. . .accept the challenge.

MoFest 48 Hour Film Challenge.

Here's a bunch of terrible ideas, now make these into a short film. Oh and you have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit your film. At 7pm on Friday, the groups are all given the same line of dialogue and prop. The wild card is each group is given their choice of three different genre's to tell their "story." So yeah, I've been participating in the annual MoFest 48 Hour Film Challenge for the last seven or eight years. I'm not going to lie, it one of my favorite things to do every year. This year was a little different though and kinda felt like it almost didn't happen. Our founding Father, Mo, actually became a father about two weeks before the contest so needless to say, he was a little preoccupied. Luckily, the boys at Error Plain 206 stepped up and kept the challenge going. Sure the actual MoFest has been pushed to the fall (I think) but the film challenge would live on. Thanks dudes!

So, this is a little behind the scenes look at what went into our short "Parades Canceled - Jimmy's Dead"

Here's the crap we had to work with.
Dialogue: "Parades are for real men."
Prop: Nudie Playing Cards
Genres: Doppelganger, Surprise Ending, Dark Comedy

Normally, we end up at a bar, drink too much, come up with some ridiculous idea, and then meet too early on Saturday to start shooting. This year I blew it and had a baby so I couldn't make it to the brainstorm because I had to be a parent. "We'll just Skype you into the session," Randy suggested. Have you ever tried to talk to 6 other people, who are all drinking, via a computer screen? Terrible idea. So, I sat and listened while no one listened to each other.

"I'll just meet up with everyone in the morning. Let me know what I need to bring..." 

The texts pretty much sum it up.

So, I loaded up the car with anything in the garage that eluded to a parade...


The other tradition that our group has is we never actually shoot the idea that we had come up with the night before.  This year we came dangerously close to being organized.  Jonah even wrote some stuff down, another first for our group,  and we shot the first scene (Joe leading an imaginary parade in his apartment).

After shooting the first setup, it wasn't feeling right.  Dan sat slumped in a chair clearly bummed about the story direction as he looked at the days shooting script.  Then, just like that, we decided to start over.  At 12:30 pm we scrapped the original idea and start over.  Thankfully, Jonah was team player and was open to us ditching his hard work.  After a couple of hours of nonsense and flannel shopping we were getting rad again!

Me in a blouse.

 Jimmy killing it.

We had a few little ideas that we would stitch into one bigger story.  These little ideas soon turned into two hour setups!  But it was pretty awesome.  Everyone pitched in and did multiple jobs.  If you weren't acting you were directing, costuming,  or shooting.  The shoot was truly collaborative.

Our fake peephole.

"How are we going to end this?"  was the big question.  Holy crap, you should have heard some of the suggestions... My two favorite suggestions were Laser Penis (yup, I capitalized Laser Penis) and/or an apology.  Thankfully, neither of those ideas happened!  Instead, we ended it with something along these lines...

 Thanks again to everyone for making this happen!  This is my favorite film we've done so far. It was a real pleasure to work with everyone.

Oh yeah, we actually had to have one of the other teams shoot the last shot for us because we were all in the scene!  Thanks again John and Eric.