Holey crimoly what a weekend!  My son and a buddy of his collaborated on a video for a local film slam.

So this is what the weekend looked like:

Friday 5:30pm:  We went to have dinner with the other film teams.  This was an opportunity not only to meet and greet, but to see if we could get people to join our team.  My son wasn’t particularly feeling like working with new people, I think, so the team just wound up being his buddy and his parents.

At 6:30, we started getting assignments.  We got an assigned line (“Do the dance.  You gotta do the dance.”), an assigned prop (a Haveaheart trap), and an assigned location, (A bandstand in Haverhill, NH).  The teams drew for genres, and fortunately my son’s team got comedy on the second draw.

By 7:00 we had everything ready to go.  We’d have 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, burn a film to DVD and get it to the screening location before 7pm on Sunday.

The boys stayed up and wrote a script. I’m going to admit that I was nervous.  I’ve spent years listening with half an ear to their rambling liveaction storytelling up in my son’s room, and was scared that they weren’t going to come up with a script with a PLOT.

I should have had more faith.  They did.  It has a plot.  It builds to a punch line.  I laughed at the punch line when I read it.

So, off we go to shoot.  The camera work is definitely the weak point on the film.  Sorry guys.   I touched the camera for the first time when we were shooting the first scene.  In fact, at the end of the day when we’d shot everything the boys reviewed what we’d done and decided that we needed to reshoot the first scene in a slightly different location and to give me a chance to do a better job on the camera work.  It’s still not great… Sorry.

We drove all over the place to get the different locations on Saturday.  Luckily for us, it was a lovely sunny day — not too warm and not too cold.  This made for much smoother shooting.  We did get some strange looks from passers-by in a couple of locations.   Location… gosh, when you’re making a film in 48 hours, this doesn’t leave a lot of time for getting venue permissions!  We managed to get the local library to let us shoot, but the local Wal-mart were butts and would let us.  We had to make a bit of a change.  Not that this was too terrible, as when you’re doing something like this, flexibility is the name of the game.

We shot everything in one day, which was great, as it gave my son all day Sunday to go ahead and do the editing.  Now, he was doing this in Windows Live Moviemaker.  What we didn’t know was that he was going to be competing with people who were using… well… better equipment.  He did okay even so. (Though I think some better video editing software may appear in his stocking come Christmas…)

That was the thing that really kinda got me.  This film slam had people in it that were film students, film graduates — people who had a lot more experience and really knew what they were doing.  People who’d been trained to use a camera properly.  People who, well, KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING.  (Some didn’t, too, mind).

My son still held his own in this group.  He was the youngest director by about a year.  The next oldest kid was the youngest last year. (From what I understand, he got stuck with the romance category last year, which my son lucked out of).

The films were all good.  I was braced to wince through part of the evening.  Nope.  I can say in total honesty I enjoyed every one of the seven minute films I saw.

So, here’s the final product.  Hope you at least chuckle.

My son and a buddy of his are doing the 48 Hour Film Slam sponsored by the Cohase Chamber of Commerce.

The way it works is that you assemble a team, and then at the beginning of the slam, you get assigned a line of dialog that has to be used in the film, a prop that must be used, and a location that must appear in the movie. My son’s team, Team Dragon, got comedy as a genre.

Which, in and of itself was comedy gold. You see, to do the film slam, you draw the genre randomly. If you want, you can have one redraw, but you’re stuck with whatever you got.

The categories were: drama, comedy, horror, mystery (whodunit), silent film or <drum roll> romance. Why yes, my son did draw romance as his first pick and the look on his face was priceless.

From what I understand, the youngest competitor last year drew romance. But the poor boy drew romance on his second draw. He was stuck. My son got comedy on his draw, which was a great relief.

The other criteria this year were:

Assigned Line: Do the dance. You gotta do the dance.

Assigned Prop: A Havaheart Trap.

Assigned Location: Bandstand at Haverhill (NH) Common.

My son and his friend spent most of last night writing a seven minute script. I admit I was a little worried, wondering if it was going to be workable. Well, I laughed in the right spots, and laughed spontaneously, so the script was okay. It’s decently structured and builds to the climax pretty well.

If the movie has a weak spot, I’m sorry to say it’s going to be me. I got assigned duty as the camera person. I’d never so much as touched my son’s digital camera, so I had to learn as I went along. So much so that my son decided to reshoot the first scene we shot to get a better quality scene, what with it being the opening scene and all. I think this was a good choice, and it’ll make for a far better movie. Even so, this was a ball to do today. I mean, amazing fun!

Shooting is done (ya!) and now my son and his buddy are editing this to bring it together into a good film with special effect and all. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does with it post-production.

The screening for the films will be at 7:30 tomorrow night at the Bradford Academy (for you locals) and is open to the public. So, if you’re so inclined, stop on by and support Upper Valley filmmaking. The other seven teams seemed like they were some creative people, and I’ve seen many of the actors in local plays and know they’re good. So, if you’re interested in some amateur film, come on by and see who wins the Second Annual Cohase 48 Hour Film Slam.

It’s a truism that people who live in an area tend not to go to the tourist spots.

I went to one that’s not too far from my house today — The Shaker Museum in Enfield.  I’ve held a long interest in alternative communities, especially Utopian communes.  The thing is they really don’t present what the culture really was, why the Shakers came about or any of that.  It’s a fascinating story, but all we get is that the classic view of Shaker furniture was a 15 year period during the “Golden age” of a 200-odd year history.  I mean, that’s true as far as it goes.  By the late Victorian era they were making and selling Victorian-era furniture.  They were not living quite the plain and unornamented lives that their predecessors had.  However, like almost all Utopian communities of the time, there was a serious interest in purposeful lives lived in an orderly way.

I was entranced to walk its halls, though and see first-hand large, airy building this particular community had made for its home.

After that, The Bird wanted to visit La Salette.  It’s a shrine diagonally across the road from the Chosen Vale community and was built on land the Roman Catholic church had bought from the Shakers. Talk about a contrast.  The restrained ornamentation of a Shaker community gave way to a shrine dedicated to an apparition of the Virgin Mary sometime back in the early 1800s to some shepherd children in the French Alps.

There was a garden dedicate to the apparition, a series of statues in the Stations of the Cross ending in a tomb-like structure with a truly grisly statue of Jesus lying dead and blood-stained — rather  shudder-inducing to my general Protestant-trained sensibilities.

The Rosary Garden was kinda neat, though.  It’s a path and garden surrounding a large fish pond.   There’s a chain that surrounds it with iron roses painted in various colors and statues at each Rosary decade.

The varieties of religious expression and what they cause us to create and express is endlessly fascinating to me, even if I don’t join in the game, myself.