The Philadelphia 48 Hour Film Project: Now featuring 100% more Keith

The 48 Hour Film Project is a competition where filmmakers are given a genre, a line of dialogue, a prop, a character, and two days to make a film. This year 48 teams participated in the Philadelphia competition and I was lucky enough to be a part of team Psynema. Every team was given the variables of Ira or Irene Livingston the dishwasher, a wrench, and the line "You better double check". Not every team got the same genre but they didn't have as many genres as teams so a lot of groups had the same one. We got Holiday Film. You find out all of this at 7:00 on Friday night and the completed film is due at 7:30 on Sunday night. That gives you one night to write the script, one full day to film and most of a day to do editing/post-production. Since I was just an actor, I only had to work Saturday but most of the team spent the night in the office we filmed in to more or less constantly work on the movie. The final films were screened on Tuesday and Wednesday. Both nights had two shows of about twelve movies each. Our team ended up winning Best Direction (essentially second place) and the Audience Favorite.

Now, to the review. I was only able to make one of the screenings but I was pretty impressed with what I saw. Obviously, our film was my favorite because there's really nothing quite like seeing yourself on a big screen in a venue that seats a few hundred people (even if it's only half full). One of the movies that really impressed me was The Take Out. It's really well done, they made good use of the elements and it's got a nice little twist at the end. Another great one was The World's Dullest Underwater Explorer made entirely by one guy who's gotten to be a regular on the 48 Hour Film circuit. It's a charming musical about an underwater explorer who can't swim. Tip Top Cop might have been the worst movie I saw but it might also be my favorite non-Keith film. It's just so charmingly awful!

The 48 Hour Film Project has a website where they post films that are part of the competition but it doesn't look like they've put up any of the ones I saw yet. When they do, I'll try and put links to the ones I talked about in the above text. But for now, you can check out some of the older ones here.

SEE MY MOVIE!

I know that one isn't actually one hundred percent more than zero but I like the way it sounds.