Day 36: The 24 hour Film Challenge

Been away for a few days, partly because of depression but mostly because I was away from my computer devices doing a 24 Hour Film Challenge with my friends. Adam contacted me on Friday and asked if I wanted to help him and John with making a movie in 24 hours. I drove down to his house with my toothbrush and a Coke Zero. When John arrived and we received the prompts they were: a theme of "a memory," a prop of "a puddle," and an action of "dressing." We were originally going to shoot something outside but it started raining. We realized we would have to shoot in the garage so we drifted to thoughts of a band of friends getting back together to play their old songs. While hashing everything out, someone came up with the idea of each person doing internal monologues and I threw out an absurd joke (I wish all these assholes would leave so I could get this buried treasure). It was just a non sequiter joke that I like but John latched onto it and wanted to make sure this was the thing that made our entry different. We talked for hours about the logistics of the comedy, do we sing a song about the treasure or do we play it straight for as long as we can and then bust out the absurd?

I have to say, I had a clear opinion the whole way and that helped make a lot of our decisions we were wishy washy on. Even though Shawn came up with an improv'd song about the treasure being right beneath our feet, it didn't work with the logical flow of the rest of the story. We ended up filming Friday night for about an hour and a half and all of it was unusable.

On Saturday, after a few hours of sleep, Mark came around to help us which gave us someone to actually film the thing dynamically while the rest of us acted. We finally figured out a ridiculous ending to the whole thing and we shot all the footage in about three and a half hours. I went home to crash after a night of little sleep, no clothing change and no shower. There was some last minute tension as we had all left Adam to do the final editing and his job called him in for an emergency. We still somehow submitted on time. One day, I'll post the video here.

Watching the finished product today, I feel like I look awful. A "sentient bag of garbage" is the best way to describe my mode. I gotta do something about this but what?

Also, watched a Columbo last night...always a pleasure.