The 48 Hour Film Project

I'm working as a Production Assistant this weekend on my friend's film he is directing for the 48 hour film project festival in San Jose. We start Friday night, today, and end Sunday night, having written, shot, and edited a 7 minute maximum short film, and submitted it in to the festival. It will be judged on many different categories, and there are 14 awards given, so we are hoping to get one! There will be two days of screenings at Camera 12 in downtown San Jose, Wednesday the 15th and Thursday the 16th, 7 & 9:30pm. Our film is in the Thursday set of screenings. I am very excited for this creation we are about to make in less than two days from start to finish! We will literally pick our genre tonight, find out what props/lines are to be used creatively in our film, and it will be the beginning of 48 hours of no sleep, but we can always sleep later :-)

I love being on set. There's just this feeling, everytime I start working on a film shoot, no matter if 1 day or 2 weeks, whether the crew is big and famous from LA, a student thesis film with an NYU crew, film festivals and competitions, or small, personal films for my friends and I, it doesnt matter. Being on set is just AMAZING and SO FUN! I prefer the smaller, more personal sets, where we all eat together, sleep on set together (the little sleep that we do get) but it's so fun because it's so much more personal! Instead of working on a big, famous set, like the Martin Lawrence produced project I did last fall, where we know most of the crew, mostly just by name, and are close to very few people, usually those you are working directly with, and then at the end of the day, we all go home, and report back at crew call time. But on small shoots and crews, we all stay together, rooming in hotel rooms if the location is out of town, or sprawled all over the director's living room, sleeping when we can, eating all the time, and just having a total blast and general good time, no matter how busy we are or how hard we all work, the end product makes it totally worth it, but the steps we took to get there are memories for life :-)

I remember once in college when I worked on a grad student's film, I had been up most of the night doing work and helping with the script and location, so the next morning, when the actors had their call, i took a nap, literally in the hallway of the set, with people walking over me, and I was snuggled up in my blanket, catching a few zzzz's. :-)

Talk about the great memories!