chicks dig unix

Some time in the week past Seamus brought to our attention the Fast Forward Film Festival and looked for people interested in giving it a go. The premise was a 3 minute film, 24 hours (actually 20) to produce it and a theme would be given to you just before the 24 hour period. I signed on, as did Karl and a few others. Other’s pledged acting skills or equipment. We called ourselves “Team Zing”

Last Wednesday Seamus, Karl and I got together for a brainstorming/writing session. We came up with an idea of some fast paced sketches and some other ideas that we considered to be quite funny and were sure we could work into the film regardless of theme.

Friday evening at 7pm we and the other teams got our “theme”, our particular theme was simply that we had to have a character of an “Assassin Priest” and he had to deliver a particular line. We were confident we could work that in without a problem.
So, we headed off to Karl’s, via Dunnes to pick up supplies to get us through the night. We had plenty of ideas and some how decided on a post-death, pre-judgement waiting room scenario with three characters with 3 different, and hopefully funny, tales to tell about their respective demises. We stayed up until near 5:30am on Friday night/Saturday morning getting many of the important scenes planned, filmed and edited.
Went home and probably got to sleep around 6am. Set my alarm for 9:30am.

Saturday morning woke up at 9:30am with my alarm and sat up in bed for about 30 minutes going “WTF?”, got out of bed at 10am, showered and was back at Karl’s for 10:30am. Some more editing and them filming. We had set our selves the ambitious task of telling 3 stories in 3 minutes and the two stories left to be filmed were put together quickly and are probably not properly told as a consequence. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to film either but with the time constraints I think we did as well as we could have.
Our deadline was 5pm and it was quickly approaching. Once we had a film we were happy with and hand a suitable running time it was time to render it to a suitable digital file but it would’ve taken too long and we would surely have missed the deadline. As copying the file to a VHS could be done in real-time we did that. Thanks to Niamh who gave me a lift up town. Got as far as near the end of Geroge’s St. and the lights hadn’t changed in a while so I got out of the car, VHS cassette in hand, and ran to Filmbase on Curved St. where the Fast Forward guys were waiting. I handed in the tape at 4:58pm.

The film showing was at 8pm that night so there wasn’t time for any kind of proper sleep so we ate (yet more) pizza and attempted to relax. Walked over to the “Monster Truck Gallery” where the premiere was to be and found it tiny and full of people. We had to stand outside and couldn’t really see any of the other films. Our film was shown last and as far as I could hear got laughs in the right places. We didn’t win or anything but we did produce a tangible product for our sleep deprivation and while not perfect I don’t think it was a bad effort.

Unfortunately you’ll have to wait until this evening or tomorrow to view it online. I’ll let you know, until then - watch this space.

[ Update ]
It took several hours last night but I managed to compress 7gigs of raw video (running time: 3:03) into 10MB of H264 MPEG4. How awesome is that? I <3 H264. Here’s the movie you’ve all been waiting for, the cross over hit of the summer it’s:

I’ve posted the film on YouTube too (video removed) but YouTube doesn’t respect aspect ratios so we look a bit squished up.