One Last Sniff, Then On to the Pistachios: 48-Hour Film part 5 - David Loftus

Sabra finished shooting her Chinese girl scenes about 1:00 p.m. Sunday, and then drove me back to the city from the Valerios’ farm. When I got home, I took off all my dirt-covered clothing and had a shower. My wife Carole said, “You look like you could use a beer.” She was right.

So we went to our local pub and I was halfway through a salad and my second pint -- maybe about 4:30? -- when my cell phone rang. Brian McKee, the cameraman, wanted to know if I could do one last shot for the film. I had to go home, put back on the dirty clothes I’d worn all weekend, and rejoin Brian.

The script had called for a brief shot of my character sniffing the urine sample on his clothing while riding the bus home from work. Dan had planned to do a “guerilla” take on board a city bus, but that seemed too dicey, particularly given that we were only a couple hours from the deadline to turn in the film.

So we shot the scene at a Portland Streetcar station just outside Powell’s Books instead. Brian lurked at the far side of 10th Avenue while I planted myself at the stop. The other “passenger,” the girl, and the traffic were all fortuitous elements. You’ll see this sequence early in the film between 0:42 and 0:50.

Dan’s script for “A Hole Story” won Best Writing for the 2009 Portland 48-Hour Film Project.

Which brings us up to this year. At 7:00 p.m. on Friday, August 6, we received our assignment: character would be Pete (or Pam) Peterson, artist; prop was pistachio nuts; and line of dialogue would be “I have a surprise for you.” Our particular team was assigned the genre of Mockumentary.

We had a lively brainstorming session from 7:30 to 10:30. Several separate ideas that surfaced during that time would come together in the finished film. Dan was interested in the self-referential, post-modern idea of inserting videos within a video. Someone called pistachio nuts “addictive,” which raised the notion of bringing the prop into the story as an actual addiction. Dan’s team had worked on other stories in which a guru figure teaches a novice how to do something, and it was suggested our artist could be a video filmmaker who knew how to make viral YouTube videos.

It was only in Dan’s script that the character became a filmmaker who expressly could not make such a video, though he was trying desperately to do so. That would allow Dan to parody some of the most famous viral videos on YouTube, such as “the Numa Numa Dance” (Gary Brolsma lip-synching to a Moldovan pop song in front of his computer Webcam), guys getting injured doing stupid things, and cute animals.

When I was describing my thoughts, I conscientiously referred to the as-yet hypothetical protagonist as “Pete or Pam Peterson” -- but speaking quickly, I ran them together. The person next to me, Alex Huebsch, heard them as one word and suggested the character’s first name should be “Peteorpam.” This not only made for a great inside joke for the other Portland filmmakers who would recognize a slurring of what we’d all been assigned, but would sound like “Peter Pan” to a wider audience. Best of all, it set up a “who’s on first”-style comic dialogue with a package delivery person played by Dylan Hillerman.

I didn’t get the script in my email box until something like 9 a.m. Saturday, and arrived at Dan’s house well after 10. We shot some of the script in around his house: a sequence involving a TV repairman that Peteorpam arranges to have pushed off the roof (which did not make the contest-entry version), and the deliveryman sequence (which did). Then we headed out to the Valerios’ farm, site of last year’s imaginative film about digging a hole to China.

Part six:  Critters in the House






Read part one: Overview of The 48-Hour Film Project


Read part two: Daniel Elkayam and the Overcast Productions strategy


Read part three: Digging a hole to China


Read part four: In the dirt and through the earth

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