I ended up being a mixture of runner, lighting assistant and 'Jez Wrangler', trying to make sure our director was kept on track of his work and not side tracked by too many questions and distractions where possible. As the day wore on I became more of a general directors assistant on top of the runner duties, going between "departments" that had seemingly set up, and finally also helping as a secondary camera assistant with some of the more tricky shots, including a dolly zoom that is at the end of the film.

The idea of the film was to do with a guy who comes to a hotel with the latest super intelligent A.I., which then goes haywire and attempts to trap him, and a local escort girl it ordered, in the hotel room. As far as action went, it wasn't the most action packed, but we also got good humor in there and the finished film got some great laughs. Sadly the film suffered from some audio level issues when first displayed, with our A.I. character voice over not appearing in some places.

Genre - Revenge

For the 2009 48 Hours I was sadly stuck at work on both Friday evening and most of Saturday until mid-evening. This means I was only able to arrive for my usual teams evening shoot. Compared to last years crazy production number, this year the much smaller team was shooting with a handicam in a office supply closet and mostly with a single actor.

Being around to help I setup and moved around the light they were using for some of the shots and then got asked to sit at a desk and be a bit part actor who just looks confused at what has just happened at the end of the film. I was working in the Sunday evening as well but came in during the day to help on the edit, doing some audio edit work to assist the main editor before he would work on exporting it out.

It was a simple affair and the story probably wasn't as well explained in the film as people had originally intended, the revenge thing - a required element - wasn't so obvious. Additionally to this, the export was going to be to a DVD this year - which caused problems, and we didn't get the film in on time. I still also have no idea where the title came from, but I did enjoy setting up and helping make the title work as part of the character's action in the film.

Genre - Musical

2010's 48 Hour entry was to be an amazing event. When we first got our genre, musical, it sent us briefly into a spiral as some of the crew had ended up with Musical back in 2005 and had greatly struggled with it.

But somehow a comment about dance musicals and then Michael Jackson's Thriller music video started a concept for a zombies vs. vampires thing, and then that spun off into a lake side camp thing ala Friday the 13th, and eventually into a fleshed out movie - with lots of fake blood.

The issue was the writer/director, Jez, also had to help co-write the music, leading to an epic overnight session of ideas and then most of the day making music so it could be played on set. Then go and direct the shooting ofthe thing the following night. I could just tell how tired he was getting the longer the shoot went, and I hate to think what it was like to be him by the time he finished shooting on Sunday morning.

hooting didn't begin until close to sunset to get a lakeside shot (actually shot on the beach at Oriental Parade in Wellington's city, but framed to not give any clue of this) and then moved to a series of night shots in the Mt. Vic forest and nearby crew member flats. Shooting didn't finish until half way through the night, but it was also the most unified I'd seen both cast and crew ever be on a 48 hour film shoot.

This year I took on a full production assistant role, being the right hand for both the director during the shoot and the producer during both shooting and production. This often meant co-ordinating various areas and getting missing materials or much needed equipment. I also did the occassional runner task while doing this just to sort out stuff like food to eat and other such runner events. Every once and a while too I would take some production stills on one of the other crew's camera.

The film was well recieved in it's screening, and we recieved great feedback. The fun on set obviously spilt into the film itself. From that we went on to find out we'd managed to make it into the Wellington Regional final. We managed to win Best Makeup in the award catagories, but sadly didn't progress any further than this.

Genre - Road Movie

Sweetcorn was a tough but fun film for the 2011 48 Hour competition. After last years success in getting into the finals, we had hoped we could pull off another decent effort. We ended up with Road Movie, for most of us this was once again. I had had it with my team in 2006, and one of our Producers - Carly, had also had it the same year I had also in Dunedin. The pitching and ideas are a blur to me, but somehow we ended up with bicycles and a whole hick inbred family thing, espcially with our frequent actor, John, dressed up as a lady in a well undersold gag that got good laughs.

