Son of a Ditch Goes Up the Creek; 48-Hour Film part 4 - David Loftus

[Here again is a link to "A Hole Story," the short film I'm describing in this account:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4 ]

The mound of dirt you see at 1:52 was heaped up in the Valerios' “front yard” (actually, a plot of ground between a barn and their driveway which is closer to the passing road than their home) by Jim and his backhoe. We hollowed out a “hole” in the middle of it to shoot into and out of as the mouth of the hero’s hole to China. The girls look down into it a little later, and both I and the Chinese girl shout and drop things into it -- supposedly at opposite ends of the earth -- near the end of the story.

The naturally-lit scene of the mound of dirt at 1:52 was probably shot on Sunday morning, as was the next scene at 1:57 -- where I’m in a fairly dark area supposedly down the hole. But that was shot in a creek bed below a road and culvert several miles away from the mound of dirt and deep in the woods. (You can see the bottom edge of the culvert near the upper left corner of the screen when I’m talking to the girls at 2:07-2:25.)

Each side of the conversation with the girls was shot out of sequence: me at the creek earlier in the morning Sunday, them at the dirt mound much later that morning. Similarly, the little girls weren’t anywhere near the culvert to drop the bucket on the rope to me at 2:45; someone else did that.

Also, the sequence between 3:13 and 3:20, when I first hear and discover the buried miner, was shot Sunday morning at 8 or 9, many hours after we did the miner’s end of the conversation, which was done between 10 p.m. and midnight the night before. That had been in the ditch that Clay had cleared out, somewhere in the woods between the culvert/creek and the Valerio homestead with the dirt mound “at the surface” of the hole. (The distance from culvert site to the mound was, I would estimate, something like two miles.)

Tony Green, the actor who plays the miner, lay on his back in the bed of the ditch, and we buried him in dirt all around and over him from his waist to the crown of his head while keeping only his face uncovered. The camera was hung directly above him, “upside-down” from his perspective, and I crawled into the shot from the other direction for a few scenes where the back of my hatted head appears with Tony.

The interspersed scenes when I’m facing the camera right-side up were shot the next morning, in the culvert creek, with no Tony around and someone else reading his lines for me to respond to. (I notice the background in those shots starts pretty dark and gets lighter as the scene plays out, because the morning sun was coming up and increasingly piercing through the tree cover.) Obviously, at least two different half-eaten apples were used, too.

One of the challenges of doing the scenes with the miner was getting enough lighting out there in the deep woods in the middle of the night. We had a few artificial standing lights, but we also pointed the headlights from two different cars, I believe, down on the scene from the road above. It was a cold night in the ditch, and the dirt was cold too, so Tony asked for blankets on his legs, and by the time we finished and he could go home, shower, and get to bed, he was shivering. When he wrapped, we all applauded his brave work.

(That's Tony emerging from the dirt at the completion of his scene. In the background you'll note a silver "bounce" disk to reflect some of the artificial lighting, probably from the car lights, down onto him when he was lying on the floor of the ditch and covered in dirt.

I continued shooting in the ditch for another hour, to get the scenes of “Brian” deep in the earth and getting closer to China: first lying on my side and pretending to dig downward, toward my feet while the camera shot me mostly from above; next, a side shot of me digging the pick into a wall of the ditch; and finally, another shot of me on my side in the ditch, appearing to pick at the wall above me while the camera moves in and gets a shot of me pulling out the all-important prop of the picture frame for continued inspiration. I remember Dan asked me to wipe my brow in almost every one of these shots, but I thought that was a little too repetitive, so I pretended to be out of breath from the labor and trying to catch my breath.

At 7:03 the film moves to a dramatic new location, both within the story and during the shoot. Obviously, the camera shoots the field in “China” upside down as a piece of visual wit. This field was a different location from everything else: the dirt mound next to the driveway was a little west of the Valerios’ home; the forest, ditch, culvert (even the hill and pond where Juno is seen dumping the dirt) were all pretty much north and east, I think; while this pasture land was several hundred yards down a hill to the south.

