VF48Hours Forum

What kind of rules would you like to see in Ultra next time?

in reply to Rastinha:

So everyone gets some kind of story-type genre like horror, coming of age, time travel, science fiction, last person on earth, or whatever. But then ultra teams with their second number get like, a film structure type genre on top e.g. real-time, one shot, non-linear, silent film, intersecting storylines etc. Teams would end up making a silent horror, or non-linear coming of age, or one-shot sci-fi etc. These genres you'd only need a few of each year mixed with the regular genres.

Yeah, I like that format, although I think I'd prefer it if the secondary, add-on Ultra genre was the same for all Ultra competitors, so it's more apples with apples when you're looking at how the various different Ultra teams coped with the challenge.

And of course this format has in a way already been in the competition - back in 2012, there was the "One Shot" genre, and the instruction was that you then had to select one of the other 11 genres to go along with it. (Hmm, was it also done another year with the "One Room" genre too?)

What kind of rules would you like to see in Ultra next time?

To clarify my idea (insofar as I've thought about it at all), the two films would be handled as separate entries into the competition, and as such would each get a randomly drawn genre, and would need to abide by all the elements and requirements. They would be judged as standalone films for the main competition, without consideration of the other one.

(In terms of an entry fee, I would say that it would be a little more than normal (to acknowledge the fact that you've got two films in competition), but certainly not double.)

So the normal comp would assess the films separately, and only the Ultra judging would consider the films as a pair, as a greater whole.

I would also say that this isn't the kind of Ultra challenge that you can just spring on teams; they'd need to know in advance that two films are to be made. Still, if you did want a surprise element, I suppose you could on the Friday reveal some required connective element for the Ultra challenge, e.g. a character who is alive in one film must be dead in the other, or the lead character of one film must be the parent of the lead character in the other, or the two films must each include the same scene or moment, but shown from different perspectives.

What kind of rules would you like to see in Ultra next time?

in reply to Mista Teas:

RE: The move to broader elements:

PRO: It's made it easier for teams to integrate the elements seamlessly into their films.
CON: It's made it easier for teams to integrate the elements seamlessly into their films.

Which is to say that I can see it from both angles, so I'm a bit torn. It's undeniable that the elements don't tend to get in the way of teams telling the story they want to tell. But if it's now easier to tell any story and just discretely shoehorn the elements in, my question would be, why do we have the required elements at all?

What I will say is that I think the best teams have always been able to find a way to make even very specific elements feel like a natural part of their films. And the more elements you have to integrate organically into your film, the greater the challenge, hence where I was coming from with my idea. But maybe not everyone gets as excited about brainstorming ways to incorporate elements as I do.

I think my general point is that teams may want an extra challenge, but I hope I can speak for every team when I say that we all still want to have a fun, enjoyable weekend, and not be mired down by a curveball that is technically hard but also not inspiring, and which just makes for a miserable time.

My own personal experience with Ultra was just the once, in the first year, and it pretty much broke us. In retrospect (even just days after the shoot weekend) I could think of dozens of better ideas and approaches we should have chosen, but in the heat of the moment the challenge threw us, and ironically did the precise opposite of the point of Ultra, by putting us in a crisis management mode and leading us down the route of making safe and obvious decisions. So overall we didn't cope well with the challenge, but also the specific Ultra challenge itself that year was a bit of a downer for us: a big part of the excitement of the comp for me at least is getting to be openly creative because really anything is possible, and being forced to revisit an earlier film instantly narrowed and diminished that blue-sky excitement.

I wonder if the most successful Ultra challenges are actually the ones imposed on themselves by teams. One or two examples come to mind, like Rowan deciding to make a 3D film. The year before the first Ultra, we challenged ourselves to make two films instead of one, and that definitely fell in the hard-but-fun category.

Ha, maybe that's a potential Ultra idea: make two 48HOURS films (each separately must comply with all the elements and requirements), both of which exist in the same world/story/reality. Could be fun. But I dunno, it's a tricky one!

What kind of rules would you like to see in Ultra next time?

in reply to themorgan:

ULTRA is terrible, they never quite worked out how to make it any good, and we're better off without it.

I partially agree with you, although I think it's worth remembering the motivation for it being introduced in the first place, which (as I understand it) was essentially to offer an additional level of challenge for veterans of the competition. I still think that's a worthwhile thing to explore, although perhaps the ULTRA format as it currently stands isn't quite right to achieve it.

Not all constraints are enabling - some are just plain annoying. One of the purposes of required elements for 48HOURS should be to inspire creativity in the competing filmmakers. Now of course, everyone responds differently to different challenges (for instance, each year I live in hope that my team might draw Musical, but I appreciate that enthusiasm for making musicals is not widely held...), so there's no clear categorical divide where a challenge objectively goes from good to bad. I actually think last year's two (split-screen and breaking the fourth wall) were the best so far, but they shouldn't have been bundled together, since I feel that the combination necessarily diluted the potential of either one of them on its own.

I don't know what the answer is - maybe it is less about the ULTRA element(s) being massively crazy on its own, but simply that ULTRA teams have the added challenge of having to incorporate more elements. For what it's worth, I feel that the elements of the main competition in the past few years have been less specific than I would like, and I feel like more films these days make only passing reference to them.

So maybe my (serious) suggestion is this:

NORMAL COMPETITION: 3 required elements (sound, object, technical)
ULTRA: the standard 3 elements, PLUS 3 extra ones.

The Ultra option could even reincorporate the old-school model, so the additional 3 elements would be a character name, a character trait, and a line of dialogue.

