http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQDF-MFk6AE

Here’s that short film project I mentioned before. It was another 48-hour film project and this time, the ingredients were:

• a debt collector named Dan Sagan
• a piece of chalk
• the line, “Do you have any questions?”

We brainstormed on Friday night, starting with a list of assets that our group had (motorcycle, a bunch of computers, a baby, etc.). For some reason, Shion really fixated on the idea of using the baby in the short. I was a little skeptical because, hey, I’ve worked with that baby and I’ll tell you … working with babies is hard. They don’t take direction and you can’t get them to do more than a couple takes. On the other hand, they are super cute. So Emma and Shion wrote a beat sheet (it’s like a simplified script) and we went from there in the morning.

I make a brief appearance in the short so my main role was to wrangle the baby. But Emma, Shion, and Brett worked almost non-stop from early Saturday morning to late Sunday afternoon. Things went pretty smoothly except at the end when we nearly didn’t make the deadline because we couldn’t get the movie to export from Final Cut Pro. So we made the desperate decision to just film the computer screen of our movie playing in Final Cut Pro instead. As always, it was a ton of fun and a big learning experience. Specifically:

• if you do want babies in your film, it’s important to be flexible
• Final Cut Pro has trouble exporting black frames that are color corrected
• it is theoretically possible to get from Berkeley to San Francisco in under 15 minutes

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