We moved back to the original dirt mound for the shot of the shovel and me “breaking through” (which I think you can tell from the treeline in the background), and to get that, I had to scrunch myself down into the hole in the mound, let myself be covered with dirt and grass -- partly held in place by cardboard flaps -- and deal with spiders and potato bugs that dropped out of that mess on me while the camera was being set up for the shot.

Then we hustled back down to the alternate pasture for the rest of those scenes (including Maggie the Horse and Juno at the very end), for which Jim Valerio had dumped another, smaller mound of dirt with his backhoe. As the Chinese girl, Sabra Choi also clambered out of the original dirt mound, shot from a different angle. That mound is also the mouth down which both of us yell, supposedly at opposite ends of the earth.

I’m proud of my leap into the earth-long hole from the China end, which was really just a jump behind a small mound of dirt in the “Chinese” field. I had to crouch down instantly behind it to make it look like I was plummeting all the way to the other end of the planet, and I think it works.

I believe I had finished shooting all my scenes by the time Sabra arrived to shoot hers close to noon on Sunday. Dan wasn’t sure Sabra was going to make it; all through the weekend, he was hunting for alternative girls, possibly making them Australian (which might have made more sense, geographically; through the center of the earth, and all), but a Chinese girl made more emotional sense, so Dan was pleased that Sabra could make the shoot.

Part five: Trying to Go Viral

[It was announced last night by the Portland chapter for the 48-Hour Film Project that our entry for this year, “Hit Count,” had made the finals and will screen with the other best films of the 2010 Portland competition on Thursday -- hardly a surprise, since our film won the audience favorite award in its group in the first round of screenings two weeks ago. There are one or two more things to relate about “A Hole Story” and then I’ll move on to my account of this year’s shoot.]


Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: Daniel Elkayam and Overcast Productions' approach


Read part three: Digging a hole to China

Find the Cost of Goodies Buried in the Ground - David Loftus

When you get your latest electronic toy -- iPhone, iPad, Xbox, Wii, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Playstation, Game Boy, Nintendo -- do you ever think about how many people died to put it in your hands?

Probably not. Human sacrifices (unwilling ones) in the course of bringing conveniences, amusements, and luxuries into our homes and hands are not the most natural thing that comes to mind when we enjoy a brand-new purchase. They’re not a particularly pleasant thought, either.

Yet many of our possessions today have come to exist through a process that included the waste of precious human lives. When slaves worked outside the door (and sometimes inside a well-to-do household), and slave-trading ships carrying more cheap labor from Africa lost and dumped up to a third of their human cargo on the voyage across the Atlantic, this was a little more obvious.

Today, the truth becomes evident only once in a while … such as with the recent rash of suicides among workers in the Chinese factories that make iPhones.

This year, at least 12 assembly-line workers, many of them young women, have committed suicide at Foxconn plants in China, and at least two more have attempted to kill themselves. The most recent “successful” attempt was on August 4 when a 22-year-old woman leaped to her death from her factory dormitory.

Foxconn is the registered trade name of Hon Hai Precision, the primary manufacturer of iPhones and iPads for Apple. A Hon Hai company spokesman said Friday that it had been “blinded” by its success, and didn’t cater to the emotional needs of its young workforce, of which 75 percent is between the ages of 18 and 24.

The company has responded by doing everything from installing nets around its buildings to catch falling workers, and holding morale-boosting pep rallies, to announcing a 20-percent pay raise in May. An entry-level worker at the company’s Longhua plant was reported to make 900 yuan, or $131.80, a month before overtime or bonuses.

Suicidal pressure and deadly working conditions are nothing new, even in the U.S. The old phrase “a Chinaman’s chance” (meaning slim to none) dates from just after the Civil War when Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad in California, Nevada, and Utah were lifted up or down rock cliff faces in baskets to set dynamite charges for construction of the transcontinental railroad. Many of them fell or were accidentally blown up.

When my wife and I investigated her ancestors in southwestern Pennsylvania, I noticed that local newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th century were full of stories of fatal coal mining accidents. These workers were digging coal to fuel trains, steamboats, and factories, and to heat homes. Dead white miners were usually identified by name, but only numbers were provided for foreign immigrant fatalities.

