Making A Film in 48 Hours...Big, Crazy Fun!

Only 48 hours to make a movie? Am I a dummy or what?

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which teams of aspiring filmmakers make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours.

On Friday night you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie MUST be complete. Then all films submitted screen at a local theater, usually in the next week.

In 2009, nearly 40,000 filmmakers made 3,000 films in 76 cities. This year, the project is even bigger, with filmmakers around the world taking the challenge to make a film in just 48 hours.

Well, you all know I love movies....I am the Flick Chick for goodness sake!

I've been watching movies (a LOT of movies!) my entire life & am now a movie critic and have been creating video reviews for a while now, so how difficult would it be to jump right into trying to create a short 4 to 7-minute movie in a weekend?

Wow. Crazy. Who knew?

Less than a month ago, I formed Team 1 A.M. Films for the 48 Hour Film Project Columbus 2010 with my FlickChick.TV partner Jason Blanton. We became the team leaders and I signed on to write & direct, Jason would executive produce & act as an assistant director as well.

We assembled a fabulous team of friends & colleagues who were as passionate and excited about this project as we were, and had the various skills to make it happen:

Lou Ann Racher - Writer/Actor, Louie Cowan - Assistant Director/Actor, Jay Brooks - Editor, Ken Moss - Cinematography/Composer, Kristie Madden - Writer/Script Supervisor, Caliph Scott - Actor, Elizabeth Cave - Actor, Chris Engebretson - Camera/PA and Jim Bowe - Production Assistant.

(Missing in photo: Elizabeth Cave, Chris Engebretson & Jim Bowe)

A seriously wonderful and talented team, our film was a complete collaboration from beginning to end.

As a first-time writer/director/filmmaker, I must say...the result was a fun, inspiring, creative, tiring, educational, frustrating, hilarious, crazy weekend that I will NEVER forget....and a finished film that I will always be proud of.

As mentioned above, each submitted 48 Hour film had to include a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre.

Genres were chosen at a Friday night kick-off event by the team leaders (me!). I pulled "Mockumentary" out of the hat....and was thrilled because our team was really hoping for comedy. Other possible genres included: Sci-Fi, Horror, Road Movie, Dark Comedy, Musical or Western, Silent Film or Drama.

Every team HAD to include a character named either Sam or Sara Carpenter, and that character had to be a ticket-seller (and had to be shown on camera at some point in the film). The prop everyone had to include this year was a cell phone (pretty easy) and the line of dialogue that had to be spoken at some point in the film was: "All you need is one of these."

So, without further ado....below is POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS, our film produced and submitted for the 48 HOUR FILM PROJECT Columbus over the weekend of August 13th - August 15th.

We will be editing a "Director's Cut" version soon, where we can make all of the corrections & edits that we just didn't have time to do under the weekend time constraint. Make sure to stay tuned for that.

As you can imagine, our team ♥'s this finished 7-minute short that we were able to submit ON TIME for the competition -- but only having 48 hours makes it extremely difficult to get everyone's exact vision on film.

We'd love for you to view our submitted film below. Feedback and comments are definitely encouraged, we hope you enjoy it!