we won!!! sorta!

i knew it! i knew we were gonna win! our very first short film, “watchmaker,” has advanced to the finals in the dallas video association’s 24-hour video race competition!!!

last saturday, doc, lori and i participated in the competition. at midnight friday night we were given our requirements: a theme (“first class”), a prop (saturday’s issue of the dallas morning news’ crappy commuter rag “quick,” and hey guess what, they were also a SPONSOR, how about that bullshit!), a location (mailbox), and a line of dialogue (“i thought that was fixed a long time ago”). at that point, we had 24 hours to write, storyboard, script, cast actors, shoot, produce, edit, and finalize our film. we had to turn it in by midnight saturday night.

our film ended up being a very cool, esoteric artsy piece. the basic plot, if you can call it that, is that there is something broken with reality, and super-sensitive people on our plane of existence are noticing it. the reason that reality is broken is because the “watchmaker” — our term (that we’re not quite happy with) for a creator didn’t receive his invoice from first class existential services for scheduled maintenence on reality. he didn’t pay the bill, so reality was breaking down. once it was paid, repairs were made to the universe, and everything went back to normal.

so we stayed up for more than 40 hours straight working on this project. we came back to our house, made some coffee, got some red bull (nasty, and never again) and potato chips, and went to work. leslie came by about 1:30 a.m. to hang out and help us. there was an awesome thunderstorm going on. we got our idea worked out, and leslie drew the storyboards for us, and we figured out what dialogue we needed. doc set up his microphone and we all read our lines, and he recorded them. we got this finished by about 5:00 and decided to get a tiny bit of sleep before starting shooting. i laid down in bed and my whole body was just vibrating, maybe from the combination of nervousness, excitement, coffee, red bull, and chocolate covered espresso beans. anyway, i laid there until 6:30 when the alarm went off, and got maybe 20 minutes of sleep the whole time. i think doc got maybe 1-1/2 hours.

we met at leslie’s house at 7 a.m. from there we caught a dart train northbound at mockingbird station, and rode all the way to the end of the line and back, filming leslie’s role as “disgruntled commuter.” lori nearly got assaulted by a crazy woman on the train, and then another woman turned to me as she was getting off at her stop and said “you know, you should try doing this when it’s not rush hour.” i said “i apologize if we inconvenienced you [we didn’t, there were plenty of seats], but seeing as how it’s saturday at 7 a.m., we thought there’d be fewer people on the train.” and she gave me this fuck-you look and said “you know, some people WORK on saturdays” and then stepped off the train. so we thought about calling our production company “some people work on saturdays productions”.

after the dart train scene was done, we drove out to east dallas and filmed a scene that we didn’t end up using underneath a rusty abandoned train trestle. then we went to the railroad museum, paid our $5 admissions (i was hoping they’d let us in free to film for 10 minutes, but no such luck), and filmed doc’s repairman scene using some rusty gears and bolts on the side of a locomotive.

this whole time, i felt like i was on the verge of throwing up. it got dicey from time to time. it was probably a combination of lack of sleep, caffeine, and actually having some sort of mild stomach illness (which i think i have had since last wednesday). anyway, all day saturday i felt like i had an awful hangover.

back at our house, we set up our watchmaker scene using a felt-covered table and a lot of doc’s cool old estate sale finds, such as an old microscope, a 1920s era smith-corona typewriter, tiny paper dolls, tiny scissors, a crank-style counter, old books, my old brass mailbox from college, and some other really neat stuff. we filmed all of our watchmaker scenes and were done with that around 3 p.m.

lori went back to her house to capture the video, while doc and i worked on the music and the titling, respectively. we got the files to lori as quickly as we could so she could add them in to the video. she did all the editing work. we came over to her place about 8, and we did some last minute editing tweaks, rendered the video, copied it to DV tape, and raced it down to fair park to turn it in with 30 minutes to spare.

we were only the 24th team to turn our video in, so there must have been a rush at the last minute because 82 teams ended up finishing on time.

“watchmaker” was shown onscreen at the angelika tonight, and we are now advancing to the finals!! our film will be screened again on thursday night, and then we’ll find out if we win. i’m nearly certain we won’t come in first (a team called “dropped on your head” did a really fabulous job with theirs; i think they’ll win), but i’m not ruling out 2nd place as a possibility.

i still can’t believe we got to the finals on our very first film!! amazing.

please come out to the angelika on thursday! tickets are only $3 and you can stay for as many of the films as you like. our film will be shown at 8:30 sharp.