VF48Hours Lockdown Forum

From looking down the list I don't think any of them were really curly this year. I drew Rom Com and that was fine. It's not a genre I like, but no big deal. Rockumentary as a genre would have sucked pretty bad, I would have opted to make a normal musical instead I think, and you could choose this year, so again not really too curly.

Very few "established" teams drew Black Comedy or the four-way Musical option in Christchurch this year. Just the way the cookie crumbled.

in reply to Andrew Todd:

Andrew, can you explain the four-way Musical. I assumed it was either musical or dance or beach or rockumentary but I get the feeling there was more to it?

We got shock ending. Which I was pretty excited by when I found out at launch

It's a hard genre for two reasons though

Reason one is that it's not a genre, Same issue we had with inspirational film back in 2012. In a lot of ways being told to make a horror film or being told to make a rom com takes a lot of hard work away from the writing as that first decision of what sort of film should we make is taken away. That said I do like getting non genre genres as it almost let's us make what ever film we want to.

Reason two is that it's kind of annoying that the title card that plays before the film has shock ending attached to it. It's harder to do a shock/twist ending when everyone knows to expect it.

in reply to Strange:

Reason one is that it's not a genre

I had the same problem when my old team drew "drama". But the same is actually true of musical. Now I think these not-a-real-genre genres are liberating. I'm sure a lot of us thought about what we'd love to make in the 48hours in advance, so guess what? Now you can pretty much go ahead and make that. What a dream!

in reply to mikedensem:

Andrew, can you explain the four-way Musical. I assumed it was either musical or dance or beach or rockumentary but I get the feeling there was more to it?

Yeah, it was musical or dance or beach party or rockumentary.

Just to give a couple more fun (though equally challenging) options for teams terrified of musical.

We didn't get any beach party movies in Chch and I am CRUSHED by that. It's one of my favourite genres.

in reply to Andrew Todd:

We didn't get any beach party movies in Chch and I am CRUSHED by that. It's one of my favourite genres.

Our whole schtik this year leading up to the weekend was filming on/around a beach (I've always wanted to try do 48 from an island)... and then we got SCIENCE GONE MAD. This one goddamn time I would have liked to have gotten musical.

We, too, drew RomCom and yes, no probs. Our Wellington teammates got Other Dimension though... I wondered if that was a bit too open-ended (for example, a time travel movie would fit that genre, as would most things.

I drew Other Dimension movie and I ended up doing something that probably could have also been cat and mouse as well as other dimension.
It was quite open as a genre so I suppose the real challenge was coming up with a reasonable concept that would be easy to do with what we had, I guess it worked out okay but I didn't manage to come up with many other ideas.

Very interested to see how "Last Person on Earth" ended up. I'd been bugging Ant to put "man alone" in for years....:)

Mystery was harder to write than any genre we've had in the past.
I've been trying to put my finger on why, I think in the end, a well constructed mystery just takes a lot of work and (ideally) a lot of time.

Every year I hope we get one of the weird ones, but we haven't yet.

I think the genres all make everyone think a little harder as to what to create.

This year was suppose to be the smallest team ever - 4 people - and then we got musical/dance/dance party/rockumentary. When we got our genre - I wanted to just film me eating an apple for 7 mins at that stage coz our composer wasnt available till sat night.

in reply to hl:

I wanted to just film me eating an apple for 7 mins at that stage

If you made a one minute video of it instead the audience might actually have been grateful for the change in pace and tone.

I mean, as long as it seemed like a really good apple.

in reply to hl:

You'd probably get bonus points for referencing one of the great trash musicals of the 80s: https://youtu.be/Uix3tbov65o

We got Last Person on Earth and I was very happy with that.
The tropes of that genre came easily, so a story formed itself nice and strongly around the framework, I think. The only real challenge was background noise/cars/etc on location and having to cover with ADR.

Of all of the genres, the one that stuck out to me as the most difficult was Black Comedy. Soooo tricky to get the tone right without sounding sarcastic or the humour just going over the audiences' heads. Would love to hear how some of the teams teams that pulled it got on...

We got the Black Comedy genre.

One man's black comedy is another man's "stupid humour" or another's "that's not funny".
"Black comedy" is like "irony"; in that it means different things to different people. And everyone thinks *their* interpretation is correct.

Wiki says "... humor that makes light of subject matter usually considered taboo."
48 hours examples listed: Dr. Strange Love, Harold and Maude, Office Space,
M*A*S*H, Birdman.

Anyway, we did ours on a cult, with some extra taboo subjects thrown in for good measure...

Wiki also mentions "farce", so we have that in spades.

We got 'last Person on Earth' and loved it as a genre. I'd never even thought of making a 'post apocalyptic' film until 7.01pm on Friday evening so it was a cool challenge to start from a truly blank page (isn't that the point of this whole thing?!?!).

We had a real blast taking the tropes of the genre, playing the audience into that familiar territory and then twisting things into a new direction. It all started with, "what if they..." during our brainstorm on Friday night and everything fell into place after that.

There is a cinematic idea that I love - you create the world of your film in as much detail as you can, even if it's a detail you don't film or tell the audience. Then you create a character (or characters) in as much detail as you can - their backstory, motivations, sense of self, who they think they are and so on. Once you know those things in detail - you film a documentary about them. Their actions, decision and lines of dialog are what they would actually do - if you have to wonder why they would do or say something, or if their actions are to serve your film and not their story - you haven't built the world of your characters in enough detail - if you do it right, the film should write itself...

in reply to ScottKennedy:

Word. Make characters, and the film writes itself.
Unless you're an animator, of course.

I think that shock ending would be tough.
The logic here is that the audience knows one is coming and tries to see it coming.

We got Cat and Mouse and realised just how much longer it takes to shoot a movie when you have a montage of chase shots across a whole city which meant a lot of time transporting crew and gear