into their film. The items selected were: prop - brick, character - Jordan Mooney professional skateboarder, and "Excuse me, I think I love you." On top of that each team had to randomly draw the genre of their film. We drew "Mocumentary."

At exactly 7 o'clock they let us loose and we started working on ideas on the ride back to San Antonio. We got back to John's house and Toni and Tim met up with us and Jen was on the cell phone. We tossed around ideas until about 11pm before hitting on one that we all got excited about. Over the next hour we put down lots of ideas that eventually made it into the final film. I went home and got about 3 hours of sleep and got up to write an outline.

Everyone met at my house at 9am Saturday. We went over the outline, came up with a plan and started getting things ready. One of the really cool things is that we ended up having six writers on this piece. I wouldn't have thought that would work but as John Wright put it, "everyone was extremely generous" and that made it happen. We shot until about 10pm. Everything was done at my house except for one scene that we did at John's house.

After a few hours of sleep, I got and started editing. It quickly became a session of writing and editing as I had to make all of our pieces fit together. As it got later we had to cut 5 or 6 scenes because of time constraints. That also forced us to rewrite sections to fill in the gaps. We finally got on the road at 5:45 with me editing away in the back seat of John's van. I finally started making the tape (5 1/2 min) 8 minutes before the deadline. Once it finished, I hit eject, grabbed the tape and ran down the street to turn it in with just a minute to spare. That was close!

Last night John Graciano and I went to see all of the films at Alamo Drafthouse. Our film was the last to screen and it was really well received. I was happy and relieved to hear people laughing and clapping in all the right places! Now we wait to find out if we get included in the "Best of Austin" screening or win some awards on December 1.

Regardless of the outcome, I can't say how much fun I had this weekend and how proud I am of the work that everyone did. We didn't just make something that was good for being done in 48 hours, I think it's just plain great.