There’s been plenty of talk about American jobs outsourced to overseas locations. We’ve also exported some of the employee fatalities that are also an inherent factor in industry -- diminished in more recent decades by detested government regulation.

(On the flip side, one might also note that suicide rates go up among unemployed Americans; an August 17 news report in the Washington Independent noted skyrocketing suicide rates in high-unemployment areas such as Elkhart County, Indiana and Macomb County, Michigan.)

I’m not saying any American consumer desires or expects such deaths. There isn’t really anything the buyer at this end of the process can do about them. But it behooves us to be aware of how interconnected we really are in the developing global economy, and that no “free market, individual rights” argument is going to overcome the fact that what people do (or buy) on one side of the planet can affect, and be affected by, events on the other.

That’s a fact of life today. And death.

Digging a Hole to China part 3 - David Loftus

Dan had concocted a sweet tale about a lab researcher who has a rotten day at work and decides to live out his boyhood fantasy of digging a hole to China. The big question was: How to depict the physical act of shoveling down through the Earth on screen?

The Valerio family had volunteered the use of their farm for any location work it might come in handy for, and it turned out that there was a culvert and stream in the wooded portion, as well as a fairly long, dry creek bed filled with dead branches and leaves nearby. While we shot the early indoor sequences, Clay Reiling spent much of Saturday morning in the woods, clearing out the creek bed, and Jim Valerio used his backhoe to heap up a pile of dirt that would appear in the movie as the mouth to our hero’s epic dig.

We were able to shoot “A Hole Story” in mostly sequential order. The opening sequence in which Kenneth Campbell provides a urine sample was shot Saturday morning in a men’s room at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

“Brian” spilling the sample on himself; at his desk, looking at the map of China and the pictures of a pagoda, the Great Wall, and a dragon; and packing a lunchbox and picking up the shovel, pick, and lamp . . . were all shot Saturday morning and early afternoon in a loft space above West 14th and Burnside, just across the street from the Crystal Ballroom (for you McMenamins brewery and concert fans), where producer and assistant film editor Luke Norby had his workspace.

The only scene in the first 1:18 that was not shot on Saturday was the bus stop (actually, a Portland Streetcar station next to Powell’s Books), which I’ll explain later.

We got to the Valerios’ farm in the late afternoon. I seem to recall futzing around, looking at locations and carrying equipment down a long dirt road into the woods to get to the small field where the next shots take place. The sequence from 1:19 to 1:29 is one continuous shot in which I walk six steps, set down the lunchbox and pick, take three more steps, and take a moment to survey the area. The camera moves with me for the first half, then does an almost full 360-degree circle around me in the sunshine.

The sun was setting, and though Dan probably knew he could shoot many of the “underground” scenes at night, I suspect we were still running a bit behind on the shooting schedule at this point. Since I know we shot it at sunset, it’s impossible for me to see the scene as taking place at sunrise, but I hope the innocent viewer takes it that way.

That near-360 sequence was the work of Dan’s cameraman (aka DP – director of photography), Brian McKee, wearing a Steadicam rig. Brian’s the other primary center of the creative team on this project. Fun-loving yet businesslike, mostly taking Dan’s orders yet sometimes making suggestions with regard to camera work and even what the actors might try doing, Brian is just as responsible for how these films look as Dan is.

After a short break for the title, “A Hole Story” returns to a second Steadicam sequence by Brian, which parallels the two Valerio girls as they run through a field (toward the place where the camera circled me and I started digging, but not to the hole you will see me inside of shortly). At the end of that, at 1:52, the film starts to break up in terms of the order in which things were filmed over the 48-hour weekend shoot, versus their sequence within the story.

Part four: Down in the Dirt

*  *   *   *

Read part one: The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: how Daniel Elkayam's Overcast Productions team tackles the 48-Hour Film Project

*  *   *   *

There are two places on the Web to see the 11-minute director’s cut of "A Hole Story." The best version is on Daniel Elkayam's Web site:

http://www.danielkayam.com/

Click on “Short Films” and you’ll see “A Hole Story” on the right. If your computer doesn’t handle streaming video very well (this version gets hung up and jerky on my laptop with wireless Internet access), a second option is the simpler digital copy on YouTube, which should play more smoothly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4

The Crazy Kyron Horman Case - David Loftus

On June 11 I wrote and uploaded a commentary on “American Currents” about a local -- that is to say, Portland, Oregon -- concern that was just starting to break as a national story Soon, it would be covered on the “Today Show,” “Good Morning, America,” in People magazine, “America’s Most Wanted,” and “Dateline NBC.”

