Well last weekend was a wild ride to say the least. It all started at 7pm Friday night (Aug 14th). Within 48 tiny hours my team and I collectively wrote/casted/produced/directed & edited a 6 minute short film titled Ratón. It’s now viewable online both at Vimeo & YouTube.  My sis Chelsea represented our team, named “Stroganoff” in downtown San Jose. After drawing from a hat she made a call and informed us we scored Sci-Fi for our genre. Having pre-chosen The Diamond Laundry as our location for the shoot we got busy with story ideas. With a mini crises at 4am I began to feel my brain melt and pour out the side of my head. The story we had been working on for 8 hours just was not working. We slogged away at the keyboard for another hour before passing out, when I awoke at 7:30 I discovered we had 3 decent pages. As cast and crew began to show up at 8am I hung onto that keyboard for life as everyone’s impatience gathered momentum in the community room of my building below.

After going downstairs and getting the peeps up to speed on our story we were off! I had an amazing team, everyone on set invested every minute into the film. Actors doubled as makeup people, producers doubled as PA’s! It was truly amazing to see everyone give their all for 18+ hours. My friend Tony personally catered the whole shoot, his recipes both rejuvenated and intoxicated everyone to keep working, and smiling all along!  The picture below was taken at about 2:30 am I believe, half of the “Rat People” were loopy, which helped a lot with their performance I think.

We shot until 5am, wrapped set at about 6 and everyone went to sleep until 9am. Sunday, our day for post-production was magical. Breakfast arrived at 10:30 along with lots of filmmakers from the shoot. Each of us had our task and we all dug in for the final run, grabbing sound effects, creating music on the fly, doing titles and cutting the film together. My sis raced us downtown in my car and we turned in our film with 10 minutes to go on the clock! After that we drank! The picture below was taken two days later, before we went to see the film play on the big screen at Camera 12 downtown. It was a wonderful evening and there were some great films. They played our film last which, and from the applause I think we have a chance to win some kind of audience award. Keep your fingers crossed, we find out tomorrow in Los Gatos for the official 48 Hour Film Wrap Party. If I don’t see you there I’ll let you know how we did in my next post.

Again I just want to thank everyone who worked so hard and intensely on this project  from start to finish. I know this project started a spark in everyone’s soul to get on with bigger projects, hopefully ones that don’t have to be finished in two days!

Leave comments about your thoughts on the film, post whatever. Best comment for this post will be awarded a Moleskine notebook for all your ‘on the go’ creative endeavors!

A gifted and giving crew, everyone brought something special to the sleep deprived process and we came out better for it, the whole lot of us!