This year was the first year that I had participated in the Kansas High School 24 hour film festival. Last year I couldn't go because I was busy working on the band documentary, and I was really bummed out because of it. Only five of us had decided to enter into the competition this year, which was really surprising considering that last year it had been all the way in Wichita, KS and this year it was in Gardner, KS.
We had grouped up into two groups: the three boys which made the popular Get Lost Productions and my friend Brooke and I had made our own little group. We waited for the prompt to drop at around four in the afternoon. When we got the prompt it was a little surprising and not as broad as it was last year. We had sat down and decided what exactly we wanted to do. The biggest issue was finding actors that could act for us especially because we'd be filming later in the night and it was vaguely last minute.
We had written a short little story about a kid who had been bullied and when he fought back he ended up getting killed. The idea was that it was short and straight-forward and told in more of a flashback or retelling than anything. We didn't really make a storyboard because we wanted to take advantage of golden hour as much as we could.
We were lucky enough to have connections with the theatre department and have people that were more than willing to act and stay late for us. We ended filming out of order with the retelling (that is supposed to be at the end) first and then filming the beginning part at around eleven at night. It was really cold that night so we decide not to film outside like we had wanted to for the end scene.
I had taken one of the computers home for the night and edited the morning of. Since the story was pretty straight forward it made editing the piece a lot easier. One thing that I wish I had changed before entering it into the contest was the pace of the editing. It's all very static and there isn't a change in the pace of the editing at all. Especially during the murder scene it should've been a lot faster and tighter than it actually was to up the feel of adrenaline.
All in all it was a fun experience to do even though none of us had won anything and I had learned a lot about editing and filming within a small time frame.