Lights. Camera. No Crew.

We just wrapped on our third submission to the Louisville 48 Hour Film Project, with Blood Brothers, which SPOILER ALERT: contains no blood and they're not brothers. This is what happens when your working title becomes the actual name of the film due to the 48-hour time limit. And it wouldn't be a 48 without a little chaos on the set.

Now I should say that I love the 48HFP. I look forward to it every year. It's the most stressful fun you'll ever have. While this is the third project where I was the lead, it is the seventh time I participated. I acted in four of them previously. The group I worked with before was immensely talented, and I owe a lot of how I run my teams now to them. The problem this time around is that I had no team. As in no production team. That meant I was going to have to write a script, run the camera, set up the lights, record the sound, edit and possibly act in it all within 48 hours. As I said, it's the most stressful kind of fun.

When it came time for me to draw my genre I pulled Mockumentary/Buddy Film. You could see by the look on my face that I wasn't thrilled about it. I mean look at this face. Look at it. I look like I just opened a bag of Skittles and it was nothing but yellow.

Squinty eyes, half-hearted smirk. This is a look of disappointment.

I wanted something like Action/Adventure or Horror/Time Travel. You know, something complicated. I spent most of the year since the last 48 taking notes and learning how to be a better filmmaker. I planned to take everything that I learned and use it in this year's film. Fortunately for me, that's not what happened. I called my wife and whined about my awful pick, but she explained how this was the perfect genre given the circumstances. You know what, she was right (but don't tell her that.) I can shoot a fake documentary all by myself. Set the camera up on a tripod, one location, people sitting still talking to the camera. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Could you imagine being a one-person film crew trying to shoot a fast-paced action-adventure, who'd be crazy enough to do that?

Robert Rodriguez literally did that.

Thankfully, I had a few friends who thought it sounded fun and wanted to help out. They might not have had the most experience in filmmaking, but they were willing to put in the work. Free labor? Score! I mean, if you're not exploiting your friends and family to get your movie made, can you even call yourself an independent filmmaker? We met at my place and began pitching ideas. They were all over the place, from a crossdressing serial killer to a story about every day is a holiday so no holiday felt special. After a bit of brainstorming we decided to blend the two genres and make a mockumentary about a group of buddy serial killers being followed around by a camera crew. And before you say "Behind The Mask", yes I know. This is kinda like that.

A better version of my movie.

I got to writing and as I do, I start and stopped a dozen times before settling on a direction for the film. As much as I knew filming this in a documentary-style format would be best, I kept writing towards the cinematic. One of the things I liked most about Behind the Mask was its blending of those two styles. Plus I had just bought a new camera and I hadn't got a chance to use it yet. So now the script was done. It was 9 pages long. They say a page of dialogue equals one minute of screen time and the films have a seven-minute time limit. That SHOULD have been a red flag, but if there is one thing my characters like to do, it's talk. A lot.

The next morning we went over the script and it seemed to get a positive response, so we went with what we had. The script now had two locations. A spot for the talking head segments, which we were going to use my house. And then a scene near the woods. In my mind, this sounded easy, but the problem was...We didn't have an outdoor location! Now, I'm not sure if you caught that this is a time-sensitive competition, but what you don't want to be doing is spending the first 1-2 hours of your shoot date looking for places to shoot. After a bit of searching, we got lucky and scored Nick's Aunt's place, but the catch was it was 25 minutes away and we were already behind schedule. So we packed up the cars and then drove out to her house. She had a nice wooded area behind her property, unfortunately, like clothes bought on wish.com it wasn't the right fit. .Great. It was almost noon and we haven't even shot our first scene. We quickly decided to re-work the ending to fit the location. After about another 30 to 40 minutes of blocking, we were ready to roll. We set up the camera, everyone was in place and... The neighbor decided it was a nice time to start mowing their lawn. To be fair it was a pretty nice day out.

After wrapping on that location we still needed to find a place to film the documentary crew witnessing the killers in action. And we thought what better place to simulate a murder than at a public park on a nice sunny day? So we packed all 5 actors into my 2007 Kia Rio (because I thought it would be funny but I think I was the only one) and called action. Now if you haven't seen the movie the scene goes like this: The killers are on the hunt for their next kill (in broad daylight mind you) when they stumble upon an unsuspecting victim who just happens to wear the wrong shirt. So they hop out of the car and begin to strangle him and eventually stab him to death. Of course, we didn't get this in the first take so we shot it several times. A few of those takes were a bust because of people who happened to pass by thinking they were witnessing a real murder. This was beginning to freak my wife out, God bless her, who was in a car parked down the road watching everything in real-time. So she began texting me to wrap it up but being the perfectionist I am, I wanted a few more takes. Thankfully no one called the cops.

My Wife's full name is Mama Bear McWifey.

Besides someone running over my gear bag with all my audio equipment in it, the rest of the shoot went pretty smooth. It was all talking head segments and it was indoors, so I just had to put the camera on some sticks (tripod, but I wanted to sound like a professional) and press record. We finally wrapped at around eight o'clock Saturday night. We all celebrated. We took some pictures and had a toast, it was great! Until everyone went home and I began editing. Remember how I thought the script might be too long? Turns out I was right. Our original ending was a minute and a half over the 7-minute time limit. That's after trimming out as much as I could and still having a somewhat coherent story. So I had to unwrap the project and call everyone back because we needed to find a new ending and quick.

Thankfully we managed to come up with something in time. And to be honest, I think it was a better ending. My aim with this post was to highlight some of the struggles of being an inexperienced filmmaker. Did I hit my mark? Maybe that leaves the door open for future discussions. I recognize that I still have a long way to go, but I'm not letting my lack of experience stop me. Are there things I wish I did differently? Absolutely, but I'm choosing to look at the mistakes in this film not as failures, but opportunities to learn what not to do on the next one, and at the end of the day, we got to say WE MADE A MOVIE!

Maribeth, Cameron, Amy, Randy, Eric, Nick, Tony, & Shiloh

That's a wrap. But for reals this time.