Sunday, May 18, 2008

2 Days and a Chicken Suit

48 Hour Filmmaker: Salt Lake City 2008

Kyle Mallory asked me to be the screenwriter on his team for the 48 Hour Film Project. 44 teams signed up for the project this year. Every team was given the same character, a prop, and a specific line of dialogue that had to be included in the film. Then each team was assigned a different genre of film (we drew "Road Movie"), and we had 48 hours to write, film, edit, score, and hand the film back in.

At the opening meeting we sat around waiting for them to announce the character, prop, and dialogue line, and as we talked to the other teams, lots of people were impressed by the people Kyle had recruited for his team, and the fact that we were going to shoot the film on Kyle's new RED One camera.

Then the guy stepped up to the microphone to announce things and everyone settled down quickly and got their pencils ready.

"Your character is . . . a guy in a chicken suit."

The whole crowd groaned and someone said, "Are you joking?"

Luckily, he was joking. The character we had to include was really an instructor named Jacob or Janice Simon. The prop was a jewel. The line of dialogue was "Just wait and see."

We all raced back to meet with the rest of our team and come up with the story as quickly as we could. That night was also game 6 of the Jazz vs. Rockets NBA playoffs, so finding a parking spot downtown was like fighting over the last chicken dance elmo on christmas eve, and I was the only person on the team who wasn't smart enough to have picked up a parking pass for the hotel.

Since it took me so long to kill someone and take their parking spot, when I got into the room the group had already been discussing story ideas for twenty minutes. And the worst part was that Kyle and Linda hadn't realized the chicken suit was a joke, so for twenty minutes they had been coming up with chicken stories.

I quickly explained. Come on, don't you remember him saying the real character was Jacob Simon? They talked about calling to get clarification, because if we were really supposed to use a chicken suit and we didn't have it we might get disqualified from the competition. I decided we weren't going to get in trouble for having a chicken suit in the film, so why fight it, and we put the chicken suit into the movie. Could be fun.

We were the only team with a chicken suit.

The other problem was the number of people in the room. There were almost twenty people there. That is way too many for talking about story ideas. When we're on a tight deadline, we should have had two or three people get together, hash out an idea in 20 to 30 minutes, and then I kick everybody out of the room and lock myself away to write a draft.

Instead, we talked about story ideas for hours without ever really agreeing on anything, and I sat there thinking that if we have 20 people in the room, no matter what we come up with I'm going to end up pissing off 19 of them when I finally put this to paper.

Luckily, everyone was very easy to get along with. There was only one person who was really adamant about any one story, and she ended up happy because that was the story we decided to go with.

When I sat down to write, since there were still 20 people joking in the next room, I put in headphones and turned up some brain-numbing trance music (Office Rocker from DJ Steve Boyett's podcast Groovelectric ) to pound in my head while I pounded the keyboard. I like this setup. The music is numbing enough that I don't get distracted by it, but I feel it pushing my pace and keeping my fingers moving.

The script is based on a real experience that happened to Arthur, the lead actor. The main differences are that in real life Arthur was alone in the car, and the fellow in the truck was not actually wearing a chicken suit.

Here is the team that worked on the film

  • Scott Halford was editing on set while we shot. Scott is a fantastic editor. He has great instincts for editing meaningfully and improving the storytelling and pace, and he's fast.
  • Mike Terrell was in charge of production design. I have been a big fan of Mike's work ever since his animated short Devon's Journal was in our film festival two years ago. Click the link and watch his film. It's dark and disturbing and so . . . wrong. It's one of my favorite animated shorts ever.
  • Richard Terrell (Mike's brother) composed our music and did on-location sound. Richard helped out with some database work for our film festival this year, so I had heard some of his music and I knew how good he was.
  • Chris Forbes was the Director of Photography again. Chris shot the two films I made with Kyle last year.
  • Rory King was a new face. I haven't worked with him before. He's a relatively new resident around here, just transplanted from L.A. He seemed like a great guy who knows what he is doing.
  • Linda Eyring was Kyle's producer again, and she took care of everything and everyone. She is meticulously organized and one of the nicest people I know.
  • Arthur Lazalde was the main male actor in the film. Arthur actually played a lead in the film that gave birth to the film festival I help run, so it was interesting that after going on to get a masters in fine arts from NYU and working as a player at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival he happened to be back in town for a while and available to be in another film.
  • Wendy Macy was the lead female actress, and the one who took hold of this story in the initial meeting and became it's main cheerleader. She really had the vision for the dynamic between the two main characters.
  • Mike Hardy said he had always wanted to play a creature in a film. I don't think he really imagined that the creature would be a guy in a chicken suit, but I'm glad we could make that dream come true. And he definitely got the best line in the movie.

There were some others, too, like Mary who I think was assistant camera, and a P.A. who I think was named Tom, but I didn't work with them so I don't know them well.

I'll write another post about the actual production process.