At the time of my comments, Kyron Horman’s disappearance was still just a mysterious and upsetting story; it had not yet turned into a weird, soap-opera farce with the upsetting mystery nearly smothered underneath.

All I aimed for in June was a plea to bystanders not to speculate too freely -- not to treat the story as if it were just another piece of entertainment, an hour-long mystery on “CSI” or “Without a Trace.” The people involved were (and are) real human beings, not characters in a fictional plot, and for strangers to bandy about theories on who was guilty or what they had done was a tasteless and disrespectful form of public gossip and, in some cases, even bullying.

I stand by everything I wrote in that piece, although the story has taken many strange turns since then, some of them accurately predicted by those strangers I advised not to speculate. Here is a summary:

·      June 13 (day 10) -- Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Staton announces the missing and endangered child case has become a criminal investigation, with a $25,000 reward for tips leading to the 7-year-old’s recovery

·      June 14 -- a dive team searches the Willamette River near Sauvie Island, not far from  the school but down a steep hill from it; Multnomah County Sheriff’s Capt. Jason Gates thanks the 42 law enforcement agencies from Oregon, Washington, and California that have been involved, and 213 detectives and 1,300 volunteer searchers

·      June 15 -- about 400 attend a candlelight vigil at Sunset Presbyterian Church Sanctuary, organized by Rachel Hansen and Michael Cook, a friend of the boy’s father, Kaine Horman

·      June 17 -- Kyron’s story appears as an inset on the cover of People

·      June 19 -- stepmother Terri Moulton Horman takes a second lie-detector test; a feature story in the Oregonian daily newspaper quotes friends of the boy’s “blended family” of parents and step-parents who characterize them as “a close, supportive group”

·      Starting in late June, the family “coalition” starts to unravel: Kaine Horman, ex-wife Desiree Young (the boy’s birth mother, who lives with her police detective husband downstate in Medford, Oregon), and various friends of the family repeatedly ask Terri Horman publicly to “cooperate with the investigation,” at times on national television, while the sheriff’s office responds several times that she has been cooperative

·      June 28 -- Kaine files for divorce from Terri and obtains a restraining order against her

·      June 30 -- Terri hires criminal defense attorney Stephen Houze

·      July 4 -- first report that Terri Horman tried to hire a man, a landscaper, to kill her husband about six or seven months previously; police shared the information with Kaine Horman on June 26, which is apparently what prompted him to move out and file for divorce and a restraining order

·      July 8 -- Kaine’s restraining order is revealed to include the statement “I believe the respondent [stepmother Terri Horman] is involved in the disappearance of my son Kyron….”; in a news conference with Kaine, his ex-wife Desiree Young says: “I’m so angry I don’t even have words. I just really want her to do the right thing and I can’t say it enough that Kyron is still out there and he needs to be home…. It’s extremely frustrating that she’s not cooperating…. I’ve known her a long time. I know she’s lying.”

·      July 9 -- another candlelight vigil is held for Kyron, 200 at Skyline School, with Kaine Horman and Desiree Young participating

·      July 12 -- Kaine Horman files a motion alleging that Terri violated a restraining order by carrying on a sexual relationship with one of his childhood friends (the aforementioned Michael Cook; she was sexting him as recently as June 30), sharing sealed information, and attempting to kidnap their daughter Kiara from the day care at Kaine’s gym on June 28

In an interview with law enforcement, Cook told authorities that Terri Horman let him photograph the sealed restraining order, as well as Kaine Horman’s new undisclosed address, and he shared the information with at least two people. Kaine Horman and Michael Cook both attended Shoreline High School north of Seattle. Cook was one of a few of Kaine’s friends from high school who ended up moving to Portland. Kaine had tried to reconnect with him once Cook moved to Portland, but that did not happen until Cook showed up at their home after Kyron’s disappearance. Along with two others, Cook, who is divorced with a son, helped organize the first vigil for Kyron. He was later seen at Kaine and Terri’s home after Kaine moved out, picking up the mail and bringing in food and drink to Terri, her friends and relatives. He told The Oregonian he was just trying to be supportive in a time of need.

