VF48Hours 2020 Forum

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

in reply to Andrew Todd:

The main reason for deliberation, to me, is for judges to make their cases for the films they liked where other judges might have missed something. A bunch of opinions separately don't mean shit when judging art, but a conversation will usually come to an actual decision that means something.

I've never been a judge of this competition, but given that I'm a strong-opinions-loosely-held kind of person, this approach just seems natural and obvious to me. Hell, half the 48HOURS reviews I've written I would probably now disavow if I re-read them, due to having subsequently talked with other people whose arguments shifted my own views on a film.

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

in reply to Mista Teas:

The EntX is a cool venue - very modern but extremely cavernous so the intimacy is kind of lost. As such, it was hard to judge the audience reaction to some films. Not sure if teams got, for example, the volume of laughs they expected.

It occurs to me that these newfangled cinema theatres with the fancy-pants laz-y-boy style seats and huge amounts of row-space in front create a bit of an illusion - specifically, that a full house in the room is actually a lot fewer people than you'd assume, since every individual takes up a lot more space. Additionally, the distance between people probably means that it's a bit harder for the energy of an audience to reach that magical critical mass moment where the whole room starts buzzing. Comparing the reactions of the films from Heat 8 that I saw, pretty much all the big laugh points of the films seemed more muted.

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

in reply to Cardinal:

I am also sick today. Maybe these forums are contagious?!

I've been sick since the weekend. And since I started this thread, I am therefore Patient Zero. Sorry guys.

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

in reply to Mista Teas:

You can't really fix the "time-it-takes-for-winners-to-get-to-the-front" unless you tell the winners to sit in the front rows prior. Not really in the spirit of things. Might ruin the suspense.

Actually, I just remembered that a few years back Andrew had the city finalists submit some music from their film, to be played if their film won an award. And in addition to personalising the win a little more, it also served the very practical function of filling in the awkward the-audience-has-run-out-of-clap-but-the-winner-is-still-on-their-way silence. Bring that back next year please AJ!

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

in reply to Bloydd:

we just needa work a little bit on making sure all our films are in focus

IT WAS A DELIBERATE CREATIVE CHOICE, GODDAMMIT

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

I thought the Hoyts venue was a great room, with just a single complaint - that aisle is really really really long and zig-zaggy for people coming down to collect a prize, even if they're not sitting at the back. This has always been a logistical challenge with the flow of the awards part of these events, although in that room it seemed to take even longer than usual.

Regarding the finalist films themselves, terrific line-up I thought, and really varied. Some great high concept premises too (even if some of the films didn't seem quite sure how best to use their awesome idea). I was going to complain about the alphabetical presentation order, except that it accidentally played very well in that order, so yay ("not accidental at all" - AJ).

And there was stiff competition this year for the coveted Best Use Of A Phone In An Acceptance Speech award. :)

Christchurch City Finals: morning-after de-brief/-lirium/-tox

Hey everyone! Awesome night at EntX last night. It was nice to see the awards love shared quite widely around the teams, and special congrats to Snack To The Future for snagging the big one.

So let's talk about it! Overall impressions of the finalists? Any big surprises in the awards? What did you think of the venue? Who gave the best speech? How many 48HRS 2008 stickers did you get?

2019 Thoughts

It might sound a bit odd, but after the #1 reason of not having enough time, the #2 reason I don't get round to writing and/or posting a 48HOURS review is because I feel choice-paralyzed in trying to decide what star-rating to give a film.

I would love to have the option of writing a review without giving any star rating at all. Except a moment after thinking that, it also occurs to me that I like receiving star-ratings from others, so I'm a bit of a hypocrite.

But yeah, I seriously struggle with the 7-star rating system. I usually trying to pre-rate the films in the heat that I'm going to be reviewing. But this year, I got to an annoying point, where I basically ended up shunting everything up a point, in that situation of "well if I give x stars to this film, but this film with the same stars is obviously better, then that rating has to go up by one, but then that other film has to go up by one, but then..." I ended up having two films in my heat ranked 7 stars, and neither is actually a perfect film, of course - they're in the 4.5/5 territory, which 6/7 feels inadequate to capture. It's weird, a 7-star system strangely gives you both too many and not enough options at the same time.

(Of course, it should be noted that if we're complaining about the lack of a 5-star system that allows half-stars, then really what we're asking for is a 10-star system.)

Christchurch Finalist Prediction Thread

... And here's my list.

Probably gonna make the finals
Bork - Night Shift
Deep Dish Pizza Wolf - Rozkol (Schism)
Dragon V Mouse - That Time of the Month
Dystography Studios - Cold Hearted
JAGBOG - Cut
Little Old Lady Productions - Decompression
No Budget Ninjas - Lifeboy
Snack to the Future - A Familiar Feeling
South Jersey Ghost Research - Catman and Robyn
Strang Entertainment - Timmy
Submission Impossible - Now You See Me, Now You Don't
TBALC - D.O.C Force: Danger Island
Team Moon - Inflamed
The Brothers Boyce - All Hallows' Eve
Toot Toot - Stopping World War II

Furthermore, I predict that one of these 15 films will win Christchurch.

