A star is born then instantly collapses
This year, the 48 hour film festival was different. Different in a number of ways, mostly good, and in one way very bad. Let’s start with the good ways.
The Times-Union team featured an all TU staff this year, no professional script writers, actors or trophy-chasing producers. We were a bunch of hearty, motivated, sleep-depraved souls with more talent in a twist of our pubic hair than in the entire self-aggrandizing bodies of years past. That is to say, we rocked.
Upon learning our genre (sci-fi) at 6:30 p.m. Friday, we immediately began brain storming the story line. Short story shorter, we went with Luis’ idea: A woman **plot removed until the screening, you nosy bastards** description. The four script writers, Luis, Timothy, Topher and myself were locked in room dripping with caffeine and inspiration and by 11 a.m. we had the storyboard complete and began on the actual script writing. Lots of deep-dicking jokes later, it was 5 a.m. and by God, we had a script. A script! Normally I’d try to explain the significance of this in a few sentences, but unless you’ve chased after the greased up pig that is the 48 hour film festival, it won’t matter.
Oh, I should mention – this is where the movie began to go awry. We had two main objectives this year: Be an all-TU team and include as many of those people on screen as possible. The lede actress was an obvious choice; the talented and tow-headed Julie. While reviewing our actor list, Luis Tim, Topher and I realized that we had little choice but to cast one person in the lede actor role – your sweet Nuinca. Since I’ve used every stupid literary trick in this blog post except for analogies, let’s us this one. Casting me as the leading man was like having the Joker let you decide which family member of yours should die first – your wife or your son. No good choices and our situation was worse because it’ll never follow with an awesome sequel featured the Penguin (please, Chris Nolan, if you’re reading this.)
Anyway, the scripters and I broke up around 5, ran home to get our costumes and met back at the paper around 6:30 a.m. I can only speak for Luis and I, but at this point we had both been up right at 24 hours. The movie hadn’t started shooting yet.
While I, the lead and least talented actor, was memorizing my lines that morning, shooting began around 8:30. By 9 I was in my suit and pacing in the paper warehouse that was my character’s office. Due to a potent combination of nerves and heat stroke, I can’t guarantee what happened between then and 2 p.m. Saturday morning, but I’m sure other people would be willing to fill you in. I remember sweat, bottles of sticky wine and talking about my borrowed Megatron cufflinks.
After a short break we were back in action, filming the majority of the scenes. I had thankfully found an easy way to escape to air-conditioning between takes. No heat stroke FTW!