48 Hr Film Project

In May 2007, out of pure curiosity, I got involved in a 48hr film project at Stratford Circus Arts Centre in Stratford, East London.

The project took place on a Saturday and Sunday, Saturday being the orientation with the filming equipment and logistics and the agreeing the film subject, defining the story and story boarding the shoot. Sunday was the actual shoot.

We settled on a rather surreal storyline of a guy with a million pounds in his briefcase, living in a public toilet. Inspired by stories in the press which alledged eastern european migrant workers were sleeping in public toilets in Knightsbridge for 20p a night because they couldnt afford accomodation elsewhere... 20p is not a bad deal for London!

The original brief was to have only 10 scenes, however our film concept had more than a little scope creep and we ended up with about 19 scenes overall. This presented a number of challenges, not least time for the shoot itself and the editing of the final film... a year later, I hear the editing is complete but the distribution and upload to youtube is still not complete. Thats quite an over-run for a 3 minute film!

What did I learn from all this? 1. we should have run the film project like I do my day job and been strict about the scope (Im an IT programme manager by day), and 2. keep it simple, stupid!

Anway, I got to meet some cool people and I had my camera with me as always, and I satisfied my appetite for taking photos by taking some interesting location shots. The shot above is of the actor in the film, his name is Kostas Katsikis, he is a full time actor here in London.

If the film ever sees daylight I will post a link, in the meantime, my movie career is over and done.