From Dusk Till Dusk (Pt. 1)

Tonight, we start our engines. Tonight, we have pizza. Tonight at 9:59, we stand around one computer. Tonight at 10:00, we get a theme and an element that we have to include within a film that we will be making for the next 24 hours. From 10:00pm Friday, April 3 until 10:00pm Saturday, April 4 we will proceed to make a film. No idea if it will be successful or not, but it will be one of the more shiny moments for 2009 and the household.

Last year's 24 Hour Film Race was awesome. We were armed only with Taylor's camcorder, which he said didn't have good color anymore. We also didn't have sound equipment, so we opted to make a movie without a soundtrack. The best alternative: silent black and white film based off of old 20's slapstick comedy, straight out of "Sherlock Jr." territory. We used public recordings of Scott Joplin ragtime tunes as the soundtrack.

We pulled it off within mere seconds. We literally ran to the place where you drop off your projects and got there with only seconds to spare. Louie was almost doing 100 on the freeway to get it there on time. We were okay with the submitted film, but we had filmed so much more that we had wanted to include. So, the next day, I edited a Director's Cut version. Came out to be around 7:00 (each film in the race has to be 3:30 or under with thirty seconds for credits at the end).

I did the editing last year with some minor casting jaunts. We started filming early in the morning, starting at 7:10am, actually the first shot you see in the film was the first shot Taylor attempted to record. 8:00 we were filming on location. We filmed until about 3:30, I captured the film onto my computer and started to edit the scenes we had already filmed. The rest of the gang went out again, got more footage, came back around 5:00. I edited furiously until around 9:00pm, stressed all the while. After I was done, it was over the limit. About 5:00. Director Taylor came in, edited the project down to 3:20. We finished editing around 9:30pm. We rendered it, tried writing it onto a DVD -- it wouldn't do it. I don't know how or why, but it finally wrote and spit the DVD out at 9:53. I caught this moment on camera. You want to see stress exhibited in humans? Watch that footage.

So, it shall be an interesting weekend . . .

Here's last year's Director's Cut version. It's called "CTRL+S":


Queen -- "Tie Your Mother Down"