What kind of rules would you like to see in Ultra next time?

The film must be in a foreign language.

The script must be an acrostic, where the first letter of each line of dialogue spells out the title of the film.

The film must make sense when viewed in reverse.

Christopher Walken must feature in the film in a small yet significant way.

Team Reflections: 2020

I've been involved with 48HOURS for some time now, but this year was the first time I'd done either of the roles of cinematographer and editor, so that alone made it a very different experience for me.

Due partly to time restrictions, partly to sheer laziness, I chose not to write/draw any storyboards or shooting schedule plans, and instead just kept all of what I wanted to film in my head. And the result turned out pretty much the way I was imagining, so that approach proved successful. Of course, being a crew of one this year possibly helped a tiny bit in keeping all of the crew members on the same page...

I recently bought a $10 smartphone tripod from AliExpress, one of those ones with the bendy legs. And it worked perfectly, did exactly what I needed it to do for 48HOURS, yay.

I filmed on a smartphone, and that ended up making one aspect of the workflow much easier than usual (where 'usual' involves using a proper camera) - it's surprisingly easy to just sit there and watch the takes on the phone itself, rather than exporting them to the computer to view. This resulted in me only sending a single, chosen take of each shot to my computer for editing, and hence streamlined that part of the process in a big way.

My computer is almost a decade old. It reeeeeally doesn't like editing films, even three-minute ones. As a result, I could almost never actually do smooth playback within the editor itself, which made micro-edits very very hard. In the end I was kinda sorta guessing where the cut should go, then exporting the film, and inspecting the exported video half an hour later to see how close I got. I know one solution is to use proxy files, but that requires lot of hard disk space, which I don't have. The best solution involves buying a sweet new computer; wouldn't that be nice.

Towards the end of the post-production process, I was going, "Should I colour grade? I think I should colour grade." Then I'd do a google of how to colour grade, get confused, then give up. I'm still unclear if there's a quick-and-dirty way to touch up the grade.

Overall, I think the 3-minute limit was the perfect restriction for my first time doing it all on my own. I think I chose an idea and story that was a good fit for the duration, and that was an achievable challenge given my own limitations, and I'm pretty happy with what I managed to slap together. It will interesting to see whether anything I've learned this time round is transferable back to working in a team context.

Judging this competition

in reply to Mista Teas:

The 3-mins max was tough. I actually really like it but it was tough. My 2 page script was 4 minutes on an early edit. Great lesson in being forced to trim away the unnecessary. Some of the films still feel really long though!

The difference between 5 minutes and 3 minutes might not at first seem like much, but it turns out there are a ton of stories that can be told in the former but not the latter.

One interesting thing I've observed from watching a lot of entries is that the passage-of-time montage is a technique used an awful lot in this competition. Hell, the films I've been involved with over the years have probably used it more often than not. Which makes sense, since you're trying to efficiently tell a story in a small run-time.

However, this time round, in the vast majority of cases, I've found that a montage in a 3-minute film feels unearned - you've just gotten to know this character or characters maybe 60-90 seconds ago, and so there is no investment in the intended character change which is usually the purpose of the montage. As a result, they often end up feeling forced and rushed, as if there were maybe a few extra scenes originally scripted that got condensed into a montage for time (which probably literally was the case with a few films).

I guess there are lots of ways to show the passing of time in the edit, but the montage is the most obvious and easy-to-understand, so it's the blunt instrument that gets used most often.

New reviews / screening room!

in reply to Nick Burridge:

So just to be clear, are you saying that once this transitional period is finished, all of the pre-2020 reviews will be lost? And if so, is there a way to export the data before that happens? There are a certainly a few reviews that I've both written and received that I wouldn't mind retaining a copy of.

New reviews / screening room!

Just checking, is there a way to set it up so that you get an email notification when a new review for your film gets posted? This was an option with the old reviews site, and it was awfully handy. Ness, if it's not currently a feature, how easy or hard would it be to implement?

Judging this competition

Agree with most of what's been said here. I would also add that I think this 48HOURS Lockdown experiment (and to be clear, I love that they had the balls to just take the leap and try a slightly different format out) demonstrates some of the strengths of the main competition format, by showing a contrast of what is missing.

Right now, I think a lot of us are feeling a sort of whiplash, due to leaping from 1,200-odd eligible entries to 10 finalists and announcement of winners, all in the space of one hour. So in effect that's a one-stage competition, whereas what we're used to is a five-stage competition: 1) heats, 2) city finalists announced, 3) city finals event, 4) national finalists announced, 5) grand final event. (And with the additional of city shortlists now, I suppose technically it's actually six stages...)

Although it obviously requires more organisational complexity, one of the key benefits of a staged competition is that it allows time and space for everyone to process the decisions that are made, and in smaller increments. In some cases that's a grieving process of sorts, coming to terms with what happened. And so by this framework, what we saw last night was everyone experiencing five/six phases of processing all at once, if that makes any sense.

New reviews / screening room!

in reply to Mista Teas:

Unfortunately, the "Please treat it as a review site rather than a comments section." has already been broken with film-makers replying to reviews. Hard to stop I guess.

Then again, when you think about it, what actually is the downside of comments that aren't reviews? If comments don't require a star-rating then it's not harming any score averages, and it can only help in encouraging discussion and community, surely.

One thing when I click on my profile it lists my Entries as THREE. Two of my films and one of TBALCs. Not sure how that works. :)

"I now realise I had a little bit of TBALC inside me all along."

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!