24 Hour Film Fest

The 24-hour fest is a film competition that encourages high school teen, in Kansas, to create a video in exactly 24 hours. It challenges us to construct a short story that couldn't pass the time frame of three minutes, film it, then edit it. Our video's theme had to center around the quote "A sucker is born every minute". The video also had to use a mailbox, and a deck of cards as a prop in some way. And the final requirement was to have a shot of a newspaper or phone screen that had the days date shown clearly.

The competition began at exactly three o'clock after school ended on a Friday. We then had to have our finished product in at a high school about half an hour away by three o' clock the next afternoon. My group consisted of two juniors and I. We decided to cold turkey it, one might say, and not do any pre-production. We weren't really supposed to have a lot done because we didn't have the prompt. However, what we could have had is a group of actors knowing that we would be filming and that they might write them into our script knowing wether or not anyone could do a role. But, we didn't do that. Instead, after trying and trying to come up with a story we settled on one. Then we had to find actors and locations. At about 5 o'clock that night is when we began looking for people. That weekend the school musical was happening so the majority of the people who acted were busy that night. Then we went to the Robotics Room knowing that a lot of boys were there and hoped that one of them would help us. When that didn't pan out we look through our contacts. We called about every boy we knew that night. We finally had one that said yes, so we moved on to find locations. We needed a coffee shop and two bedrooms. A friend's of mine mother owns a coffee shop, and I had been saving that information for a time I need to film somewhere. Asked her if we could use it and she said yes, but it had to be after the play that night because she was watching it. We wrote our story and packed our gear and set of to my house.

We got there at around 10 o'clock to set-up for our first filming scene. However, when it turned 10:30 the man that was supposed to act for us backed out. We had to convince someone else to come act for us again except this time it was past a lot of people's curfews. We found another person to act, but we needed to go to our next location, which was the coffee shop because we told her we would get there around 11:30. The problem then was that we didn't have another boy to play the other boy in the coffee shop. One of our team members's called her brother to help us. He reluctantly agreed. (I think he was presented by their father.) He got there and we were set to go. We filmed there in till 1 o'clock in the morning. After we finished packing back up we drove back over to my house. We finished filming there around 2: 30 in the morning. The two juniors went out to get on the final shot of the night, while I got ready for bed. The next day we got to school at 6 o' clock in the morning. I had never stayed up that late and I didn't have food throughout it all. This created into having a migraine from the time I got to school all the way in till about 7 o'clock when I finally eat something. That morning we finished filming by creating the relationship intro. We did our editing in shifts. Awhile before noon I took over and continued editing. The two juniors went home to change and eat, while I continued working. However, when one of them came back they were crying. We needed to take care of her. She wasn't in the right mind to work through our edit and, we wanted her to take care of herself. This prohibited me from going home myself in till around 2 o'clock. I showered and dress to make it back to school with enough time to make it to the place we were supposed to turn our video in on time.

 During this realized how crucial phones were. My group was always on them. Talking to others, trying to get everything organized in enough time. I learned time management skills, and how to work successfully without a fight during filming and with a time crunch. I didn't win anything, but that was alright. I'm proud of what my group did. I would do it over with them again.