The Blog of Thom Milkovic ( TM )

“Mr. Amazing” Wins Best Film

August 14th, 2009 by Thom Milkovic | Posted in Branding, Film |

81 Edits + 48 Hours + 29 Cast & Crew + 27 Sets + 9 Red Bulls + 2 Canon 5D Mark II DSLR Cameras = One Amazing (Award Winning) Film.

Imagine making a short film in 2 days, better yet, picture yourself conceptualizing, writing, shooting and editing that film in the same 48 hours. Well, that’s the 48 Hour Film Project (”48HFP”), an international contest that challenges filmmakers to complete a 4-7 minute film over the course of a weekend.

48 Hour Film Project

Out of the 70 teams who entered into the 2009 Atlanta 48HFP, our movie won Best Film along with four other awards. The best part of this story is, I’m not a filmmaker…

Let me first explain how the 48HFP works. All of the team leaders gather just before the 48 hour block of time begins.

Photo by Thom Milkovic

70 Teams Gather to Compete

At the gathering, we were given three elements that every team needed to work into their film somehow. They were as follows:

Character: Ann Knight, Transit Co. Employee
Prop: Art Supplies
Line: “I think I can do it”

Every team pulls a unique genre from a hat…ours was Superhero.

It’s 7:01 in the evening on Friday. The film needed to be submitted no later than 7:30pm Sunday. As the details were revealed, everyone in the bar was on the phone calling their production teams. My team, Tannhauser Gate, and I worked out a different communication strategy. I knew that trying to keep a 29+ person team up-to-date throughout the weekend was going to be challenging, so everyone used Twitter to stay in touch and keep record of the event. You can relive our real-time Tweets here: http://twitter.com/tgate

Between 7:01 pm and 7:14 pm, I tweeted the required elements and genre to the group, who were poised and ready at our rendezvous point, an improv theatre. Instead of a gathering a bunch of brains in a room to figure out a story, I called upon the talented improvisors at Village Theatre to help get our Story Team’s brain cells churning. For an hour or so, the performers acted out sketches that played with with the elements we had to work with. Granted, we didn’t use “exactly” what they acted out, but it did lead us down the path to the story we ultimately wrote. All in all, it was an excellent experience to work with the gang at the Village Theatre and it started us off with a roar.

Photo by Mark Lewin

If there was one objective I had in making this film, it was to make sure that each member of our team was doing what they loved to do. Sure, you can say I “directed” the film, but what I really did was inspire every member of our team to be the best they could be. Yes, I did make us completely change the script at 3:00am in the morning. If you don’t know what utter disappointment, borderline hatred looks like, it definitely resembled the facial expressions I witnessed at that moment in time. Michael Sokol, our head writer, had the best scowl of all, that quickly shifted into a more hunched posture, as he leaned into another round of typing. Matt Odum played a combo puzzle slash 52 pick-up game with the story’s index cards and Trent made a blanket with the old script, while curling into a kitten-like ball at the edge of the sofa. Deontae took a long, lingering stare at his beautifully illustrated storyboards, that were tied to a story that we were no longer telling.

Photo by Mark Lewin

As the sun came up, our main actors, Kyle and Mehgan Walls, and day crew members started to arrive as Michael and I were finalizing the script. Thanks to Angie of Psycho Sisters, Montine and Kimberly Jo, we had an amazing array of costumes. They had been compiling them since about 2:00am and Nancy (our makeup ninja) was ready to go with everything we needed to pull the looks together. The rest our talented team of actors arrived shortly thereafter and were dressed and prepped.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Once Eric De Fino (our DP), Matt Odom, Ryan Rodinis and Eric Heinen and the production team finished blocking the script, we started shooting. Joey Appie and Eric Heinen were hustling to get our equipment where it needed to be and were stellar at making sure that our crew was operational. Of course, Jamarie (also my wife) was playing the role as AD, executing her meticulous plan to make sure that we were all doing what she planned for us to do, at the time and place we were supposed to be doing it.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Our first shot was around 10:00am and we were going strong until about 2:00pm. We used two Canon 5D Mark II’s to film this. Yes, we used DSLRs to film the whole movie in HD. Eric DeFino and Ryan even put together a special rig to hold the cameras:

