Behind the Scenes - "Down Town"
Here’s some of the behind the scene’s and 48hour film challenge premier’s photos of “Down Town”. - Samuel
Zach and I entered the FilmSPARK 48film challenge. Zach wrote quite a bit about the experience under the video’s description on our vimeo page.
We got the packet with our instructions on friday night at 8:00pm. On the car ride home I pitched to the concept to him for what would eventually evolve into “Down Town”. When we got back to Zach’s house he began storyboarding as I wrote. I would write the scene, read it off to him and he’d sketch it up. We were up till about 2am that night preparing and trying to see who we could get last minute to help us. The next day shooting started around 11am. At about 12:30pm we came to a stop and seriously considered giving up. It was a very rough start and it looked to get more and more difficult. After a short break and a deep breath we recommitted ourselves. We knew we’d have to ditch most of what we planned and with that freedom, everything became easy. We stayed downtown shooting until we absolutely had to leave in order to get ready to go to a gig we had that night shooting pictures for a bachelorette party. There was a couple of scenes we did at the house before leaving but the light was so low due to some poorly timed weather they just weren’t usable. On the way back from shooting the bachelorette party we realized how amazing it looked downtown with all the reflections from it raining earlier and decided to go back out and shoot some more scenes. We were up until about 2am again and we knew that we still weren’t done so we agreed that we should wake up super earlier and finish it all up at dawn. I of course overslept, but we still managed to wrap up shooting by 12pm on Sunday. Plenty of time to edit and render and hand in by 8pm right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t and we just barely missed the deadline.
We were exhausted and not being able to hand in the film we made was demoralizing. The next day, we were contacted by FilmSPARK and they told us we could submit our short film but it would not be judged since it did not make it in by the deadline. We were thrilled and a little confused because we didn’t even know they were going to be judged.
We didn’t take home any awards and I didn’t get a chance to give the speech I didn’t prepare but we got to show our film and I’m pretty sure some of the people thought it was pretty alright.
So here it is for you to enjoy, I hope you think it’s pretty alright too. As always, if you like it, share it.
-Samuel
Music by and special thanks to - Paper Castle and Nick Driver Band