Seriously though, a) congrats to all the finalists, and b) any thoughts about the final 15? It all seems roughly in line with people's predictions, but were there any surprise inclusions or omissions?

Also, is that award really being called "Best Performer", even though half the nominations are for groups of performers? (I would humbly suggest that "Best Performance" is a slightly more effective wording to capture the various options.)

2019 Thoughts

in reply to Oliver Roozen:

I think it probably varies based on the specific prompt people got, but the real-time-movie was something that really sparked the imagination of everyone on our team. It immediately went to the question of, do we make something that is hyperreal or do we make something that treats "real time" metaphorically? For us, the prompt (or genre or whatever you want to call it) was absolutely perfect.

For quite a while it's been the case that, in any given 48HOURS year, about half of what we nominally call the "genres" are not actually genres at all, but rather structural or thematic tropes, or in some cases simply a storytelling challenge: One-shot, Real-time, Bechdel Test, M. Night Shyamalan Twist, etc.

And I'm totally cool with this loose definition of genre in the context of the competition, cos those out-of-left-field 'genre' options have almost always been quite exciting to see revealed (and from my own experience, usually exciting to do).

But I wonder if the difference between 'genres' and genres this year might be a be more noticeable, because with the required elements being so generic and easily insertable this time round, the genre perhaps became one of the key drivers of story creation. And when you're sitting around spitballing ideas with the team at 7.30pm on the Friday night, "Real-time" is surely way more directly inspiring than a massively broad genre category like "Science Fiction".

2019 Thoughts

in reply to Andrew Todd:

I would counter that between 500 teams, 48HOURS competitors will find ways of making ANY compulsory element grating and obvious.

"Hahaha! I, The Wind, look directly down upon you puny humans, and laugh at your ridiculous monuments in the shape of giant propellers. Don't you realise that you will never tame m-- ... What the--!"

2019 Thoughts

in reply to Joel_Tempero:

the fact that we had done a time travel movie 2 years ago gave us the motive to get creative with 'How can we make a film with the same genre, but completely different tone'

TBALC had something similar with Rom Com back in the day, getting it 2 or 3 times (depending on how you count it), and it's definitely a choice you make to view it positively as an extra challenge: "How do we honour the genre, but do something totally different to what we did last time?" And given that the brainstorming process usually kicks up a bunch of potential good ideas that don't get used, there's always much more fertile ground to explore in any given genre.

We don't qualify for Ultra until next year

Didn't they change the rules this year so that any team that's been a city finalist before is now eligible? Oh well, whatever the case you'll be eligible next year anyway. :)

2019 posters

CATMAN AND ROBYN, by South Jersey Ghost Research (The Secret Identity Movie, CHCH Heat 8).

2019 Thoughts

in reply to Andrew Todd:

ELEMENTS: there has to be something in there that inspires story, as opposed to just "items/events that need to be included." This was the first year that I constantly lost track of what the elements were, because they were so forgettable.

Yeah, I think that what nominal category the elements are (Sound, Physical, Technical, Action) is less important than what they offer to the film. If we stick with four elements, they I'd say make two of them somewhat technical hoops to have to jump through, and make the other two the kinds of things that might inspire story. And to be clear, I get that any element, a puddle or wind or whatever, can of course be used as a story motivator if you're clever enough. But looking at the four from this year, only one (the double-take) directly and necessarily relates to a character moment (and even then, it doesn't do much to inform character).

What I would like to see is something that is situationally specific enough to inspire story, but vague enough to be used and interpreted in a variety of ways. Something like "a misunderstanding", "a lie" or "an overreaction".

2019 Thoughts

in reply to DogsBreakfast:

Personally I've found it much harder writing a script with the change to the way the elements work. I always found a character, trait and line gave me a springboard to get going, whereas this time round I had no script, let alone a solid idea of what the hell I was going to do, until well into Saturday morning - the first time that's happened. A lot of it came back to getting too caught up in the technical aspects, how will the split screen work with that story, or an overhead shot won't look right with that and so on.

I know where you're coming from. While I 100% welcomed the shake-up of the format of the required elements in the past few years, it does rather feel like the elements now are all just random technical bits that have no need to be story-related. At least with the character and line of dialogue, it gave you a provocation for a narrative direction. I think if nothing else, the ACTION element should be more conceptual and interpretable than technical (for example, I much preferred "a collision" to "a double-take").

Regarding time of year, while it was annoying having uncertainty about the dates for so long, I didn't mind the winter shoot so much - if nothing else, it forces the films to have a slightly different look and feel to them to what you'd get in April.

Overall we had a great weekend, and came out of it with a solid-enough film. Of course, I'm in the limbo-land of this difficult week post-weekend and pre-heats, where I'm not really sure what I think of the film - usually I find experiencing it with an audience for the first time clears things up a bit.