The shoot needed something looking rural, but also couldn't be too far from Wellington City to make it an easy location for lots of our production to get to. But it also couldn't be too busy either. After scouring around locations at night, we ended up by the Maupuia hills near the local Prison, just above Miramar. Here was a stretch of road that looked rural enough, but allowed us to be close to a city looking area but not too busy either.

The shoot day was fun. We started as early as we could for us, which considering getting everything sorted, was just after lunch. Being the first day shoot we'd done in years we took a while to get adjusted at first too. Of course with this we ended up battling daylight to get the shoot done in time, and ended up pushing out the last scenes into the fading light.

Considering we shot in a chronological order, this actually wasn't too bad for the film, but meant that getting consistant or good looking light was always going to be a concern, especially in the edit. We ended up shooting a second camera from a DSLR another crew member had to avoid losing all the light, however without realising he was shooting in 24p (opposed to my 25p) meaning we had to convert his material which softened the images a little sadly. As usual the art department and costumes worked a wonder however and we solidly sold the hick concept, and generally the film was feeling good.

The idea for the film was fine, but I don't think we sold the jokes as well as it originally looked on paper... even naming the film was a difficult situation with us taking half a day on the Sunday just pitching things before settling on a reference to a joke in the film. On a technical side, aside from the softness of some shots, everything else seemingly went smooth, and we got the film in with plenty of time to spare. We did okay in reviews, but didn't get a chance in on a second year in the Wellington finals.

Genre - Underdog

48 Hour weekend has returned, this year we're taking on the idea of doing two films that are linked as one. This also means two sets of teams, our mostly usual Team Cupcake Go guys, and some of our Director's friends in Squidwig Productions (this year as Team Cupcake Squidwig) The idea ended up not being trouble free however,
with our usual director Jez, having to drop out of duties due to conflicts with the direction the films headed into. This was even after the original pitching session for these got more heated than other years, but came down to a lot of no to this, no to that from certain people until the two genres we got (underdog story and romantic comedy) almost seemingly vanished for a while.

As part of the two story team, I went off to be Camera Operator on our teams side of the story - Big Ben's Big Bean Challenge - which had us shooting at the Mt. Vic Bowling Club, standing in for the inside of a standard pub. Story mostly consisted of our main character trying to get his courage and lady back by beating the local bean eating legend at an eat off. The beginning and end of the films tie into the other story which follows his lady on a roller skating date.

While starting much later than we originally expected, the shoot went mostly smoothly. My main regret was in not checking consistancy of lighting and color, but we had very limited lighting gear and knew there wouldn't be much time for color work in edit sadly. The finished edit was quicker than I'd seen in 48 Hours before, due to us having a different editor who'd come from a News editing background. However after that was all in place, the director spent a lot of time fiddling and we were in a rush to get the export out in time based on how much time we'd seen the rendering counter show. It didn't matter in the end, as it sped up and we got the film in with time to spare.

When we got to the screening however the short was disqualified. Sadly however none of us noticed that once we added the opening and closing from other film to link our films together, the runtime on our film had gone way over the 48 Hour comp limit of 7 minutes (our run time was over 8), meaning it wasn't in the competition. We were commended however on the two film idea, something no one else apparently had done in the nine years of the comp so far.

Genre - Immobilized

For 2013's 48Hour Competition I teamed up with producer Anna Pendergrast, who I'd worked with in the few previous years, as well as Becca Barnes and Alwyn Dale who I had worked with just the previous year, to produce an "Immobilized" type film. This basically meant someone who got trapped in one place for a large chunk of the film. Pitching ideas didn't go as smoothly as previous years, and in the end the Producers/Directors decided themselves after some other ideas to basically make a monster movie mostly under a house.

I was asked to be camera operator again this year, and basically worked on the fly to create shots and movements around the placement of actors as we got to and ran through the script in our locations. Filming didn't take as long as in previous years overall, even with two very far apart locations being used to create the one area. One
was mostly for above the crawlspace, in a kitchen. The other, a larger space under anothe house, allowed us to shoot much more coverage underneath. However, through editing Sunday became a larger than expected pickup day, especially when it came to audio that was needed or missing.