·      July 13 -- Terri seeks money from Kaine to help her move out of their family home

·      July 15 -- Kaine files to have her removed from the home immediately

·      July 17 -- Terri said to be relocated to her parents’ home in Roseburg, some 180 miles south of Portland

·      July 19 -- having spent an estimated $300,000 on the investigation, the Multnomah County Sheriff, along with the District Attorney’s office, requests $438,00 from the county to support the continued investigation (three days later, the sheriff tabled his $242,609 request, and the county approved a pared down $196,034 for the DA)

·      July 22 -- DeDe Spicher, a close friend of Terri’s, is alleged by Desiree Young, her husband Tony Young, and Kaine Horman to be in close contact with Terri and not cooperating with police

·      July 26 -- Kaine states in documents filed with the divorce court that he believed Terri had tendered $350,000 to retain Houze, and he wanted to know where she got the money; Desiree Young also reveals, in an interview on “Dateline NBC,” that Kaine had had an affair with Terri in 2002 when he was still married to Desiree and she was eight months pregnant with Kyron

·      July 28 -- Peter Bunch, divorce attorney for Terri, files a motion to delay the divorce proceeding because intense scrutiny of his client in the Kyron Horman disappearance was making it impossible to proceed with a normal divorce; he also said the $350,000 figure described as Houze’s retainer was “grossly misstated”

·      August 3-5 -- Various friends and neighbors of the family, and other potential witnesses testify before a Multnomah County grand jury about the boy’s disappearance

·      August 11 -- Authorities hold a press conference to ask the public for any information people might have about seeing Terri Horman (or possibly someone else) driving Kaine’s white Ford F250 pickup truck near the school between 8 and 8:30, near a Fred Meyer supermarket later that morning, and on various roads to the west of the school during the day of Kyron’s disappearance

Since the flurry of revelations in mid to late July, the pace of new stories has slowed, which is hard to avoid reading as a bad sign, if the safe return of Kyron Horman is still the concern. Almost every night, one of the three network stations, whose studios are located four blocks west of my apartment, brings a truck over to the next block, where a billboard of little Kyron Horman stands prominently displayed. (There are many others around the city, but this one’s the closest to the TV station and to me.)


Their live feed on the 11 o’clock news inevitably shows a reporter standing in the foreground with Kyron Horman’s face beaming over his or her shoulder.

Back in June, it seemed strange enough that this drama had begun at a school just a few miles over the hills to the west of me. What’s even stranger is that I know Michael Cook personally; he and his former wife were active in the outdoor Shakespeare theater company I first acted with in the summer of 2005. A year later, I sang a karaoke song at his birthday party. I haven't seen him since.

But you know what? None of this make me an expert -- on Cook or anyone else in this matter. Unlike so many other Internet bloggers and gossip-mongers, I have nothing conclusive to say. This story is far from over, and it's really none of our business until law enforcement turns up something more substantive and someone is actually charged.

Obviously, this is a family that has been in turmoil, and has kept secrets from one another, for some time before the ugly turn of events that brought them to wider attention on June 4 (that is, the disappearance of a little boy). That they’ve managed to take their spats and games into the public arena and hold their neighbors’ -- and indeed, much of the nation’s -- attention for more than two months is a sad commentary.

Apart from the criminal matter of the disappearance of a 7-year-old boy, it would have been better for all concerned if the sordid drama had not played out in public. And I reiterate that noninvolved bystanders -- people who have no direct relation to the case -- should have shown some dignity and restraint by choosing not to comment publicly on what they think about who did what and to whom.

It’s not so much that Kaine and Terri Horman, Desiree and Tony Young, DeDe Spicher, and the rest have a right to privacy that we have invaded; most of them have been courting media attention assiduously for various reasons, some of them possibly valid and some probably not so. The point is that it is a bad thing for us, ourselves, to indulge in this kind of loose talk.

