VF48Hours Forum

in reply to Cardinal:

I'm wondering how many teams reacast roles from previous films? We mentally ruled out a lot of our previous entries due to personnel.

We featured 2 characters from the original - 1 was recast and 1 we found the original actor on Facebook and asked very nicely

ULTRA definitely made it harder, but we ended up having a blast anyway. The most difficult part was of course, casting. Our team started in Dunedin and, while most of us have moved to Welly, some of our key team mates are still down south. Still, I think we managed pretty well!

Definitely keep ULTRA for the upcoming years. It's like a completely open dice roll that has the potential to thwart any usual production patterns that many teams have slumped into the past few years. Keeps us on our toes and the comp fresh!

in reply to Cardinal:

We managed to not have to recast any roles, but yeah it restricted which films we could actually do a sequel to.

We had to recast everything as the two surviving (in the script at least) cast members haven't been part of the team for ages, plus had no way to contact one of them, but the story we went with I think it didn't matter sooo much.

Making a sequel was fun but it would be cool to mix it up again next year with a new and exciting challenge for Ultra.

in reply to Steve Austin:

I'm looking forward to the year musical gets excluded from the genres and Ultra is "REMAKE a previous 48Hours short you've made, as a musical"... wait, no, I'm not looking forward to that at all...

Hahaha, fantastic. Seeing as the organisers mined the forums for ideas this year, let's hope they pick this one up in the future.

in reply to steppenwolf:

Oh yeah, that's a goodie - keeping that in mind for next year.... lol

I thought sequel idea was a great idea but very little information was given On the launch night ..it took us quite sometime online to relaze and find that we had to include the elements that we were given from the movie we were doing the sequel too but we didn't have to combine genres as the genre wasn't an element ... All kind of unclear so be really good if this kind of thing was made really clear at the launch as I'm sure teams may be disqualified for not fulfilling the criteria
Lived making the sequel to virtually you we defiantly have a scene in our movie that you will never be able to unsee

in reply to Strange:

Strange I can promise you at least one dramatic and serious sequel from us! Polaroid 2. We were stoked to have a reason to revisit this one and go further with the original cliffhanger. So amped to see some of the other ultra sequels.

in reply to Clayton Hiku:

I cannot wait to see this.

I really enjoyed it, I'd actually ben umming and ahh-ing about making a sequel to Dazza and Bazza: Kiwi Dad Detectives for the last year, I'm glad I finally got the hot poker in the rear to just sit down and make it. Already had a few ideas swimming around which made it easier to write.

We featured 2 characters from the original - 1 was recast and 1 we found the original actor on Facebook and asked very nicely

One thing that I'm finding interesting looking back on the weekend is that our story development process was made much more torturous than usual at least in part because of the love we all had for the characters in the original movie.

in reply to Strange:

I guess i shouldn’t really pass judgement till ive seen what the ultra teams made. But my fear is that all to many of the ultra film will be based in comedy and in particular, inside jokes.

Well, our genre this year was Horror Comedy, so we were kinda stuck with comedy! That said, it made it really easy to decide on a direction - we had a Black Comedy from a couple of years ago that was the obvious choice, and we still had the main actors available.

Bad George - Hamilton

Absolutely loved it, what a dastardly thing to ask of us. We took 12 hours to agree on an idea, and didn't finish script until 9am. After already e-mailling out and then pulling another finished script at like 5am.
I love how this challenge forced us to be self-indulgent by revisiting our back catalogue and deciding which stories deserved to be revisited (I imagine, for most of us, the answer was "none of them"), then try not be self indulgent in making a movie that literally anyone else would care about.

Having to include exposition about the past movie, as well as like 8 elements in 5 minutes will probably crush a bunch of these movies under their own weight haha (defo guilty of this), but I can't wait to see this manic new style of 48hour film this year.

in reply to Steve Austin:

I'm looking forward to the year musical gets excluded from the genres and Ultra is "REMAKE a previous 48Hours short you've made, as a musical"... wait, no, I'm not looking forward to that at all...

That would be despicable. Despite the obvious, a reservation I have about this is that although it is a remake it is really in the same ballpark as doing a sequel. Not sure if I'd be that interested in doing ULTRA again if there was a pattern of revisiting previous 48HR films every year.

Sequel was great, and something I totally didn't expect from ULTRA.

Was made a bit more difficult in that we didn't have the actor who's been in most of our films (not that we couldn't sequel without him. but it certainly limited our approach).

In the very early stages we thought we had to merge genres as well but quickly figured that wasn't the case (although the film we made actually did merge both genres anyway).

I've no doubt that ULTRA won't be the same next year, but now seeing the way it's being approached, rather than just a bunch more elements or something, it seems like a great extra layer.

in reply to Mista Teas:

Not sure if I'd be that interested in doing ULTRA again if there was a pattern of revisiting previous 48HR films every year.

I totally agree. Sequel was a fun idea, albeit a little predictable if you'd been on the forums (although the same could be said for almost all of the elements this year...). But I would hate to think that every year Ultra requires you to repeat the past. I'll be doing Ultra again next year, but I if it's remake or requires you to reference a previous film then I don't think I'll be doing it a third time.

I had the same issue as a lot of teams, not having access to previous actors, but managed to do something a bit different and continue the storyline of a previous film in a way I would've never thought of (but somehow did).
In an ideal world, I wanted to do an Avengers style team up with all the previous compulsory characters from my films, and incorporating 9 years worth of compulsory elements, but it was just too hard with the actors we had. Maybe if we'd gotten Z-Grade...

in reply to Bloydd:

Not sure if I'd be that interested in doing ULTRA again if there was a pattern of revisiting previous 48HR films every year.

Yeah I don't think anyone would want Ultra to be predictable either. Rest assured though that Ness did say the following earlier in this thread. So don't expect to see sequel come up again.

Hi All, Glad to hear ULTRA went down well and yes it makes the competition fresh again. Our plan is to switch up ULTRA next year - it will be different.

in reply to Clayton Hiku:

Yeah, but then again, Ruth did say this

Oh yeah, that's a goodie - keeping that in mind for next year....

In response to the remake idea, so who knows what to believe!

I loved the general idea of ULTRA, but speaking personally I was a bit conflicted by the Sequel challenge. I mean intellectually it was an intriguing thing to consider the possibilities, but I think I really like the joy of creating brand new things, and so revisiting past films was immediately less inspiring to me. Also, because Sequel threw a pretty big spanner in the works in terms of how you need to approach the brainstorming process, I kinda feel like it short-circuited some of our team's creative inclinations, and I can't help feeling like we might have compensated for the disorientation by perhaps defaulting to some safer choices. Dunno.

More frustrating is the fact that, by the end of the weekend, having had a couple of days to reflect on and process the possibilities of how to approach doing a Sequel, I felt like I was much more clear-headed about how to approach the Friday-night brainstorm, in terms of coming at the challenge from unexpected angles.

On the plus side, I thrive on the challenge of the required elements, and I actually felt the elements were a bit on the thin side this year (what with "a female" and at least one of the themes being pretty much in any film we'd make by default). So in that respect, I appreciated that the ULTRA challenge meant we had to use a set of old-school character/line/prop/tech elements also.

in reply to TheNimbleMarmoset:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Could not agree more with everything you just said.
Was really excited for something new this year, so the sequel thing was immediately a bit deflating, and whereas the old elements were something that you could tick off as you go, this year I found myself halfway through the edit on Sunday thinking "huh, did we do everything?" (coming from someone who was in support of changing things up) but as you say it was good to bring back old elements and try include them in a unique way.