Hi everybody! Marcus here!
In our second year participating in the Minneapolis 48 Hour Film Project, Two Jackets Productions made an absurdist comedy called All’s Chair in Love and War. The only problem was that we were supposed to make a romance! And we had such beautiful people to work with…
Joe (left) and Matt (right) are, unfortunately, not about to get romantic.
In the picture above you see Matt Pitner (right) who played Limpwings in, um, Limpwings, and Joe Rapp (left) who we had never had the pleasure of working with before on film. Both Matt and Joe are members of the Bearded Men Improv troupe and are hilarious performers. Not pictured is Emily King (YODO!, I Stole A Lot of Money!) who brought a good deal of heart to the film, and Craig Larson (Boxing with God) who never fails to crack me up. I co-directed this piece with Andrew (something we really enjoyed and plan to do again this year!) and Eric filled the editor role. This is all heightened by Reed Reimer’s fantastic score.
So where did we go wrong? First, take a look at the film...
I really love the film that we came up with for this competition as a standalone piece, but it falls down as an entry in the 48 Hour Film Project. To explain why, I’ll need the help of a Jedi Master.
There’s a scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker, our hero and Jedi-in-training is instructed by his master, Yoda, to go into a spooky cave for some reason. Luke reasonably asks, “What’s in the cave?” and Yoda sagely replies, “Only what you take with you.” Luke brings in a lot of rage, fear, and doubt, and ends up having a pretty miserable time of it. The idea is that if he had gone in without all of his baggage, he may have seen something a lot better than his own decapitated head in a Darth Vader outfit. Maybe even a rousing performance by the Max Rebo Band.
The 48 Hour Film Project is like that cave: The less you bring with you when entering it, the better your experience will be.
Allow me to elaborate.
Remember when I said our genre was romance? Here is the full list of required elements we had that year:
Genre: Romance
Character: Betty or Bobby Bulmer, Farmer or Gardener
Prop: A lamp
Line of Dialogue: (S)he told me it’s a secret.
Our difficulty was that we had gotten an excellent open office space that was filled with blue and red chairs, and we had a vision of using tents indoors going into the weekend. We worked so hard to get our own set of self-imposed restrictions into the film that we lost sight of the prompt.
The first draft of the script didn’t even include the prop or the line of dialogue, because I was so busy trying to fit in our other fun items. We never come up with story ideas before the weekend, but we found ourselves backed into a corner when we couldn’t let go of the extra elements we brought with us. The film as a competition piece suffered because of it. While the finished project has elements of a romance, that certainly wasn’t the primary genre and as such we failed the assignment.
We learned back with Level Up that it’s possible to not achieve the goals of a 48 but still create a film we love. This film however, finally drove home the idea that we had to put the assignment first. When we make films for challenges now we go in as blank slates and let the ideas derive directly from the assignment. You’ll usually see the assigned character as our lead, and the prop and line as integral parts of the story. It’s a really fun way to make a film and it guarantees that we are working on something we never would have dreamt of Thursday night!
In essence, we will no longer fight Vader in the cave.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that we’re unhappy with how this film turned out. Thanks to a smooth shoot, and the dedication of our crew (Ben Efron our valiant Director of Photography actually slept in one of the tents Friday night), we turned in the film on time! And that’s really the number one rule of a 48 hour shoot: Finish. That was even after the hour we spent getting Matt to say his character’s name correctly.
We’re proud of the work that went into All’s Chair in Love and War, both from Andrew, Eric, and me, and from our awesome collaborators. While we weren’t right on the ball with the required elements, we did have the smoothest shoot in a 48 that we’ve yet had in Minneapolis. This was definitely helped by Andrew and I co-directing the film. Sharing the directorial load allowed us to solve problems faster, and not feel like we were overwhelmed. It was a great directing experience, and one we will be repeating with our 2015 entry!
I won’t, however, say which one of us was the master and which the padawan learner...