I’m not a religious man, but there is value to the Biblical admonitions against gossip: “… I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken” (Matthew 12:36); “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths,” Paul wrote, “but only what it helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (Ephesians 4:29). Or, as it advises in First Thessalonians, “… make it your aim to live quietly and to mind your own business” (4:11).

It used to be that news stories could print only what they could verify from documents or from spokespersons for the sources they were covering. And if they published a factual error, they printed a correction and apologized. Now that newspapers and television stations have gone online, most of them provide an outlet for instant, thoughtless, anonymous, and therefore often erroneous and abusive, comments by the public. This might not be illegal, but it certainly is unpleasant and disrespectful.

Here’s my hope that Kyron Horman is found, alive and soon, and that everybody else will finally shut up about all the other parties involved.

Digging A Hole to China, the 48-Hour Film pt. 2 - David Loftus

A 48-Hour Film Project team can be as small as one person who sets up a camera, then goes around front to act for it. The theoretical upper limit is unlimited. According to the 48HFP Web site, the largest team ever put together was in Albuquerque: 116 people and a team of horses.

The two Daniel Elkayam/Overcast Productions teams I’ve been a part of are probably fairly average: about 12-15 people working in front of and behind the camera (moving equipment, handling sound, scouting and preparing locations, fetching food, etc.), and another half dozen toiling elsewhere on the music and keeping in cell-phone touch with Dan as the story and film evolve.

Another invaluable resource for Dan’s team the past two years has been Jim and Mary Valerio, who put their farm to the west of Portland at our disposal, with a wide array of terrains (everything from pastureland to deep forest, pond and creek to carpeted home), and two little girls – Mary Ann and Juno – as featured supporting actresses.

On Friday night, many of us gather at Dan’s house for the brainstorming, which takes place from 7:30 to 10:30 or 11. The process goes like this: each person in the room gets a tablet and pen or pencil, and spends 15-20 minutes free associating ideas about potential plot situations and arcs, the character, the prop, and potential uses for the line of dialogue. Then each person shares his or her ideas with the rest of the room, which sparks further ideas from the others. Dan writes down the most interesting and appealing ideas as we talk. Then he reads them back to us, indicating which three to five appeal to him the most as we hash them around some more.

Then he sends us home to bed while he hunkers down to write the screenplay, which he does between 11 p.m. Friday night and Saturday morning at 6 or 8 a.m. We gather at 9 or 10, shoot steadily throughout the day until 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., get some sleep, shoot whatever remains to be done on Sunday morning, and Dan edits the film in the afternoon and turns it in to the contest organizers in the evening.

In 2009, our assigned character was Brian (or Breanne) Merryweather, researcher; the prop was a picture frame; and the necessary line of dialogue “For crying out loud.” During the brainstorming session, I suggested the line could be split between two characters, which is what eventually happened: “What did you do that for?” “Crying out loud! It’s good to hear my own voice!”

Our assigned genre was Fantasy. Naturally we started talking about wizards, elves, dragons, aliens, Tolkien parodies, and other things that would have been problematic to put on screen in terms of scenery and costumes. For a while we discussed a “billy goats (or other folks) on a bridge with a troll down below” scenario, because somebody had or could manufacture a troll costume/mask. We also considered a story about a tour getting lost in the woods and having some sort of fantasy encounter/adventure.

In the end, Dan said thought he would write about someone deciding to pursue his childhood daydream of digging a hole to China. I think this was one of Dan’s own ideas from the start, and it puzzled most of the rest of us. We couldn’t picture what to do with that, plot-wise, or how it could be shot.

But Dan pointed at me and said he wanted me to act in it, and we went to bed while he wrote the screenplay. By 8 in the morning, the script was in my e-mail box, and by 10 a.m. Saturday, we had gathered to shoot.