The film was handed in on time with no major technical issues or problems. The finished film also rated well with the local audiences as far as the reviews on the competition website went, however we did not make it into the Wellington finals after that. Competition was exceptionally high and and the eventual Wellington winner was a stunning film however, and went on win the overall competition nationwide.

Genre - Film within a Film

"One" might have been the most extreme ends of a 48Hour production, being both somewhat the most fun but also the most difficult to make in the several years I've been involved with the competition. I originally contacted people to see who was involved in a 48Hour film for the year to find none of the previous people I'd worked with had plans, except in contacting Jez I somehow sparked an idea of him making a return. And so a week out we had scope of a 10 person team making a return to the competition. However by Thursday our 10 person team was just two, Jez and Myself. This would make creating the film possibly far more interesting. The weekend was also over Daylight Savings giving each team an actual 49 hour length this time around.

I managed however then to wrangle David Duxfield, a co-worker from Avalon, into our team as well as Kirstin Cambie, another co-worker when she was free from work. Jez would later find an actress for a needed female part, and our usual producer Anna stopped in briefly on Sunday to make sure our paperwork was done. However this also meant Jez was reliant on me acting in the film, something I've never done (and likely will never do again). I expected this wouldn't help our progress and indeed I blew through take after take after take. Additionally prancing around in skin tight white suits for part of the film as well, put me well out of a normal comfort zone as far as films for 48 Hours went.

With such limited numbers for our team we mostly had to take on dual roles, which also meant we were not looking great when we only wrapped filming at 3pm on Sunday with minmal editing done so far. The idea was also far more ambiticous than we probably should have gone for, with a reality within a relality Quantum Leap inspired concept. Indeed we missed the 7pm hand in and arrived just after 8pm with not much more than an assemembly cut of what we shot. Our 48 hour project, with the extra hour and the hour late, became a 50 Hour film.

Genre - Time Travel

I ended up signing up for the team list in Romania in case someone was looking for an extra crew member and didn't mind my lack of Romanian. Adrian from Team Noobz was the first to get in touch and so for the weekend I joined their team in Brasov. As always the discussion on how best to tackle the genre was probably one of the hardest and even when I left at 3am on the Saturday morning thinking things were finally looking to be in place, I returned to find the team still planning the film out later in the morning.

I shot the first part of the day in the alleyway and attempted to do my best in getting coverage of the scene for editing purposes. Aside from collecting some other outdoors shots, the rest of the film would be shot in one interior location and it was there we spent the next dozen or so hours working. My focus for the rest of the shoot was mostly the light and look of the interiors and left the producer to shoot based on what the directors and other production members decided to use. There was a lack of coverage shot which came across in the edit, but in general the film was a blast and worked better than we may have first thought it would.

The concept was reasonably simple in the end but came across slightly more complex on screen. A guy goes out to buy flowers for his girlfriend on their anniversary and meets a gypsy who sells him a camera. The camera ends up sending the user back into the past, but the gypsy ends up coming back to collect both his camera and the users of it. The film was in the local finals automatically as there is only 8 films in total for the local competition. From it the film won Best Actress, Best Use of Prop (a pipe), and best Editing.

Genre - Film de Femme (film with one or more strong female leads)

Much like with the Romania team, I registered my details for the London event via the offical website and was contacted by Marcus Ako about joining their team 8ft Ants for the event in November 2014.

I met the team late due to work on the launch night at the launch venue where the idea for the film was already fully formed and Marcus had begun scripting it. We proceeded to unintentionally tour around south London trying to get to our overnight accomodation/shooting location before changing to yet another and bigger filming location for the film.

My role, while not exactly my normal background, was sound recording - being done so externally to Director Michael Burhan's laptop. The idea would be for the editor to edit the footage (which had poor camera mic audio only) and replace the sound with my recordings. Sadly the editor did a basic edit which also didn't include much if any of our audio recordings combined with no grading meant our finished product wasn't as strong as we felt we had shot. Live and learn for next time.

The film did make it and and screened with no issues, but we didn't manage any awards for the shoot. However the team on the shoot worked so well we've already got back together again and shot one other short with another on the way soon.