Photo by Mark Lewin

Then, the dreaded first MAJOR issue occurred. We lost about 2 hours to a dead boom mic and eventually figured it out, after we ran around looking for a replacement mic and the “perfect” connector cable. We continued to shoot all day, outside in the heat, eventually moving to our interior shots, as the sun set and we continued shooting well into the night.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Again, I have to give a big thanks to everyone for hanging in there during that heat. Brian Wible, Kim, and Montine were doing as excellent job making sure that everyone stayed hydrated and fed, Luli Alonso was our watchdog and Mark Lewin was our stellar behind the scenes photographer. You can find his pictures here: http://bit.ly/DRtbs

Photo by Mark Lewin

We finally wrapped at 1:44am (according to twitter) and all decided to rest for the night, with the intention to re-convene around 6:00am. All the while, during our rest, Amy Puckett and Helen Thomas were converting our movie files, putting the shots in the timeline, and preparing the meat of our story to be mastered, upon the editing crew’s return in the morning.

Photo by Mark Lewin

Enter 9:45 am on Sunday…we all overslept!! In hindsight, this was probably a good thing, because it gave us the “rested” advantage, but at the time it resulted in tweets like, “@analogueamy are you coming in?” and “via @milkovic: My car smells like Red Bull this morning” The ultimate result was high-speed editing mode, which was evident in tweets like, “via @SupremeMcGriff: edit, edit, edit. render, render, render.”

Photo by Mark Lewin

Our music experts, Andre Krasich and Eric Mason, had prepared some scores for us to incorporate into the film. Ryan and Eric were making “blue balls” in their secret special effects dungeon. And Trent Chau, my co-producer, was calming me down as Eric De Fino was working in Avid faster than I’ve ever seen before in my life.

Photo by Mark Lewin

We were coming down to the wire and it was 40 minutes before we needed to hand off the film when we finally completed it. Our film’s run time was a mere 2 seconds over the minimum required time of 4 minutes. Now, we needed to put it onto a disk somehow. The only acceptable format we could configure FAST was a thumbdrive, but the movie needed to be rendered with a certain codec per 48HFP rules…and that would take another 12 minutes! Jeez. So, we rendered it on our editor’s machine at his studio, leaving us with 18 minutes to drop the movie off to a location that was about that far away. This would have been fine, but we still had to copy it to the thumb-drive which would take another 12 minutes. So, we attached Eric’s Mac to my Powerbook via firewire, copied the movie over, ran out the door and took the thumbdrive operation on the road.

Photos by Mark Lewin

My wife (and AD), Jamarie, was behind the wheel of the car and speeding like an absolute maniac (I know she loved it), running through one stoplight after another, while Ryan was the pace car, carving a path through traffic for us. About 1 minute into our drive, I get a disk error message on the thumbdrive. This pretty much spelled out the end of our hope to hand it over in time, but for some reason, that wasn’t our destiny. It somehow occurred to me to re-format the thumbdrive and the start the operation again. To my relief, the movie was finally copying over!

7:29pm, we pull up to the dropoff location, laptop still attached to the thumbdrive, as it pushed over the last little bits. I hit the eject button and handed the thumbdrive over at 7:30pm on the nose. The funny part of the story is that we never had a chance to see the film all the way through. So I had no idea what I was submitting.

Photo by Jamarie Milkovic

As we panted and hugged, a local reporter stuck a microphone in our face, exclaiming “We’d love to interview you!” We opted to share some of our joy, pain, and mostly relief with them. Look for us in their upcoming special about the 48HFP.

Photo by Mark Lewin

At our wrap party, we finally got to watch the film and enjoyed wonderful homemade treats from Luli and Montine (along with some much needed wine and vodka). We were tired, but happy.

Flash forward one month.
Trent and I get a message from the 48HFP saying “Mr. Amazing” is one of eleven films heading to the award ceremony. We just didn’t expect to win five awards. They are as follows:

Best Acting
Best Use of Line of Dialogue
Best Costumes
Best Musical Score
and lastly…Best Film.

Wow, we simply did not expect that at all. We are all humbled by the experience and honored by the recognition. I’m proud of each and everyone of our team members. I’m looking forward to working with them all again.

Photo by the Canon 5D Mark II we used

So, we made ourselves a movie… and it all started with a conversation on iChat. About a month before the 2009 Atlanta 48HFP, Trent Chau sent me a link to the 48HFP Website. Without being 100% sure how it worked, I paid the entry fee and here we are. I can’t thank the Tannhauser Gate Team enough for all of their incredible work on this endeavor.