This is probably the time for you to look at what we ended up doing, if you haven’t seen it yet. Although the version submitted to the 48HFP must be 7 minutes or less, there are two places on the Web to see the 11-minute “director’s cut,” which includes nearly all of the original script and which Dan edited later. The best version is on his personal Web site:

http://www.danielkayam.com/

Click on “Short Films” and you’ll see “A Hole Story” on the right. If your computer doesn’t handle streaming video very well (this version gets hung up and jerky on my laptop with wireless Internet access), a second option is the simpler digital copy on YouTube, which should play more smoothly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfonQwdZC-4

Part three:  The 2009 Shoot

The 48-Hour Film Project, an Actor's Story - David Loftus

Last weekend, August 6-8, I participated as an actor in my second straight 48-Hour Film Project competition. Wednesday night I saw the results on the big screen: thanks to the film crew I rejoined from last year, especially its writer-director Daniel Elkayam, who calls his outfit Overcast Productions, I can say the product was good.

Briefly, a team of filmmakers (writer, director, photographer(s), actors, film editor, and other helpful types) gets 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, score, and turn in a movie of no more than 7 minutes in length.

Here’s how it works. At 7 p.m. on Friday evening, representatives of each film team (there were about 56 in this, Portland’s seventh year of the competition) receive a character’s name and profession, a line of dialogue, and a prop that must all appear in the film. Those items are the same for every team; what varies is the assigned genre, which could be anything from Western to Musical, Horror to Silent, Noir or Fantasy to Mockumentary.

The reps then turn the assignment over to the rest of the team to brainstorm a plot or at least a situation; a script is written; the film is shot – mostly on the Saturday, but often with some final shooting on Sunday morning – and edited; a score added (often something original with the help of musician friends, but sometimes just Creative Commons material from the Web); and the finished product gets turned in to the organizers of the 48HFP on a CD or thumb drive by 7 p.m. Sunday night. (The contest allows a half-hour grace period to 7:30 p.m. before a film is considered late and automatically disqualified, which adds travel time for delivery of the entry and gives the teams a full 48 hours to work on their film, in theory.)

Just three and four days later, all the submissions – including the late entries – are screened for the public (which mostly means, the film crews in the competition and their friends), and a week or two after that, a dozen finalists are screened again before the judges choose the Best Film and honorees in other categories such as Best Writing, Best Directing, Best Acting, Best Use of Genre, Best Effects, and so on.

The concept started in Washington, D.C. in 2001 and in 9 years has spread to more than 50 U.S. cities and more than 35 cities overseas, including Newcastle, Mumbai, Melbourne, and Casablanca.

A year ago, I had just lost my nearly five-year-old day job and was starting a deeper plunge into acting. For nearly the same length of time, I had been doing two to four stage productions a year, dramatic readings, live old-time-radio style performances with other actors and sound effects, and that sort of thing. But in the late summer of 2009 I began to explore film and video work.

I did some pro bono film extra work for Dan’s crew on a coffee company ad they were shooting on spec just two weeks after I lost my job, and two weeks after that, on August 14, 2009, I went to his house for the brainstorming session for the 48-hour film.

Part two: Digging a hole to China

A Very Clinton Wedding - Jeff Weiss

Former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton married Marc Mazvinsky Saturday in Rhinebeck, NY amid a flurry of press, curiosity seekers, and friends and family. For months the news media buzzed about the “top secret” wedding as everything from the guest list to the actual location of the nuptials were under lock and key. The frenzy reached a fevered pitch on Saturday morning as all three of the network morning news shows devoted most of their air-time to every minute detail they could uncover about the wedding. CBS's Early Show even went so far as to dub Saturday's episode “A Chelsea Morning.”

By now all of the festivities are over and Mr. and Mrs. Marc Mazvinsky are about to begin their lives as any other newly married couple. While the media has already forgotten the wedding in favor of the next “big” stories (Wildfires in California! Who will be the next judge on American Idol?), Chelsea and Marc will be challenged by their next big stories – managing household finances together, the prospect of raising children in an interfaith marriage, and of course, in-laws. And how does one exactly prepare for the inevitable meddling from your in-laws when they happen to be a former President of the United States and a sitting Secretary of State?

My advice to the happy couple is to always remember to talk to each other, as communication is key to any relationship. I wish them happiness, long lives filled with lots of love, and – above all else – I wish they can have some privacy.